This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Michele Moody-Adams’ recent book: Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope. See here for an introduction from Michele. Commentaries and replies will follow Tuesday through Thursday.

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Symbols, Narrative Activism, and the Importance of Storytelling in Making Space for Justice

To a generation of postwar progressives, J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings was a foundational text. This, of course, makes perfect sense. In Tolkein’s imaginative story, a ragtag group of the downtrodden and exiled stand up for nature and peace against an industrial war-machine promoting an environmentally destructive monoculture. It’s no wonder that countercultural heroes like Led Zeppelin wrote songs about the novels, extolling their virtues.

Likewise, to a generation of contemporary right-wing activists, J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings is a foundational text. This, of course, makes perfect sense. In Tolkein’s imaginative story, a ragtag group of the authentic folk of the countryside stand up for idyllic tradition against a foreign horde of invaders promoting a community-destroying modernity. It’s no wonder that far-right heroes like Italy’s soon-to-be prime minister Giorgia Meloni give speeches about the novels, extolling their virtues.

The idea that the postwar progressive counterculture and the contemporary far-right would both embrace the same story as authentically speaking to their values seems far-fetched. Surely, one of these groups must be misunderstanding the texts. And yet, Michele Moody-Adams’s thought-provoking new book Making Space for Justice provides us with the necessary tools to understand this phenomenon. Social movements, Moody-Adams notes, are not merely seeking to pass policies or gain political power but are also attempting to shape our collective imaginations.

Through what she calls aesthetic activism and narrative activism, movements rework (or, conversely, support) existing social imaginaries. This often includes conflict over societal symbols or widely disseminated stories which generate shared representations of belonging or delineate social boundaries. Moody-Adams, for example, uses the public fights over what to do with our society’s numerous monuments to Confederate generals as an example of this kind of activism. Through different social movements appropriating these boundary-marking symbols into their storytelling, we are forced to imagine different versions of the past as well as divergent visions of the future. To Black Lives Matter activists, the statues aggressively symbolize a telling of history in which the Confederacy is worthy of commemoration, thus actively erasing the trauma of slavery and the ongoing legacy of structural racism. By removing the statues, these activists ask us to dream of a future where we reconcile ourselves with the violence of our past and build a society in which our public symbols enlarge the imagined boundaries of community and citizenship to truly include all people. Conservatives, however, respond by asserting that removing the statues represents a desecration of history, and warn of a future they claim will see America in decline as overzealous activists find ever-more fault with the symbols of a once-great, imagined past.

I’m certainly not the first to point out that many conservatives probably thought very little about the average statue of a Confederate general in a park, somewhere, until very recently. Moody-Adams’s work in Making Space for Justice would suggest, however, that this misses the point. Similar to the recent social media flare-up about singer (and classically trained flautist!) Lizzo playing James Madison’s 200-year-old crystal flute, where the right lamented the perceived violation of a sacred object while progressives noted that approximately zero of the conservatives complaining cared about the flute before Lizzo played it, the event itself is less the point than how every element of the event becomes a symbol in our shared collective imaginary. Arguments about an artifact of American history, owned by one of the “founding fathers,” being played by an ascendant Black woman superstar, are less about the people and events in question, and more about, in Moody-Adams’s terminology, the narrative and aesthetic activism of whose imagining of the past gets to count, or whose symbols do we honor?

While reading Moody-Adams’s thoughtful discussion of the battles over Confederate monuments — and other, similar conflicts over language and representation in our society — I found myself nodding along, able to see the whole of contemporary U.S. politics through the lenses she provides. Controversies over statues and flutes are taking place against a backdrop of commentary on representation within popular culture and whether history is more accurately told by the 1619 project or the 1776 rejoinder. They are part of a political landscape in which #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo activists ask us to reckon with the structural biases of the past that have created the inequities of the present, while the MAGA movement demands a return to an mythical, “great” past. To return to The Lord of the Rings, as I write this, debates unfold on Twitter over whether the presence of Black elves on the new TV show set in Tolkein’s fictional universe represents a fulfillment of his anti-fascist politics or a betrayal of his deeply British-centric vision. Moody-Adams’s work suggests that whether the conflict is over the fantasy world of Middle Earth or the very real history of the 1619 project, the concerns are similar: how do the symbols and stories of our collective imaginations distribute honor, prestige, and status in our society?

These concerns, Moody-Adams demonstrates, mean that these debates over a society’s collective imagination are not frivolous but, instead, represent questions of justice. As I read Moody-Adams’s book, I often found myself ruminating on Du Bois’s famous comment that Black Americans experience “a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.” Du Bois captures, in this passage, the power of shared symbols and stories to divide and define, as well as the importance of the kinds of activism discussed by Moody-Adams. To face marginalization in a society is to be denied the right to have your own stories and symbols honored, to be forced to see “one’s self through the eyes of others,” rather than given the power to act as the narrator of your own life. Making Space for Justice is an exemplary fulfillment of Du Bois’s profound insight: controversies over statues and stories rage in our society because equity is not exclusively a matter of redistribution, but also one of re-envisioning.  

And yet, as I read Making Space for Justice, I wondered about the limits of imagination. Moody-Adams cites Arlie Russell Hochschild’s recent work to talk about the idea of deep stories — the narratives that express how we feel, potentially divorced from facts. On the one hand, as Moody-Adams astutely notes, to build coalitions or bridge divides requires empathy with the deep stories of others. It is rarely a listing of facts or figures that change minds, but rather understanding and presenting stories and symbols that reflect the affective dimension of politics. However, as someone who often worries our politics have become too unmoored from fact, increasingly morphing into entertainment in which the avatars of our identities and values publicly perform our feelings for us, how do we both recognize the deep insights into the cognitive dimensions of politics in which Moody-Adams discusses in this book, while still valuing a belief in empirical evidence, material interests, and history? Put simply, when seeking to change hearts and minds, how do activists bridge the possible rift between empathizing with stories that feel real to potential constituents while enjoying the ability to plainly state things they know to be true?

Following this question, I want to turn towards future work that Moody-Adams’s manuscript suggests will be vital. As a sociologist, this book ignited my own, personal imagination for how we can best study the kinds of activism Moody-Adams highlights. I opened my comments with the example of different interpretations of The Lord of the Rings to emphasize the multivocality of stories. Whether the narrative in question is Frodo’s journey to Mordor or a retelling of U.S. history, examining how differently situated social movements frame and tell the same stories, attempting to breathe new meaning into them, or trying to freeze the symbolic meaning of specific characters or events, may be deeply revealing of efforts to both protect and rework collective imaginaries. David S. Gutterman’s book Prophetic Politics, which examines how both progressives and conservatives have used the Exodus narrative to promote their political views, serves as a useful companion to Moody-Adams’s theorizing of narrative activism. Similarly, I have increasingly found myself drawn to studying successful social movements to understand how they were able to build coalitions and craft resonant messages. Successful coalitions I have examined have often been forced to enlarge the way that privileged individuals within them imagine their issue of concern, moving from thinking about “environmentalism,” for example, to “colonialism,” to better allow marginalized groups in the coalition to tell their own stories about the problem. Through studying how movements successfully inspire their audiences with narratives, or expand their collective identity to incorporate diverse voices, I hope that we answer Moody-Adams’s call to “make space for justice” in our collective imaginations.  

Reply to Fuist: On Narrative Activism

Salman Rushdie once cautioned that “those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, power to retell it, rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.” [1] One aim of Making Space for Justice (in Chapter 6) is to show that many progressive social movements have anticipated the wisdom of Rushdie’s observation. They have drawn on the powers of imagination to create opportunities to “think new thoughts”—as a way of making perceptual and conceptual “space” for the realization of social justice. The book gives the label “narrative activism” to these projects and focuses on two varieties:

• emancipatory narrative activism, which involves retelling disempowering narratives in terms meant to further the cause of freedom from injustice

• historical ‘truth-tracking’ activism which challenges inaccurate and incomplete historical narratives which claim to “track the truth” but in fact serve to suppress it.[2]

These remarks will clarify the aims and implications of narrative activism in order to address some important concerns raised by Professor Todd Fuist’s wide-ranging comments.

As Fuist has gleaned, a central element of emancipatory narrative activism is what I call “narrative self-reframing.” Some of the most consequential examples of narrative self-reframing are the slave narratives that constituted what one historian describes as the “movement literature” of abolitionism.[3]  But, contrary to Fuist’s suggestions, the narrative self-reframing I discuss is not about exercising “the right to have one’s own stories and symbols honored.”  Slave narratives, for instance, were part of a project to change the world by ending chattel slavery.

Slave narratives count as emancipatory narrative activism because they typically involved one or more of the following projects: (a) correcting assumptions that marginalize and stigmatize disempowered groups; (b) conveying knowledge of what it is really like to occupy social roles shaped by those assumptions; (c) offering new ways of understanding connections between a group’s past experience of injustice and its possibilities for a liberated future; (c) and sometimes just declaring a group’s intention to resist discrimination and oppression, by rejecting the stigmatizing and marginalizing elements of a socially dominant narrative. Slave narratives furthered the African American freedom struggle because their aims always transcended narrative self-reframing itself.

Fuist helpfully discusses one aim of Part III of the book when he attends to arguments, in Chapter 7, regarding the importance of treating even one’s political opponents as fully human beings whose self-understandings may be rooted in narratives that should initially be treated with respect and concern. This effort must draw on that element of “narrative imagination” that Martha Nussbaum describes as the capacity to be an intelligent and empathetic “reader” of others’ stories.[4]  Yet people often adopt narrative self-understandings that tell us more about their hopes and fears than about the way the world really is. This is the point of sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s concept of the “deep story.”[5]  As I argue in Making Space for Justice, understanding a deep story is essentially different from approving and agreeing with whatever content of that story might fail to track historical truth. 

Historical truth-tracking activism is an essential element of narrative activism, first, because vitally important truths of history are often suppressed in service of exclusionary and xenophobic ways of life.  This is what historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed appreciated when she successfully contested histories suppressing the truth about Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with the enslaved woman Sally Hemmings.  But second, we learn from Book III of Plato’s Republic that important truths of history can be suppressed by those who hope to deceive us into believing that some way of life is “natural.”  This is why authors of slave narratives, especially Frederick Douglass, were adamant that their efforts at narrative self-reframing were also meant to record the truth about the brutality and inhumanity of chattel slavery.

Fuist rightly suggests that there is no formula for achieving a defensible balance between understanding a “deep story” that is dangerously unmoored from historical truth and articulating the historical truth that the story ignores. But as Aristotle might wonder, why should we expect that practical wisdom—as it is relevant to realizing the virtues of political life—will unfold according to standards appropriate to other forms of argument and inquiry?

Yet Making Space for Justice shows that part of the knowledge we need in order to meet the demands of social justice is contained in the saying that “those who tell the stories rule the world.”  Contrary to Fuist’s suggestions, narrative activism is rarely (if ever) about whether or not to interpret a popular novel from “the left” or “the right.”  It is, rather, about challenging some of the humanly damaging ways in which socially dominant narratives sometimes serve to regulate the social worlds they help to create.  But many progressive social movements have recognized the value of narrative activism as a strategy for fighting back: turning to imagination to generate ideas, images, stories, and experiences with the potential to make space for justice.

Notes

[1] Rushdie “One Thousand Days,”   https://www.wnyc.org/story/239518-one-thousand-days-salman-rushdie-columbia-1991/  . Rushdie offered this observation in December 1991 when, after more than a 1000 days in seclusion, he made his first tentative steps outside the bubble of seclusion to help celebrate the 200th anniversary of the Bill of Rights.

[2] This label does not appear in the book—although I now appreciate the value of having a concise label for that variety of narrative activism aimed at correcting inadequate claims regarding history.

[3] Manisha Sinha. The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2016. p. 422.

[4] Martha Nussbaum. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997.  Pp. 10-11.  In Making Space for Justice, I argue that narrative imagination also involves the capacity to construct narratives – merely in service of making experience intelligible,  but also in service of more carefully tracking the truth.

[5] Arlie Hochschild. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: New Press, 2016.