Volume 13, Number 1, 2024 Special Issue: Considering Political Counter-Narratives

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This paper sets out to interrogate the use of master and counter narratives in UK Parliamentary Select Committee debates surrounding the passage of the Domestic Abuse Bill (now Domestic Abuse Act 2021) in Parliament. These debates are a site that allow for the telling of counter narratives in order to challenge the narrative of the normative socio-legal position regarding domestic violence and abuse (DVA). With its roots in the patriarchy and stereotypical gender roles that foster violence and abuse, the issue with such a narrative is that it fails to recognise the complex, nuanced nature of domestic violence and abuse. As a result, it maintains the status quo and is disconnected from the realities of DVA. The work of this paper, then, is to consider the dialogue between the masterplot of DVA, the Domestic Abuse Bill, and the attempts of counter narratives to act as discursive resistance. It will consider what is the true power of these anti-hegemonic stories in exposing the problems with the master-narrative. Counter narratives submitted by organisations, activists, academics and survivors of DVA during the Committee Stage of the debates were not uniform, monolithic or pure, and were often plagued with inconsistencies and contradictions with one another. Characterised as the same but different, these counter narratives did not act in strict opposition to the hegemonic master narrative. As a result, this paper will draw on a case study which examines three different reports submitted during the Committee Stage of the Debates to consider the following questions: in what way can counter narratives act as discursive resistance in law reform efforts and why are some more successful than others in dismantling the master narrative through the mechanism of the law? Overall, the argument put forward is that it is the counter narratives with a greater illocutionary force and greater narratological power which can be a successful tool in law reform and effect a shift in the master narrative of domestic violence and abuse.

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Telling counter-narratives has sometimes been exclusively reserved for marginal and minority groups. This article asks, instead, whether such elite group members as veteran parliamentarians will also tell counter-narratives in their oral history interviews. When the telling of counter-narratives is understood as a communicative strategy, open to various actors, the decisive question concerns about how to recognize these narratives. Previous literature provides such criteria as the stance toward some other narratives and illocutionary intent, which are helpful but not yet decisive. This article suggests that the limits of counter-narrative are and will remain negotiable since there is no easily recognizable participant orientation or speech act of telling a counter-narrative. This article proceeds to study empirically the possible markers of narrative countering.

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This essay provides an analysis of a post-postmodernist novel, Halle Butler’s The New Me (2019), whose political message is conveyed by the audience’s reconstruction of an authoritative, grand narrative about work as a source of personal fulfilment, which intersects with the main storyline. This authoritative, grand narrative not only informs the narrative communication but also provides the necessary cultural background for Butler’s novel to express its political message—that is, the countering of a normative view about work dynamics in today’s precarious landscape. The audience’s recognition of the interplay of the fictional narrative with a larger one in the background allows the narrative communication to realize its act of “countering.” This essay thus builds on the theory of co-construction (Effron et al., 2019) and counter-narrative approaches (cf. Hyvärinen, 2021, Lueg et al., 2021) to argue that Butler’s novel creates an interplay between the grand narratives about work now—including the “treatment of labour as a calling” and the myth of meritocracy permeating post-recession U.S. society—, and the counter-telling and resisting actions the characters in this narrative do to attend to political change.

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A criminal trial in a traditional Western adversarial justice system is performed as a discursive battle of competing narratives between prosecution and defence. In the end, decisions by the judge and jury, while ostensibly premised on the strength of the evidence, rely in large part on the relative persuasive strength of the two stories – which one is more plausible? Commonsensical? Familiar? After exploring the positioning of narrative studies within the field of Criminology, this article will draw on ethnomethodology, talk-in-interaction, and narrative analysis to examine a trial that took place in the United States in 2000 – that of Adnan Syed. In order to appeal to cultural understandings shared by the American jury, trope stories were deployed by both sides. Prosecution told the story of Adnan Syed, a Jilted Muslim Lover, defending his honour after the victim broke up with him. Meanwhile, defence countered with a Star-Crossed-Lovers narrative, in which there was no motive for violence. I will argue that defence failed to deploy their story effectively and, in their attempts to counter the prosecution’s narrative, rather ended up reinforcing its terms. The triumph of the prosecution’s case may be found in the details of how the defence’s counter-narrative failed.

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The article reports an empirical inquiry into the rhetorical use of master/counter juxtapositions in narrating an ongoing scene of political action. Drawing on the studies of institutional interaction, it investigates the institutional setting of public political speeches, focusing on the empirical example of Donald Trump’s public speech in the rally after the election results and just before the violent invasion of the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. My research approaches master/counter positioning as a multilayered relational constellation of identifications mobilized in the telling and deployed strategically for specific institutional purposes. I am interested in counter-narratives as interpretative discursive frames superimposed on surrounding socio-material circumstances to refute an alternative (pre-existing and prevailing) interpretation of reality. My take on the concept as a multifaceted rhetorical resource subsumes the aspects of an act of contestation, a breach of cultural orders, and a mission towards emancipation, albeit in a slightly modified version of the conventionalized definitions. In the context of political interaction, that is, in institutional activities connected to ongoing processes in policy-making and governance, counter-narratives are world-breaking but they are also world-making in a decidedly concrete consequential manner, firstly, by building on institutional continuities, virtues, and legitimacies, and secondly, by addressing recipients as co-actors, projecting identifications on them and expecting them to assume a role in the political participation field at hand. Applying tools from small story research, membership categorization analysis, epistemic governance and narrative positioning analysis, I explore the purposeful evocation of contrastive storylines in political rhetoric. The article aims to shed light on the argumentative use of counter-narratives in a political line of action.

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When Mendel Beilis, a Jew, was accused of having murdered a Christian child in Kyiv in 1911, the allegations drew on centuries-old “blood libel” legends, dating back to the Middle Ages, in which Jews purportedly sacrificed Christian children for ritual purposes. While Beilis eventually was acquitted of the charges, the master-narratives that drove them have proved resistant to counter-narration. Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel The Fixer, by fictionally attempting to retell Beilis’s story through the character of Yakov Bok, provides a “critical reinterpretation […] of dominant narrative models” (Meretoja 2021)—a powerful counter-narrative, not only to the specific tale of Beilis, but also to the longer-standing claims that continue to buttress antisemitism.

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How would it portend to analytical contextualization as well as specific theorization when instances where narrative kernels, once weaved into alternative epistemologies, make their way into, and become (re-)”plotted” on an inherently political platform, a session of state Parliament? Motivated by such an inquiry, the present multidisciplinary paper develops its theoretical argument by interrogating the notions of “counter-narrating” and “counter-narrative” cast on the intertwined conceptual landscape of forensics, tracking, and suspicion. The theoretical discussion is advanced further by developing the notions of productive suspicion and contra-plotting. On analytical level, the present chapter maintains that the narrative structure of some parliamentary discourses (presentations, Q&As) may operate much in the same manner as an anonymous forum thread or a reply chain in news’ commentaries. In undertaking this multidisciplinary theoretical discussion and analysis, the aim of this paper is to inform and expand the scholarship on counter-narratives and, in particular, to further solidify the conceptual aspects of the act, or practice, of counter-narrating.