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Katrina Narratives: What Creative Writers Can Teach Us about Oral History
Abstract
Creative writing graduate students—living in post-Katrina Louisiana and struggling for a means to aid their devastated community—ask
their peers about the stories they are telling concerning the hurricanes, how their peers construct their individual hurricane
narratives, and how the creative process/discipline bears on the material we call history. The authors frame the discussion
around Ronald Grele and Alessandro Portelli's writings on narrative. They argue that the oral history informant and the professional
storyteller are linked by certain common pursuits and practices and thereby create common byproducts as well and that these
connections offer useful insights into the study of oral history. In this essay, they work to bring the two disciplines together
and to explore possible overlaps so that we might benefit from a place of new understanding not yet imagined.
Purpose
– The paper's aim are to: review the value and credibility of oral history for historical research in marketing; and conceptualize oral history as more than a data source in historical research but also a subject to investigate memory and a conceptual approach for understanding historical events.
Design/methodology/approach
– The paper comprises an international historical review of oral history theory and practice linked to an examination of oral history methods in marketing.
Findings
– Oral history is perceived as an “essentially contested concept”; a lack of consensus on universal principles has been sustained over a long time and has led to incredible diversity in theory and practice but has also made it difficult to grasp and manage. It is shown to be perspectival with analytical reach beyond individuals' recollected experiences and actions. Memory is identified as the subject as well as the source for oral history and a misconception that oral history can provide literal expressions of what experience and events were like is clarified. Oral history has been under‐utilized in marketing history and this is presented as a methodological paradox given the ubiquity of the interview in the marketing discipline more generally.
Originality/value
– Central to oral history are a range of questions around issues of memory and remembering that have been largely unacknowledged in marketing and the oral history approach is perhaps uniquely placed to address some of these. Oral history critically examines the making of history and the paper highlights some of the issues this presents for historical research. Disciplinary efforts to standardize oral history are queried.
With the growing familiarity of the blog genre, much has been published about the use of information and communication technologies for grassroots and community endeavors, but there is still research to be done, particularly of placeblogs that coincide with sites of natural and/or national disaster. Unlike other scholarly Internet inquiries where issues of identity might influence the structures and processes of the research, the population discussed here stands out in its transparent use of blogs and other Web 2.0 technologies. The New Orleans blogger community proves to be one built upon the shared experience of Hurricane Katrina and is thereby focused on reporting the facts surrounding and actions needed for recovery to take place. While their individual blog audiences may be small, their disclosing details about their lives ‘after the levees broke’ allows these ‘NOLA Bloggers’ to be in control of their storm stories and potentially receive feedback within minutes of sharing, which is fundamental during times of crisis. After a brief overview of my autoethnographic research methods, I present a profile of a blogger whose writing presents readers with a truer understanding of what life is like in post-Katrina New Orleans. Since the hurricane hit in 2005, Charlotte’s writing has progressed from emotional outpourings of survivor’s guilt to reflective posts illustrating the way web 2.0 technologies have empowered her local identity since the storm.
History, we are often taught, is driven by vast social, political, and economic forces. But each political event, each war, each clash in the streets or at the picket lines, is experienced by individuals. It is this profound bond between public history and personal struggle, Alessandro Portelli contends, that gives oral history its significance and its power. In The Battle of Valle Giulia—the title comes from an Italian student protest of the 1960s—Portelli reflects on how to connect personal memories with history, how to fittingly collect and represent the complexity of memory. Crossing cultures, classes, and generations, he records the private and singular experiences of Italian steelworkers and Kentucky coal miners, veterans and refugees of World War II, soldiers who fought in Vietnam, Italian resistance fighters and Nazis, and members of student movements from Berkeley to Rome. By listening to those whom others presume are "without historical memory"—such as youthful protesters, or the rural Tuscan women who saw every father, son, and brother killed by Nazi soldiers—Portelli clarifies the process by which narratives come into being as oral history, and he illustrates the differences and distances between story-telling and history-telling. Portelli's articulate discussion of dialogue, representation, narrative and genre link historical analysis with literary and linguistic theory and with the concerns of contemporary anthropology.
Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History
- Grele
Grele, Envelopes of Sound: The Art of Oral History, 142.
Oral History and the Art of Dialogue , 88. 11 The words — as close to memory as possible — of James Bennett. 12 This is not to suggest that our interviews and our process were somehow un-academic. As Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better
- The Portelli
- Valle Battle
- Giulia
Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue, 88.
11 The words — as close to memory as possible — of James Bennett.
12 This is not to suggest that our interviews and our process were somehow un-academic. As
Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us, " All life is an experiment. The more experiments you
make the better. "
Baton Rouge The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue
- Clarence Nero
Clarence Nero, interview by Anna Hirsch and Claire Dixon, March 1, 2006, Baton Rouge,
LA.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.
23 Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue, 80.
24 Ibid.
The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue , 88. 11 The words -as close to memory as possible -of James Bennett
- Portelli
Portelli, The Battle of Valle Giulia: Oral History and the Art of Dialogue, 88.
11 The words -as close to memory as possible -of James Bennett.