Shaping History: Narratives of Political Change

by Molly Andrews

• ISBN13: 9780521843652
• ISBN10: 0521843650
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-08-06
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Featuring extraordinary personal accounts, this book provides a unique window through which to examine some of the great political changes of our time, and reveals both the potential and the challenge of narrating the political world. Molly Andrews' novel analysis of the relationship between history and biography presents in-depth case studies of four different countries, offers insights into controversial issues such as the explosion of patriotism in post -9/11 USA; East Germans' ambivalent reactions to the fall of the Berlin Wall; the pressures on victims to tell certain kinds of stories while testifying before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission; and the lifelong commitment to fight for social justice in England. Each of the case studies explores the implicit political worldviews which individuals impart through the stories they tell about their lives, as well as the wider social and political context which makes some stories more 'tell-able' than others.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	p. ix
History, biography, and political narratives	p. 1
Old and new stories	p. 5
The power of political narratives	p. 8
Reflections on listening	p. 14
The construction of audience	p. 16
Research and desire	p. 27
Telling and 'tell-ability'	p. 33
Hearing the told and the untold	p. 36
The myth of the 'empowerment narrative'	p. 40
England: stories of inspiration	p. 45
In search of stories of inspiration	p. 46
Context of the research	p. 47
Why life histories?	p. 50
Stories of radicalisation	p. 57
Keeping the faith	p. 64
Our letters	p. 67
Entering and exiting lives	p. 73
The USA: narratives of patriotism	p. 76
'My' country: the complexity of the personal pronoun	p. 76
One town's experience of patriotism during the Gulf War	p. 85
'Good citizens'	p. 97
Patriotism and its discontents	p. 99
Kicking the 'Vietnam Syndrome'	p. 101
The frozen frame of 9/11	p. 103
Revitalising the national narrative	p. 107
Looking back to the time before the frame froze	p. 110
East Germany: the contested story	p. 114
Background to the original project	p. 116
Constructing/constructed audience	p. 118
Oppositional activists and internal critics in the GDR	p. 120
The search for a narratable past	p. 126
Identity, imagination, and the Wall	p. 129
A question of generations	p. 134
Forgiveness and reworking the past	p. 140
South Africa: told and untold stories	p. 148
South Africa, biography, and the political imagination	p. 150
The 'miracle' of the TRC	p. 154
The 'talking cure'?	p. 161
Personal and historical narratives: the making of collective memory	p. 170
Questions and endings	p. 177
Yearning for morality plays	p. 179
Beginnings and endings	p. 187
Individual Identities and imagined communities	p. 195
Political narratives over time	p. 204
Bibliography	p. 210
Index	p. 220
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