ONE Narrative and Social Movements The Power of Stories

The past two decades have witnessed a great flowering in writing about narrative and the effort by a wide variety of scholars to incorporate it into their disciplines. The study of narrative in fiction has, of course, long been central to literary theory. More recently, however, narrative study has moved out of English Departments to take on new prominence in psychology, philosophy, semiotics, folklore studies, anthropology, political science, sociology, history, and legal studies. The “narrative turn” (Mitchell 1981) in so many fields of human inquiry, has, no doubt, many and complex causes. This development, however, is clearly part of a renewed emphasis in these fields on human agency and its efficacy, on context and the embeddedness of human experience, and on the centrality of language to the negotiation of meaning and the construction of identity in everyday life (see Hinchman and Hinchman 1997). In specific areas of inquiry, however, both within and across these disciplines, a concern with narrative has often been slow to develop, and research on social movements is paradigmatic. Within sociology, for instance, there has been a resurgence of interest in narrative as a social act and form of explanation, on storytelling as a social process, on life histories and “accounts” as social objects for investigation, and on the narrative constitution of identity (see, for example, Davis 2000a; Griffin 1993; Maines 1993; Richardson 1990; Somers 1994). Yet, with respect to social movements, little of this interest in narrative can be found. As Gary Alan