Re-membering the body: Pain in collective memory and storytelling.

Abstract

This dissertation project examines how stories and storytelling become a means for aggrieved populations to give voice to their pain, to explore complicated power relations and to negotiate literacy and their place within educational institutions. This project begins with retelling a story about invoking ritualistic protection which enables Hopi priests to dance with snakes. This story's metaphorical interpretation grounds my inquiry of the discursive and nondiscursive practices that the aggrieved must engage in order to interact with society's education institutions. The metaphor and subsequent interpretation of this story serves to frame my thinking about educational institutions as contested spaces and as potentially painful to those lacking protection and already aggrieved. The messages of worthlessness in institutional spaces may not be direct, but such messages get woven into the fabric of institutional settings with very real implications to aggrieved populations, such as their educational performance (Valdes 1996). Further, pedagogies and dominant ideologies in schools oftentimes dislocate aggrieved peoples from themselves and their voices (Freire 1985, 1987, 1993; Shor 1980, 1986, 1987; Padilla 1997; Aronowitz and Giroux 1991). This project addresses several questions when considering this dislocation: How do bodies endure those everyday painful assaults on psyche and soul in educational settings? How do aggrieved peoples use stories and storytelling to pass on moments of great pain for the purposes of community literacy? How do these personal and particular stories reflect political and social issues and contest and challenge the ideologies circumscribing schools? And how do stories and storytelling become a means through which these populations achieve personal healing and social transformation? In examining the pedagogy of composition classrooms, as well as incidents of community-based social protest, this project examines how educational institutions also ironically can become sites where it is possible to write against while inside, giving voice to populations traditionally disenfranchised in such spaces. The results of this project suggest that the presence of aggrieved populations--their disruptive re-membering presence (Morrison 1988) and their stories of pain--does challenge schooling policies and literacy practices. For these populations envision counter-hegemonic images of themselves, images which form a powerful critique of modern educational values.