The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression and Intersubjectivity

Description

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 views are contested and recombined. In this book, 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 aren't 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 to the intersubjective fields of self and other, self and state, self and cosmos, and the conditions of viable sociality.