Narrative Inquiry - Volume 17, Issue 1, 2007

In the construction of an academic thesis, the lived and multi-voiced experiences of fieldwork have to be condensed and distilled into a single, coherent narrative thread. This article discusses the problematic and delicate situation of attempting to select (and thereby exclude) materials and stories, and of representing faithfully but through analytical lenses, while juggling the intricacies of the author’s own positionalities and multiple levels of interpretation. In its discussion, this article makes explicit the complications of translating and transposing lived encounters and experiences into text and the written word, and unpacks the inexorable exercise of power involved in this process.

This article will discuss the complexity of positionality and the implications of writing in the English language in a South Asian context. Given the postcolonial heritage of South Asia, contemporary authors producing literature in English find themselves confronted with both tremendous opportunity as well as tremendous controversy. Literature has become a product in the circuit of culture, and the concluding sections will therefore discuss and explore how writers, and particularly diasporic writers, using English (as opposed to the other languages in India) are able to seize a disproportionate amount of world attention and consequently, through their choice of language, gain the power to make their presentations and representations dominant and prevalent in terms of distribution and influence.

Increasing support to women’s organisations and networks to facilitate empowerment is a growing strategy amongst a range of Northern agencies, with a particular emphasis on Southern women. This article argues that strategies employed by both Northern and Southern women’s NGOs to promote the ‘empowerment’ of women and subvert hegemonic discourses through information-sharing and privileging Southern voices deny the value-laden nature of ‘information’ and the relative power and universality of dominant gender and development narratives. It will illustrate how these narratives are historically contingent on prevailing power imbalances in social and political spaces and how development discourse and practice tends to privilege both a homogenous Southern narrative as well as a category of Southern woman that simply do not exist.

This article considers the different stories within Fair Trade and how they come together as a narrative that informs both the social movement of Fair Trade and the practice of Fair Trade business relationships. The circuit of culture is used to explore the meanings and understandings that are part of Fair Trade, from both a producer and a consumer point of view, and to demonstrate how these narratives are influenced by economic, political and social structures. However, the practice of Fair Trade also allows for the use of power in new ways, challenging some of the dominant modes of production and consumption.

In examining representations of engagements with the North American landscape in the fiction of Toni Morrison, this article seeks to explore the author’s revision of dominant discourses about the topography and symbolic spaces of the continent and her exposure thereby of historical structures of power. Focusing on her fourth novel, Song of Solomon (1977), it traces how Morrison attempts to give voice to African American experience and identity and to revisit and contest familiar stories of national belonging and being in the land. In crafting tales of black displacement, dispossession, estrangement, travel, discovery, connection and home, the author is found to excavate buried perspectives and shape her own potent narrative act.

This article explores the idea of home as a space of sanctuary and retreat from the problems of domestic life through the novels of Anita Desai and Raj Kamal Jha. I examine how these novels destabilise discourses of gender, home and family. Both novels demonstrate the relationship between narrative and power by showing how the protagonists overcome their relative powerlessness through narratives which enable them to reconstruct a sense of self that challenges nationalist ideologies. I show through a reading of the novels the problems of privileging the self over the family and communal identities and suggest how the consequences might be imagined and narrated in relation to the spaces of the home, the city and the nation.

This article considers the narratives of power acting upon the Madhapur forests of Bangladesh. Power is unequally distributed amongst the actors involved: the native people, the national government, international agencies. This article will first consider this issue in the context of political ecology, and then discuss the resources within the forest and the settlement of the local forest dwellers. It will demonstrate that the power within narratives have been effectively utilised as weapons by the more powerful groups against the vulnerable to seize their lands, livelihoods and homes, and to mobilise planning development and its subsequent deforestation, with relative ease and even impunity.