Narrative Politics

Narrative Politics explores two puzzles. The first has long preoccupied social scientists: How do individuals come together to act collectively in their common interest? The second is one that has long been ignored by social scientists: Why is it that those who promote collective action so often turn to stories? Why is it that when activists call for action, candidates solicit votes, organizers seek new members, generals rally their troops, or coaches motivate their players, there is so much story-telling? Frederick W. Mayer argues that answering these questions requires recognizing the power of story to overcome the main obstacles to collective action: to surmount the temptation to free ride, to coordinate group behavior, and to arrive at a common understanding of the collective interest. In this book, Mayer shows that humans are, if nothing else, a story-telling, story-consuming animal. We use stories to make sense of our experience and to imbue it with meaning-our self-narratives define our sense of identity and script our actions. Because we are constituted by narrative, we can be moved by the stories told to us by others. That is why leaders who call a community to action seek to frame their invocations in a story in which tragedy and triumph hang in the balance, in which taking part in the collective action becomes a moral imperative rather than a matter of calculated self-interest. Drawing on insights from neuroscience and behavioral economics, political science and sociology, history and cultural studies, literature and narrative theory, Narrative Politics sheds light on a wide range of political phenomena from social movements to electoral politics to offer lessons for how the power of story fosters collective action.

This book draws on examples from cannabis policy discourse and elsewhere to illustrate how individuals come to subscribe to a particular policy narrative; how policy narratives evolve; how narratives are employed in public policy discourse to compete with other narratives; and how, on implementation, the winning narrative is performed and subsequently institutionalized. Further, it explores how uncertainty and ambiguity are constants in public policy discourse, and how different factions and groups pursue different goals and aspirations. In the current climate of political reality, disputable facts and contestable goals, this book shows how different coalitions and ideologies use narratives to compete for policy dominance.

This is the first critical study of feminist practices of ‘speaking out’ in response to rape. This book argues that feminist anti-rape politics are characterised by a belief in the transformative potential of women’s personal narratives of sexual violence. The political mobilisation of these narratives has been an incredibly successful strategy, but one with unresolved ethical questions and political limitations. The book explores both the successes and the unresolved questions through feminist archival materials, published narratives of sexual violence, and mass media and internet sources. It argues that that a rethinking of the role and place of women’s stories and the politics of speaking out is vital for a rethinking of feminist politics around sexual violence and key to fresh approaches to combating this violence.

This volume harnesses the virtual explosion of narrative writing in contemporary academic international politics. It comprises a prologue, an epilogue, and sixteen chapters that both build upon and diversify the success of the 2011 volume Autobiographical International Relations. Here, as in that volume, academics place their narratives in the context of world politics, culture, and history. Contributors explore moments in their academic lives that are often inexpressible in the standard academic voice and which, in turn, require a different way of writing and knowing. They write in the belief that academic IR has already begun to benefit from a different kind of writing—a stylae that retrieves the "I" and explicitly demonstrates its presence both within the world and within academic writing. By working within the overlap between theory, history, and autobiography, these chapters aim to increase the clarity, urgency, and meaningfulness of academic work. Highlighting the autoethnographic and autobiographic turn in critical international relations, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars in international relations, IR theory and global politics.

Broken Narrative provides an extensive reflection on history, politics, and contemporary art, revolving around the cornerstones of the artistic practice of Albanian artist Armando Lulaj. The core of the book is formed by and extended interview of Lulaj by Italian artist and writer Marco Mazzi. This inquiry starts in the year 1997, a year of social and political upheaval in Albania, of anarchy, controversies and emigration, of toxic seeds of neoliberalism sprouting in an already wounded country, and continues to the present day, where politics, hidden behind art forms, has practically destroyed (again) every different and possible future of the country. This book also sketches out a connection between the recent Albanian political context and contemporary art by considering the realities of Albania as essential for an understanding of the dynamics of international power in contemporary art and architecture, and the role of politics therein. Broken Narrative comes in a bilingual English-Japanese edition, in part as homage to the subtle esthetics of Japanese poetry, which has inspired many of the Lulaj's works, while equally evoking the subversive films of the Red Army, active in Japan at the turn of the 1960s and '70s. Broken Narrative contains a double preface in English by Albanian scholar Jonida Gashi and in Japanese by photographer Osamu Kanemura. Armando Lulaj was born in Tirana in 1980. He is a writer of plays, texts on risk territories, filmmaker, and producer of conflict images. He's research is orientated towards accentuating the border between economical power, fictional democracy, and social disparity in a global context. His main topics of interest remain power, corruption and institutional critique. Lulaj has participated in many international exhibitions and film festivals. His works are part of various important private and public collections. Armando Lulaj is one of the founders of DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art. Marco Mazzi (1980) is an Italian photographer and writer living and working between Florence, Tokyo, and Tirana. Mazzi studied Contemporary Literature at the University of Florence and has also studied Japanese avant-garde art and visual poetry in Japan. In 2008, Mazzi founded the non-profit organization Relational Cinema Association within the University of Waseda in Tokyo. Mazzi was photographer-in-residence at The Department of Eagles (Tirana, Albania) during the conference Pedagogies of Disaster and for the project Lapidari, and he was the stage and still photographer for Armando Lulaj's Recapitulation (2015), commissioned by the 2015 Venice Biennale' s Albanian Pavilion.

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 individualized passions and shared perspectives are contested and interwoven. 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 reworkings of reality enable people to symbolically alter subject-object relations, Jackson shows how storytelling may restore existential viability to the intersubjective fields of self and other, self and state, self and situation.

Scholars in many of the disciplines surrounding politics explicitly utilize either a narrative perspective or a metaphor perspective (though rarely the two in combination) to analyze issues -- theoretical and practical, domestic and international -- in the broad field of politics. Among the topics they have studied are: competing metaphors for the state or nation which have been coined over the centuries in diverse cultures; the frequency with which communal and international conflicts are generated, at least in part, by the clashing religious and historical narratives held by opposing groups; the cognitive short-cuts employing metaphor by which citizens make sense of politics; the need for political candidates to project a convincing self-narrative; the extent to which the metaphors used to formulate social issues determine the policies which will be developed to resolve them; the failure of narratives around the security of the nation to take account of the individual experiences of women and children. This volume is the first in which eminent scholars from disciplines as diverse as social psychology, anthropology, political theory, international relations, feminist political science, and media studies, have sought to integrate the narrative and the metaphor perspectives on politics. It will appeal to any scholar interested in the many ways in which narrative and metaphor function in combination as cognitive and rhetorical instruments in discourse around politics.

A modernist icon, an object of forbidden desire, a symbol of loss and suffering, and an incorrigible survivor - the mother takes all of these forms in Chinese literature from the 1920s and 1930s. In an innovative analysis, Sally Taylor Lieberman explores the meanings the maternal figure acquired at a particular place and time and then engages those meanings in a feminist rereading of the master narratives of modern Chinese intellectual and literary history. Drawing on feminist literary criticism and the theories of Julia Kristeva, Melanie Klein, and Sigmund Freud, Lieberman breaks traditional analytical boundaries as she explores the place of the mother in the ideological struggles through which the modern Chinese canon attained its present shape.