Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling

Abstract

In Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling, Sujatha Fernandes delves into narratives produced by four organizations “as a tool of philanthropy, statecraft, and advocacy” (2). Comparing blogged narratives that invited readers’ comments, testimonies produced for policymakers, and oral histories elicited by a socialist state, Fernandes proposes that organizations engage in a “political economy of storytelling” (10), where they prompt and deploy people’s stories toward building support for particular causes. Fernandes contends that when organizations pursue instrumental goals, such as securing legislation or funding, they blunt the mobilizing, transformational potential of storytelling. Suppressing different perspectives and excising structural conditions, curated stories portray storytellers as upwardly mobile, entrepreneurial, and self-reliant. While these stories entice listeners to identify with these storytellers, omissions and erasure of alternate viewpoints reinforce rather than disrupt the status quo and its associated inequities. To build her claims, Fernandes compares four sets of stories and the organizational practices that generated these stories. She portrays three of these storytelling processes as creating neoliberal selves deserving of state protection or intervention. In the Afghan Women’s Writing Project, partially funded by the US State Department, the blogged accounts of women recounted gender oppression, drawing sympathetic commentary from readers. Fernandes contends that these stories elided questions about war violence and diverted readers’ attention from addressing inequities in their own countries. The second case focuses on a coalition of organizations’ efforts to ensure legal protections for exploited workers under the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in New York. Fernandes argues that stories replicated colonist relations of the master/employer and slave/employee, obscuring the neoliberalism’s dependency upon a “racialized and gendered division of labor” (70). Coupled with the constraints of foundation backing, this movement’s strategy generated few substantive improvements for domestic workers, leading demoralized participants to question their involvement. The third case follows undocumented students in the DREAMers movement. Using a two-minute-long storytelling format adapted from the Obama election campaign, young immigrants depicted themselves before the media and Congressional hearings as deserving, nonthreatening, assimilated, hardworking contributors to US society. However, rather than distinguishing between deserving versus undeserving immigrants, some storytellers challenged this trope with alternative storylines and formats, including poetry and art, recasting their stories as part of a larger immigrant experience.

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