Routledge Handbook of Counter-Narratives

Klarissa Lueg, Marianne Wolff Lundholt, Klarissa Lueg, Marianne Wolff Lundholt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000198812
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Routledge Handbook of Counter-Narratives is a landmark volume providing students, university lecturers, and practitioners with a comprehensive and structured guide to the major topics and trends of research on counter-narratives. The concept of counter-narratives covers resistance and opposition as told and framed by individuals and social groups. Counter-narratives are stories impacting on social settings that stand opposed to (perceived) dominant and powerful master-narratives. In sum, the contributions in this handbook survey how counter-narratives unfold power to shape and change various fields. Fields investigated in this handbook are organizations and professional settings, issues of education, struggles and concepts of identity and belonging, the political field, as well as literature and ideology. The handbook is framed by a comprehensive introduction as well as a summarizing chapter providing an outlook on future research avenues. Its direct and clear appeal will support university learning and prompt both students and researchers to further investigate the arena of narrative research.

Part I

Theoretical discussions and developments

1

Toward a theory of counter-narratives

Narrative contestation, cultural canonicity, and tellability

Matti Hyvärinen

Especially since the publication of Considering Counter-Narratives (Bamberg & Andrews, eds. 2004), discussion on counter and master-narratives has been lively in fields ranging from psychology to politics and organizational studies (Ewick & Silbey, 1995; Loseke, 2007; Frandsen et al., eds. 2017; Meretoja, 2018). Recent studies have provided several proposals for master-narratives, but not much in the way of a shared, solid theoretical grounding. This chapter maps some of these proposals, their mutual connection, and – above all – their connection to narrative theory. The perspective of master and counter narratives is relevant for at least three reasons. First, it is one of the most promising ideas for introducing the notions of societal power, resistance, and conventionality into narrative studies. Second, while the methodological work on small stories (Georgakopoulou, 2015) and narrative positioning (Deppermann, 2015) is vibrant, the study of larger narratives urgently needs new analytic perspectives. As Lundholt et al. (2018) note, “counternarratives play a role in storytellers positioning themselves against, or critiquing, the themes and ideologies of master-narratives” (p. 421). Third, the theorization of larger narratives is often based on the analysis of individual, isolated materials, whereas the counter narrative approach immediately positions the stories within a larger narrative contest.

A major purpose of this chapter is to connect these terms more closely to narrative theory and practical narrative analyses instead of using them for mere descriptive or metonymic purposes. Counter narrative theories should not ignore and pass over the relevant definitions of narrative to begin with (Abbot, 2002; Tammi, 2006; Herman, 2009). More specifically, my point of departure is Jerome Bruner’s theory of “canonicity and breach” (Bruner, 1990, 1991; Amsterdam & Bruner, 2000; Hyvärinen, 2016). With the help of Bruner, I suggest a clearer distinction between narratives and scripts, and consider just how narrative master or “grand” narratives (Lyotard, 1993) are. Based on this discussion, I also suggest a move in empirical analysis from naming stories as master or counter narratives to analyzing the ways individual stories and storytellers draw on different master and counter narratives. Paraphrasing Holstein and Gubrium (2000), a master narrative “is also always a resource for local use; it is not automatically invoked” (p. 162). I then consider the relationship between narrative contests and counter narratives, discuss the normative approach to counter narratives, and present history writing as an exceptional case of master and counter narratives.

Metonymic confusion

In a metonymic discourse, “narrative” is used to denote hypotheses, assumptions, theories, or argumentation – i.e., it is used for forms of discourse that are not narrative (Fludernik, 2000; Rimmon-Kenan, 2006, p. 11). Similarly, some academic styles allow the metonymic use of (master-) narrative to substitute such terms as discourse, theory, script, or plan. For the sake of simplicity, I call these forms “metonymic narratives.” In such confusing cases, it remains unclear how the definition “Someone telling somebody else that something happened” (Phelan 2005, p. 217) is matched by the material and where there is a narrative text to be analyzed. In other words, the problem concerns narrow versus problematically broad definitions of narrative (Tammi, 2006). Following Ryan (2005, p. 347), I understand narratives exclusively as semiotic objects (or at least as phenomena that encompass such a semiotic facet).

Lyotard’s (1993) metonymic “grand narratives” loom large behind the theories of master- narratives. As Chandler and Munday (2016) state, “grand narratives” (metanarratives, master- narratives) is “Lyotard’s term for the totalizing narratives or metadiscourses of modernity which have provided ideologies with a legitimating philosophy. For example, the grand narratives of the Enlightenment, democracy, and Marxism.” “Metadiscourse” is obviously the most apposite term here. It is easy to imagine vivid theories about the effects of the “master-narrative of the Enlightenment.” Yet we are short of the “authoritative text” (Kuhn, 2017) of the Enlightenment, and on closer analysis we might find a striking number of different and even competing versions of this presumed master-narrative (Kurunmäki & Marjanen, 2018, p. 18). Arguably, there is a risk of over-generalizing the homogeneity of master-narratives because few scholars have systematically charted these presumed master-narratives (Kölbl, 2004, p. 28). The existence and characteristics of a master-narrative are more often presumed, invoked, and projected by counter narratives than documented. When they are documented, they are most often in the form of argumentative discourse (Fludernik, 2000).

Some studies seem to equate plans and narratives in the organizational context. For example, Rasmussen (2017) discusses the competition between two different action plans or orientations in marketing the country of Denmark. The article manages to reveal two distinct marketing discourses, yet it fails to demonstrate how “branding” or its bureaucratic alternative is a narrative. The excerpts the author presents are not specifically narrative, and he does not conduct any particular narrative analysis besides using the term “master-narrative.” In this way, narrative metonymically substitutes such exact terms as “plan” and “discourse.”

Conversely, Mutua’s “Counternarrative” primarily portrays broad ideological discourses.

The expressions of this form of counter-narrative, in which non-Western knowledge forms and epistemologies not only are celebrated but also have emerged as a separate and different way of thinking about and narrating experience, are at the heart of decolonizing and postcolonial works found in virtually all disciplines today.

(Mutua, 2012, p. 2)

The aim of the critical discourse above is clear enough, yet the narrative terminology appears to be superfluous, without a proper anchoring in narrative theory. Halverson et al. (2013) similarly suggest “a master-narrative is a transhistorical narrative that is deeply embedded in a particular culture” (p. 14, emphasis removed, MH). Besides being a limited definition (are master-narratives always or ever transhistorical?), it also distances master-narratives from actual stories. The metonymization of the concepts already begins with the authors’ proposal that a narrative “is a coherent system of interrelated and sequentially organized stories that share a common rhetorical desire to resolve a conflict by establishing audience expectations according to the known trajectories of its literary and rhetorical form” (Halverson et al., 2013, p. 14, emphases removed). If narratives are “coherent systems of stories,” we hardly have empirical access to either master or the counter-narratives, and “narrative” is a metonymical term for the ideology lurking behind the actual narratives.

In critical race research, the terms “master-narrative” and “counter-narrative” are obviously used as rhetorical tools to consider cultural resistance. For example, Stanley (2007) offers a convincing analysis of dominant research ideologies and discourses at work in the review process of an academic journal. As Stanley (2007) maintains,

[a]‌ master-narrative is in place, and maybe influencing educational journal review board as well. I certainly see evidence that the educational research master-narrative – in which members of editorial review boards are privileged by race, gender, and epistemological paradigms […] – continues to increase in number, power, and renewed vigor.

(p. 15)

The evidence of master-narrative is thus recognizable in the observed privileges of “race, gender, and epistemological paradigms.” Stanley then goes on to mention that “[m]‌aster narratives are often mental models of how voices of the dominant culture have justified systems and rules in educational research, in such a way that makes these models ‘the standard’” (Stanley, 2007 p. 15). Temporality never enters into the description of master narratives. The actual reviews Stanley quotes are written in the argumentative mode, not the narrative mode (Fludernik, 2000). Event sequencing, for example, plays no role at all. The terms “master-narrative” and “counter-narrative” work as broad catchwords for dominance and resistance but without any noticeable connection to narrative theory. Ironically, Stanley’s article itself constitutes a perfect example of counter-narrative. She recounts the story of writing an article and receiving contradictory and contestable reviews. As a version of master-narrative, the story might have continued: “Then we made the corrections, got the article published, and we were happy with it.” All this might have happened, yet the resistance and rejection of the rules of the game (by criticizing the reviews and their expectations) make the story a clear counter-narrative.

Jerome Bruner, canonicity, and the breach

According to my hypothesis, counter-narratives strictly observe the requirements of tellability and exist in discernible textual form, while master-narratives tend to suffer from limited tellability. Labov (1972) raises the issue of tellability (reportability) and expectations with the following question: “What reason would the narrator have for telling us that something did not happen, since he [sic] is in the business of telling us what did happen?” (p. 380) Labov did not theorize this question much further, yet he made it clear that narratives are essentially about expectations. Tannen (1993, pp. 14–50) equally foregrounds the relevance of expectations, and, by referring to Robert Abelson, notes, “it is interesting to talk about scripts when there is a clash between how people behave and how you might expect them to behave” (1993, p. 17). This clash, I argue, is intrinsically linked with master and counter-narrativity. Because of the clashes, people need to give explanations, often in narrative form, in order not to appear folk psychologically insane, as Bruner puts it.

Bruner (1990) incorporates the concept of expectation as an integral part of his theory of narrative: “I shall have to consider the nature of narrative and how it is built around established or canonical expectations and the mental management of deviations from such expectations” (p. 35, emphasis added). Narrative indeed “specializes in the forging of links between the exceptional and the ordinary,” whereas its conceptual pair, folk psychology, “is invested in canonicality. It focuses upon the expectable and/or the usual in the human condition” (Bruner 1990, p. 47).

The expression “the human condition” may be dangerously broad in this context, and in alignment with Bruner’s cultural orientation, we may need to add that this condition is only valid within the limits of particular cultural and institutional contexts. Nevertheless, the similarity between the Brunerian “canonicity” and “master-narratives” described by Michael Bamberg is obvious. According to Bamberg (2004), “master-narratives are setting up sequences of actions and events as routines and as such have a tendency to ‘normalize’ and ‘naturalize’” (p. 360). Bamberg (2004) pays attention to the enabling side of master-narratives, highlighting that they “also give guidance and direction to the everyday actions of subjects; without this guidance and sense of direction, we would be lost” (p. 360). Canonicity and master-narrative thus seem to refer to the very same phenomenon. Accordingly, a master-narrative can be understood as a sequence of culturally expected events. This cultural conventionality has also been theorized in terms of scripts and frames. When counter-narratives – or scholars – invoke master-narratives, they typically outline such scripts instead of proper narratives.

For Bruner (1990, pp. 39–50), narratives are prototypically told only when some constituent beliefs of folk psychology – the canonical course of events – have been violated. This suggests that canonicity and proper narratives exhibit distinct forms of knowledge. Amsterdam and Bruner (2000) specify these conceptual relations further: “We use the term scripts to refer to stories that provide walk-through models of culture’s canonical expectations, and narratives to refer to stories that illustrate what happens when a script is thrown off track or threatened with derailment” (p. 45). Of course, their distinction between stories (scripts understood as stories) and narratives looks somewhat idiosyncratic, yet they draw the decisive distinction between scripts and narratives clearly enough (Abbott, 2002, pp. 12–24).

Amsterdam and Bruner foreground the narrative contestation by analyzing courtroom debates between prosecutors and defendants who are telling divergent narratives. “Narratives […] are deeply concerned with legitimacy: they are about threats to normatively valued states of affairs and what it takes to overcome those threats” (Amsterdam & Bruner, 2000, p. 121). The writers draw explicitly on the script theory outlined by the psychologists Schank and Abelson (1977). Yet, instead of focusing on the scripts’ cognitive role, they importantly introduce a historical perspective on the formation of scripts: “Some situations are ambiguous as to scripting […] Scripts eventually get established to cope with yesterday’s social anomalies. Until they are established, the uncertainty itself provides fertile ground for storytelling” (Amsterdam & Bruner, 2000, p. 121).

The connection between scripts and narratives is intimate and strong, and Amsterdam and Bruner (2000) see the presence of established scripts as “often tacit rather than explicit,” since they are “a precondition for narratives” (p. 121). Their view about the tellability of scripts is clear: “You do not tell about a visit to the restaurant unless something not in the script occurs” (Amsterdam & Bruner, 2000, p. 121). The reference, of course, is to the classical restaurant script (Schank & Abelson, 1977, pp. 42–44). If master-narratives are scripts, no one prefers to tell them as such. Bruner’s functional theory succeeds in explaining prototypical narratives and passes such non-prototypical cases off as boring stories. However, the theory suggests that the shortage of adequate cultural knowledge induces boring stories – people telling something that all others a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: What counter-narratives are: Dimensions and levels of a theory of middle range
• Part I Theoretical discussions and developments
• Part II Methodological considerations
• Part III Counter-narratives, organizations and professions
• Part IV Counter-narratives and education
• Part V Counter-narratives, literature and ideology
• Part VI Counter-narratives, belonging and identities
• Part VII Counter-narratives and the political sphere
• Index