Alexander Freund

Under Storytelling’s Spell? Oral History in a Neoliberal Age

Abstract Storytelling—in the form of public talk about oneself—has become a new social phenomenon over the past quarter century. The case of StoryCorps illuminates how autobiographical (often confessional) storytelling in public comes out of the simultaneous democratization and neoliberalization of Western society since the 1970s. The storytelling phenomenon, which frequently aligns itself with (or appropriates) oral history, reinforces neoliberal values of competitive individualism and thus depoliticizes public discourse. Oral historians, rather than embracing storytelling, need to investigate it as a historically situated social phenomenon that often undercuts the epistemological, methodological, ethical, and political aims of oral history.

Confessing Animals: Toward a Longue Durée History of the Oral History Interview

Abstract Oral historians have long focused on the interview as a central research method and claimed antecedents stretching back to antiquity, but they have not studied the longue durée history of the interview. This article is a preliminary exploration of how oral historians might begin to write a history of the interview that emphasizes structural similarities among such diverse practices as religious and legal confessions, medical anamneses and psychoanalysis, the Inquisition and police interrogations, journalistic interviewing and oral history. It surveys the history of church confession, the spread of psychoanalysis in the nineteenth century, the emergence of an “interview society” after World War II, and the late twentieth-century phenomenon of a mass culture of confession. Following Michel Foucault, this article argues that one-on-one interviews that ask about people’s lives are a technology of the self that constitute the “modern subject.” Personal interviews, rather than finding out about a “true” inner self or authentic experience, teach both interviewers and interviewees the “right” way to be. This interpretation of the interview calls into question the assumption that the oral history interview is a neutral research tool that can be employed for finding out about the past, empowering people, and sharing authority.

Transnationalizing Home in Winnipeg: Refugees' Stories of the Places Between the "Here-and-There"

This article asks how refugees narrate home. Based on extensive interviews (oral histories) with refugees in Winnipeg, Manitoba, who arrived from Europe after the Second World War, from Central America during the 1980s, and from Afghanistan during the 2000s, this article argues that refugees are continually engaged in the process of making home, not only in the sending and receiving countries, but also in countries along their often complex and long migration routes. Listening closely to their stories forces researchers to move beyond “methodological nationalism” and a dichotomous “here-or-there” conceptualization of home, toward a transnationalizing of home.Dans cet article je parle au sujet de comment les réfugiés racontent ce qui est, pour eux, leur maison. La recherche est basée sur les entrevues (histoire orale) avec des réfugiés à Winnipeg, Manitoba. Ceux-ci sont arrivés de l’Europe après la deuxième guerre mondiale, ainsi que de l’Amérique Centrale pendant les années 80, et d’Afghanistan pendant les années 2000. Je parle du processus de s’établir un domicile, dans lequel les réfugiés se sont continuellement engagés, pas seulement dans leur pays d’origine et d’accueil, mais aussi dans les pays tout au long de leurs voies de migration, souvent complexes et longues. L’écoute attentive de leurs histoires fait en sorte que les chercheurs se déplacent au-delà du « nationalisme méthodologique » et de l’idée des pôles opposés représentée par « ici ou là », pour aller chercher les innombrables connections entre les différents pays, ainsi qu’une transnationalisation des maisons.

Toward an Ethics of Silence? Negotiating Off-the-Record Events and Identity in Oral History

Silences are a constitutive part of oral history interviews. Silences may express individual or collective forgetting, collaborative remembering, discomfort, reluctance, (self-)censorship, noncompliance, confrontation, reticence, politeness, fear, anger, deceit, taboos, secrets, contemplation, concern for the other, reflection, conformity, or that which need not be told.1 Some silences are explicit or obvious, others are not. Interviewees’ silences may be an effect of oppression or agency. Interviewers may use silence to give narrators space to remember or to make them talk. Silences in an interview may be consensual or express a communicative struggle. This chapter attempts to address, in a preliminary, tentative way, oral historians’ troubled and troubling relationship with silences.

Introduction: Oral History and Photography

This book is about the “photographic turn” in oral history. Historians’ interest in photographs—their “discovery of old photographs”—dates back, according to Raphael Samuel’s observations in Great Britain, to the early 1960s.3 Historians back then evaluated their visual evidence much less critically than their traditional textual sources, treating photographs, as Samuel criticized, as “transparent reflections of fact.”4 Cultural and family historians as well as archivists seized on photographs in the 1970s, concentrating on their assumedly self-evident informational value.5 Over the last two decades, the use of photographs has come under greater critical scrutiny. In turning the object of its research into a category of analysis, the discipline of history has moved toward a “pictorial turn,” a “visual turn,” an “iconic turn,” or, more focused, a “turn to photography.”6

Oral History Pedagogy in Situations of Conflict: Experiences from Colombia, 1996–2014

This chapter describes the experiences of three teachers in Colombia who were faced with the effects of extreme conflict, state violence, and poverty in their rural school settings. The teachers used innovative approaches based on oral history and traditional storytelling to help their students and communities deal with experiences of violence, forced displacement, and discrimination. Asking students to learn from the environment and to document their communities’ histories allowed students to imagine a future beyond guerrilla warfare, army and paramilitary violence, and narco-trafficking. The teachers developed student-centered, experiential learning through storytelling, dance, drama, quilting, and recording oral traditions and traditional knowledge.

Contesting the Meanings of Migration: German Women's Immigration to Canada in the 1950s

Twenty-five thousand German women immigrated to Canada as domestic servants between 1947 and 1962. Pushed by West German society that was increasingly hostile to women’s employment and emancipation, the female migrants, in their search for freedom, independence, and adventure, used Canadian immigration schemes that were based on patriarchal and paternalistic understandings of gender and class. The male Canadian bureaucrats who recruited the German women viewed them as cheap and docile labour for the growing middle class and as future citizens and mothers who fit the racial and religious criteria of immigration policy. The article illuminates the clashes between the female migrants and the mostly male bureaucrats over divergent meanings of migration within larger discourses of gender, class, and ethnicity. The article documents the women’s agency in the face of state control and how the women benefited from privileges received as white, Christian, Northwest Europeans. It argues that domestic servant immigration failed as a labour market policy, but, in the short term, supported Canada’s racial demographic policy to keep Canada white and Christian. It further argues that the migrants’ perspectives and actions must be taken into consideration in order to understand government policy and its implementation. 25 000 Allemandes ont immigré au Canada comme employées de maison de 1947 à 1962. Poussées par une société ouest-allemande de plus en plus hostile à l’emploi et à l’émancipation des femmes, les immigrantes se sont servies dans leur recherche de liberté, d’indépendance et d’aventure du système d’immigration canadien basé sur une interprétation patriarcale et paternaliste du sexe et de la classe sociale. Les bureaucrates canadiens masculins qui ont recruté les Allemandes voyaient en elles du personnel docile et bon marché pour la classe moyenne en expansion et de futures citoyennes et mères qui correspondaient aux critères raciaux et religieux de leur politique d’immigration. Cet article met en lumière les heurts entre les immigrantes et les bureaucrates, pour la plupart des hommes, sur les différences de signification de la migration au sein du discours portant plus largement sur le sexe, la classe et l’ethnicité. Nous y documentons l’agence des femmes face au contrôle étatique et comment celles-ci ont bénéficié de privilèges reçus en tant qu’Européennes du Nord-Ouest, blanches et chrétiennes. Nous y démontrons que l’immigration d’employées de maison a échoué en tant que politique de marché du travail, mais qu’elle a appuyé dans le court terme les principes démographiques raciaux du Canada pour y maintenir son caractère blanc et chrétien. Nous argumentons de plus que l’on doit tenir compte des perspectives et des actions des immigrants afin de comprendre la ligne de conduite du gouvernement et sa mise en œuvre.