Storytelling and Global Politics

Abstract

I argued in the last chapter that poststructuralists have generated more critical perspectives on marginal experience narratives, for they have exposed the ideological mechanisms that underlie representations of “experience” and “identity.” I also argued, however, that this critique of experience and identity remains a dangerously one-sided approach to marginal experience narratives. It highlights the way that such narratives can naturalize ideologically constituted concepts of “women’s experience” or “homosexual experience,” for instance, but it overlooks the way that people excluded from public discourse can use experience-oriented writing to develop discursive agency and, ultimately, to rearticulate identity and history in ways more responsive to their struggles.

[W]e, the revolutionaries, should not be restrained by borders, and wherever a revolutionary is, he or she should communicate the experience of our people to others….

—Domitila Barrios de Chungara¹