Reading across Borders: Storytelling and Knowledges of Resistance (review) Susan E. Babbitt Hypatia, Volume 21, Number 3, Summer 2006, pp. 203-206 (Review) Published by Indiana University Press DOI: 10.1353/hyp.2006.0018 For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/hyp/summary/v021/21.3babbitt.html Access provided by Penn State Univ Libraries (21 Feb 2016 10:39 GMT)
Book Reviews 203 Reading across Borders: Storytelling and Knowledges of Resistance. By SHARI STONE-MEDIATORE. NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Susan Babbitt In Reading across Borders: Storytelling and Knowledges of Resistance, Shari Stone- Mediatore defends the critical importance of storytelling in the pursuit of mature political consciousness, and suggests means for evaluating such stories. Traditional philosophy, she claims, does not recognize the epistemic value of more subjective, storylike representations of the world (see, for example, 9, 185), being more concerned about truth and objectivity and preferring the resoluteness it associates with rational thought (185). Stone-Mediatore claims that personal stories are not mere stories (161); they can be justified, she argues, according to their contribution to understanding and critical engagement (179 91). Drawing upon specific examples, Stone-Mediatore shows how personal stories of struggle are able to challenge basic norms and categories (143), such as assumptions about identity (147f) and agency (149f). Moreover, such stories are not always strictly autobiographical at least not in a standard sense but rather are stories about peoples, and about national goals, intending specifically to reclaim and revalue (152) the experience of the oppressed. By stories or narratives the author has in mind a pattern of identifiable actors and action-units that are qualified through metaphor and other poetic devices and that are related together through a coherent structure of beginnings and endings (3). While it might seem that such a definition describes any theoretical account explanations themselves are stories, with actors, actions, beginnings, and endings the stories Stone-Mediatore refers to in Reading across Borders are significantly constitutive of the actors, actions, and events they describe. That is, they bring about possibilities for understanding by allowing readers to test and revise their community s taken-for-granted narrative paradigms through experience of more marginalized perspectives (185). The creative, engaged, tentative character of writing from outside ruling institutions (190), when engaged seriously, allows readers to imagine the world as it might be. Thus, such stories involve more explicitly moral and political objectives for bringing about democracy, justice, and communication. Stone-Mediatore describes, for example, to the genre of testimonios in Latin America that aims to retell histories in order to bring about possibilities for national identity and direction. She refers specifically to Cuba, where in 1959 the new government recognized that the country s history must be retold to include the stories of the plantations, in order to bring about new and more appropriate values, such as an antiracist way of thinking (151). Drawing upon Immanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt, among others, Stone- Mediatore suggests criteria for assessing the critical merits of stories. In the
204 Hypatia author s view, storytelling can change expectations about what, and who, gets recognized. Passionate stories of others lives and aspirations make us aware of our unself-conscious expectations because when we engage such realities we encounter those expectations (see, for example, 149, 167). But not all such accounts are useful. The author s proposal for the standard of enlarged thought (184f) is, roughly, that stories contribute to our knowledge when they promote self-examination, responsible participation in public life, and accountability to others (190). Personal stories are epistemically useful when they promote relevant sorts of ethical development, that is, when they provide access to things we need to know to become more humanely aware and motivated. Reading across Borders is valuable for its insight into the fascinating role of stories of struggle in self- and social understanding. However, the presentation of the problem is misleading, perhaps undermining the philosophical significance of work in this area some women in the global South have already done. Stone- Mediatore presents the importance of personal stories in feminist work as if the epistemic role of stories is something that philosophers, especially epistemologists, have not recognized. In philosophy, she claims, there exists a longstanding opposition between truth and story-telling (5). Yet philosophers have long been aware of the role of storytelling in understanding the world. Aristotle, for example, was famously interested in storytelling, and philosophers of science have argued since the middle of the twentieth century that theories are like stories. Darwin did not defend a principle, Philip Kitcher argues in Abusing Science: The Case against Creationism (1984). Rather, Darwin justified his theory by telling stories about phenomena in the world for which stories were needed. Additionally, Thomas Kuhn revolutionized philosophy by telling a story about the history of science in which scientists interpret the world according to their background myths, social symbols, and personal belief structures, moral and otherwise, recognizing, as Stone-Mediatore does about marginalized persons stories, the radically situated nature of knowledge pursuits (Kuhn 1962). It is true that traditional philosophy has been insensitive to, or even sometimes unaware of, the problem of the oppressed, more specifically the problems that arise when we consider that some people are unrecognized, within philosophical or political theory, as full persons. But certainly this insight is not original to feminist scholarship. Trappist monk and philosopher Thomas Merton, writing about the power of stories, specifically of black fiction and personal memoirs in 1961, said, The deep elemental stirrings that lead to social change, begin within the hearts of men whose thoughts have hitherto not been articulate or who have never gained a hearing or whose needs are therefore ignored, suppressed and treated as if they did not exist. There is no revolution without a voice.... The
Book Reviews 205 more the cry of the oppressed is ignored, the more it strengthens itself with a mysterious power that is to be gained from myth, symbol and prophecy. There is no revolution without poets who are also seers. There is no revolution without prophetic songs. (Merton 1980, 72) Instead of apparently dismissing the philosophical tradition as mostly positivistic, it might have been more helpful if Stone-Mediatore had situated feminist work within the broader traditions of epistemology, which mostly by now recognize the epistemic role of particular circumstances and conditions, including background beliefs, myths, and dramatic scenarios. In particular, since the middle of the last century, when positivism failed to explain the thoroughgoing theory-ladenness of all aspects of scientific activity, analytic philosophy of science has contributed to our understanding of objectivity and truth. Whereas Stone-Mediatore suggests that stories in feminist work especially feminist work from the global South are not about objectivity, one could think that personal stories of struggle contribute to our understanding of the world in just the way Darwin s stories did: they explain aspects of the world that need explaining (in this case, the lack of global justice) but which had before not been recognized as needing explanation, at least not in that specific way. Darwin s particular stories about such phenomena as the degenerate limbs of boa constrictors demonstrated the merits of his broader, more general theory of evolution. Such particular stories were able to explain what needed explaining within the story being told, thereby demonstrating the merits of the broader story upon which the particular story draws (Boyd 1991). Domitila Barrios de Chungara s personal account of her struggles in the Bolivian mines, for instance, contributes to our understanding of more general concepts like identity and agency because Barrios s reliance upon certain understandings of such concepts explains the particular life story she tells, a story that convinces us precisely because of its particular explanatory capacity as regards aspects of human experience. As Stone-Mediatore argues in her final chapter, we evaluate personal stories precisely in this way: we measure the contribution of such stories to our political and moral understanding, that is, their explanatory power as regards issues we need to understand, issues the stories themselves raise, such as identity, agency, and ethical responsibility. We look for stories that promote selfreflexivity, public accountability, and open-mindedness (190). Setting the work of feminist scholars against objectivity and truth, as Stone-Mediatore often does, undermines the work of some feminist scholars who aim precisely to tell us something about the nature of knowledge and what we need to do to get things right about the world. Nkiru Nzegwu s work on Nigerian women s associations is not most importantly personal and particular, although it is based upon her own
206 Hypatia experience; rather, it aims to tell us something about the nature of explanation and how it is that scholars, including feminists, get wrong the significance of Africans stories (Nzegwu 2006). Her specifically epistemological point is that feminists cannot hear Africans stories as having to do with such questions as the nature of knowledge and truth as long as they hear them as stories of others. Rather than thinking from others lives, in Nzegwu s view, feminists need to rethink their own lives, especially the philosophical assumptions grounding national identity, so that the others are no longer others, but rather the same, namely, human. Reading across Borders moves in this direction, showing how others stories help us to think differently about ourselves. But Stone-Mediatore s contribution is undermined by her distracting insistence that the important thing about feminists stories is that they are personal and particular, something other than theoretical discourse (1). Jacqueline M. Davies s analyses of narrative ethics, for instance, argues that storytelling in feminist work is about the nature of ethical knowledge and justification (Davies forthcoming). The most intriguing claims in Reading across Borders suggest that the significance of feminist work, particularly that from feminists in the global South, is not that it is personal, open-minded, tentative, creative, and so on, but rather that it contributes, because of the knowledge brought to the question, to a more objective and truthful understanding of the human condition, and the moral obligations implied therein for all of us. References Boyd. R. N. 1991. Observations, explanatory power, and simplicity: Toward a non- Humean account. In The philosophy of science, ed. P. Gaspar Boyd and J. D. Trout. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Davies, Jacqueline M. Narrative ethics. Forthcoming. Kitcher, Philip. 1984. Abusing science: The case against creationism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Kuhn, Thomas. 1962. Scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merton, Thomas. 1980. Seeds of destruction. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Nzegwu, Nkiru. 2006. Family matters: Feminist concepts in African philosophy of culture. Albany: SUNY Press