The Politics of Storytelling

Hannah Arendt argued that the 'political' is best understood as a power relation between private and public realms, and that storytelling is a vital bridge between these realms -- a site where individualised passions and shared views are contested and recombined. In his new book, Michael Jackson explores and expands Arendt's ideas through a cross-cultural analysis of storytelling that includes Kuranko stories from Sierra Leone, Aboriginal stories of the stolen generation, stories recounted before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and stories of refugees, renegades, and war veterans. Focusing on the violent and volatile conditions under which stories are and are not told, and exploring the various ways in which narrative re-workings of reality enable people to symbolically alter subject-object relations, Jackson shows how storytelling may restore to the intersubjective fields of self and other, self and state, self and cosmos, the conditions of viable sociality. The book concludes in a reflexive vein, exploring the interface between public discourse and private experience.

ISBN 8772897376   DEWEY edition DC21 ISBN13 9788772897370 (What's this?)   Pages 320 Publisher Museum Tusculanum Press   Volumes 1 Imprint Museum Tusculanum Press   Weight (grammes) 577 Format Paperback   Published in Copenhagen Publication date 01 Feb 2002   Height (mm) 230 Non-book description 320 p. ;   Width (mm) 155 Library of Congress 2003268505   Academic level Undergraduate, Postgraduate, Professional / Scholarly DEWEY 306.2

		Acknowledgements		9
		Preface		11
1		Displacements		37
		The Stories that Shadow Us		39
		'You Never Saw Your Own Faces': Reflections on Privacy and Publicity in the Lives of Refugees		65
		In Extremis: Refugee Stories/Refugee Lives		87
		Displacement, Suffering, and the Critique of Cultural Fundamentalism		107
2		Returns		127
		Preamble		129
		Retaliation and Reconciliation		137
		From the Tragic to the Comic		169
		Prevented Successions		191
3		Histories		227
		Preamble		229
		The Social Life of Stories		231
		Storytelling and Critique		251
		The Singular and the Shared		267
		Coda		287
		References		297
		Index		317

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