Abstract
For several years now, I have been involved in a number of research projects that have employed, either in part or in full, an oral history approach to the sharing of personal stories. One of these projects, a five-year oral history endeavor based at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, titled Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War, Genocide, and Other Human Rights Violations, required me, in both interview and interactive theatrical settings, to engage with participants who were often complete strangers to me prior to my initial encounter with them in these spaces.1 Other projects, namely, my doctoral dissertation project, for which I collected and analyzed oral histories of racialized, ethnicized, and colonized (REC)2 allosexual3 activists in Montreal, as well as a more personal project involving an oral history interview with my father, saw me probing the lives of friends and family members. If I were to pinpoint a common theme running through all of these projects, it would be my interest in exploring how marginalized, disenfranchised, and oppressed individuals overcome adversity in the Canadian context. In pursuing this interest, however, I have also stumbled upon a rather intriguing methodological discovery: how I absorbed and responded to each narrative I heard depended on my relationship with the respective storyteller. Put another way, in an oral history interview context, familiarity often bred content.
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Notes
“Ethnicized” and “colonized” are employed here in the same sense as “racialized,” given that “racialization [sic] refers to the process whereby groups are marked on the basis of some kind of real or putative difference.” See Yasmin Jiwani, Discourses of Denial: Mediations of Race, Gender, and Violence (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2006), 6. Thus, ethnicization and colonization suggest similar processes that actively impose certain putatively identificatory qualities on individuals that differentiate them from majoritarian populations based on ethnicity in the former case and aboriginality in the latter instance. This is not to suggest, however, that such marked individuals are not engaged in their own processes of resistance and decolonization.
See, among others, Hugo Slim and Paul Thompson, with Olivia Bennett and Nigel Cross, “Ways of Listening,” in Listening for Change: Oral Testimony and Development, eds. Hugo Slim, Paul Thompson, Olivia Bennett, and Nigel Cross (London: Panos, 1993), 61–94;
Kathryn Anderson and Dana C. Jack, “Learning to Listen,” in Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History , eds. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai (London: Routledge, 1991), 11–26;
Henry Greenspan, On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998).
For an analysis of that interview experience, see Alan Wong, “Conversations for the Real World: Shared Authority, Self-Reflexivity, and Process in the Oral History Interview,” Journal of Canadian Studies 43, 1 (2009): 239–58.
Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki, “Only Human: A Reflection on the Ethical and Methodological Challenges of Working with ‘Difficult’ Stories,” The Oral History Review 37, 2 (2010): 199.
Jonathan Fox, Acts of Service: Spontaneity, Commitment, Tradition in the Nonscripted Theatre (New Paltz, NY: Tusitala Publications, 1994).
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 1983).
Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 124.
Lisa M. Tillmann-Healy, “Friendship as Method,” Qualitative Inquiry 9, 5 (2003): 732.
Jodie Taylor, “The Intimate Insider: Negotiating the Ethics of Friendship When Doing Insider Research,” Qualitative Research 11, 1 (2011): 9.
“Confucian doctrines do not speak directly on the subject of same-sex love. Instead, Confucian teachings were focused on the family as the basic unit of the state. The emphasis of ‘self’ was placed on the kin-family relationship an individual held, not on the individual being. Marriages were formed in a way to strengthen these kinship ties amongst different groups [and were] not particularly focused on individual desire. The offspring’s primary responsibility was to respect their elders and continue these lineage lines, the concept of marriage correlated with reproduction[,] not sexuality.” Jennifer Q. Zhang, “Tongzhi Today, Tomorrow,” Senior Theses (Hartford, CT: Trinity College Digital Repository, 2011), http://digitalrepository.trincoll.edu/theses/8.
See also Yanqui Rachel Zhou, “Homosexuality, Seropositivity, and Family Obligations: Perspectives of HIV-infected Men Who Have Sex with Men in China,” Culture, Health & Sexuality 8, 6 (2006): 489–90.
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© 2013 Anna Sheftel and Stacey Zembrzycki
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Wong, A. (2013). Listen and Learn: Familiarity and Feeling in the Oral History Interview. In: Sheftel, A., Zembrzycki, S. (eds) Oral History Off the Record. PALGRAVE Studies in Oral History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339652_6
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