Counternarratives

From MarxWiki

`Counternarratives: Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces` is a joint effort focused on the potential and difficulties of integrating cultural studies and critical media literacy into schools of education (co-authored by Henry Giroux, Colin Lankshear, Peter mcLaren, and Michael Peters).

“To understand the social present is very much a matter of recognizing and understanding the extent to which and ways in which our everyday lives are [influenced] by […official and] counternnarratives” (1)

What are `counternarratives`?

According to Michael Peters and Colin Lankshear, counternarratives are specific and local critiques that counter the “official” and “hegemonic” narratives of everyday life, such as those legitimating stories propagated for specific political purposes to manipulate public consciousness by heralding a national set of common cultural ideals. Counternarratives are “little stories” – the little stories of those individuals and groups whose knowledges and histories have been marginalized, excluded, subjugated or forgotten in the telling of official narratives.

In many ways, this definintion of `counternarratives` dovetails neatly with Tricia Rose's characterization of rap music and rap artists whose lyrics, image, and musical form `articulates the chasm between black urban lived experience and dominant, 'legitimate' (e.g. neoliberal) ideologies regarding equal opportunity and racial inequality.` In this sense, NWA's `F--- the Police` constitutes a counternarrative against the prevailing view that the police are the trustworthy and impartial upholders of the law by raging against police racism and brutality.

Counternarratives also draw on Michel de Certeau's `Tactics` as outlined in The Practice of Everyday Life as well as Gramsci's War of maneuver

There are 2 types of counternarratives:

1) Critiques of the modernist universalist progress narratives of the Enlightenment tradition 2) “Little Stories” of marginalized individuals and groups whose knowledges and histories are excluded in official narratives. They reject a common set of cultural ideals and the hegemonic narratives of everyday life.

Both modernism and post-modernism can be characterized as attitudes (p14). Foucault characterizes modernity as an attitude (rather than an epoch) which is a perpetual critique of our historical era (p14). Postmodernity is conversely characterized as “incredulity towards metanarratives” and skepticism of beliefs about “truth,” “knowledge,” and “self” which are taken for granted (p3,4). Cultural postmodernity depicts “the present state of moral, political, and aesthetic discourse [as having] no agreement on a universally accepted framework for resolving claims” (p3). “…There are now only different ethical, political and aesthetic perspectives which are based on incommensurable presmises.” This “pluralism” is an “extended differentiation of value spheres, each with its own inner logic.” It is due to the influence of postmodernism that “representation can no longer be considered a politically neutral and theoretically innocent activity” (p4).

“Postmodernism pits reasons in the plural—fragmented and incommensurable—against the universality of modernism and its conception of a unified human reason which, as the standard of rationality, underwrites all knowledge claims irrespective of time and place, and provides the ground for the unitary subject considered as the agent of historically progressive change” (p8).

While the epistemological perspective of the Enlightenment played an important role in the emergence of democracy, it is now an obstacle to understanding contemporary politics (p21). Cultural studies seeks alternative perspectives in a “set of approaches […] to understand and intervene into the relations of culture and power, […] [and] is commiteted to a radical contextualism which means that cultural practices cannot be reduced to or simply treated as texts” (p30). Cultural studies realigns educational priorities to focus on political, economic, and cultural forces, and to “enact democratic uses of knowledge, texts and cultural production” (p31).