Week 10 Lab: Power of Storytelling
(Several books/narratives being examined; source: Flickr)
For this Story Lab, I watched two TED talks about the power of storytelling.
In the first talk, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks of the relationship between storytelling and power. She begins with an anecdote from her childhood wherein her mother told her that the family of the boy helping them with housework was very poor. She had this one-dimensional narrative of this boy's family growing up and they were characterized by only one thing: their poverty. When she had a chance to visit this boy's home and meet his family, she learned that they were creative individuals who had the means to craft objects. She had been so wrapped up in her own conceptions of this family that she hadn't even considered the possibility that they could be anything except poor. Adichie goes on to connect this to her experience moving to America for college. Her then-roommate was woefully unaware of the diverse opportunities and ways of life present in the African continent because she had been subject to this singular narrative of Africa as a place of tragedy and poverty. Adichie explains that this was an example of power; power is the ability to make one story of a place or people become the only story of that place or those people. This harkened back to a class I took my freshman year at OU called "Images of Africa." In this class we explored this very concept of a skewed narrative of Africa that was not only the product of, but also the cause for negative interactions between the West and Africa.
In the next TED talk, OU professor and YA author Jennifer Barnes discusses why and to what extent fictional characters become a part of our lives. Like Barnes emphasizes, we as a species spend an unbelievable amount of time consuming media and fiction. In so doing, we form parasocial relationships with these fictional characters wherein we want to believe that the relationship is two-sided, though this is not based in reality. Barnes speaks of the distinction between our belief that we do not have a real relationship with these fictional characters and our "alief" or gut-feeling that such a relationship does exist. We care more about a fictional character's death than we would care about the death of a real life acquaintance, despite knowing that we ought not to care as much about the former and ought to care far more about the latter. Due to the fact that we form these parasocial circles with these fictional characters, Barnes argues that it is pivotal that there is adequate representation in the media we consume. Barnes also hopes that we can channel our relationships with fictional characters into creating positive change in the real world.
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