Bacchilega NarrativeCulturesSituated 2015

Narrative Cultures, Situated Story Webs, and the Politics of Relation
Author(s): Cristina Bacchilega

Source: Narrative Culture , Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring 2015), pp. 27-46
Published by: Wayne State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13110/narrcult.2.1.0027
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article Cristina Bacchilega
Narrative Cultures, Situated Story

Webs, and the Politics of Relation
A
s Thomas King afffirmed in his 2003 Massey Lectures, “the truth about stories
is that that’s all we are” (2). This is why I am genuinely excited about this new
journal, Narrative Culture, and find myself responding somewhat foolheart-
edly to its editors’ call for an opinion piece.1 What is the scope of narrative
culture? What are some of the challenges and opportunities the framework of
narrative culture poses to specific disciplines? What in this framework can the place
of folk narratives and folk-narrative scholars be? The stories about stories I tell here
in answer to these questions can only be informed by the stories—experiential,
historical, imaginative, place-based, and scholarly—I know. The stories about stories
I hope to read in Narrative Culture would move us to engage with “narrative cultures”
in the plural as situated and interrelated practices where knowledges, desires, and
conflicts are negotiated within and across worldly storytelling networks.
As the editors’ “Introduction” in the first issue suggests, narrative culture invites
interdisciplinary approaches to all kinds of narratives circulating in and adapted
to a wide range of contexts and media: “By widening the scope from narrative to
narrative culture, we acknowledge that narrative informs and reigns supreme in a
large variety of cultural phenomena” and that narrative culture encompasses more
narrative culture, vol. 2, no. 1, spring 2015, pp. 27–46. copyright © 2015 wayne state university press, detroit, mi 48201-1309.
n 27

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28 n Cristina Bacchilega
“than, for instance, folk narrative, oral literature, popular narrating, or narratology”
(Marzolph and Bendix 1). Significantly, the editors also remark on wanting “to foster
exchange and learning across boundaries of learning,” boundaries that are not sim-
ply disciplinary, but rather result from economic as well as geopolitical imbalances.
Knowing that location has a strong impact on scholarship as narrative culture, the
editors “seek to honor . . . the diffferent points of departure taken for granted or
simply available to scholars in diffferent locations” (Marzolph and Bendix 6).
From my own location, I take the journal’s offfering of a scholarly forum for
narrative culture across disciplines and media as well as sociohistorical boundaries
to deploy culture, a much-contested term, in specific ways. Narrative culture is a set
of practices concerned with the production, exchange, and consumption of shared
meanings—narratives, in this case—that depend on the work of representation
and circulate in competition with one another.2 One of the challenges, then, of
contributing to the study of narrative culture is to construct and engage scholarly
tales that decode not only the workings of narrative texts as discourse and story,
récit and histoire, in relation to one another and as performances to their storytelling
contexts, but also the workings of power and knowledge that permeate the repre-
sentational, conceptual, and material practices and efffects of these narrative texts.
While this is a specialized and relatively recent understanding of culture,3 it
informs a widening range of approaches to narrative, and it helps to clarify how
weighty King’s claim actually is. The first Massey lecturer of Native descent, Chero-
kee fiction writer and theorist King tells stories about family, literature, and history
as well as a creation story about Charm, a woman who fell from the sky (10–21). In
retelling this Earth-Diver creation story, King highlights its principles of curiosity,
balance, and cooperation. He comments on how such a story is entertaining but
easily forgotten in North America where the legacy of “Genesis” dominates (21).
Then he asks, “What kind of a world might we have created with that kind of story?”
(28). Because we live by stories and in stories, he challenges his audience to take
action: “Take Charm’s story, for instance. It’s yours. Do with it what you will. Tell
it to friends. Turn it into a television movie. Forget it. But don’t say in the years to
come you would have lived your life diffferently if only you had heard this story”
(29). Stories construct our worlds and us at the same time, emerging from actual
negotiations with and in these worlds. Stories create and weave together the social
networks that define us whether we belong to them or we other them. Stories shape
our conceptions of these worlds, and they have material impact on these worlds,
the human ones and the other living ones (natural and spiritual) we are a part of.

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Narrative Cultures, Situated Story Webs, and the Politics of Relation n 29
Scholars of folk narrative have long operated on a complex understanding that

stories matter, learning from Scheherazade-like tricksters in a range of contexts
how stories and the sharing of stories create, feed, and change culture. Narratology
in its “postclassical” incarnations acknowledges this, by focusing on cognition
(Herman), the body (Punday), social emplotments (Frank), and mediality (Ryan).
I have studied in both academic traditions, but this is not the only reason I insist
on approaching “narrative cultures” in the plural.
How do I understand my location as a scholar of narrative culture(s)? Certainly
as one of privilege, based at one end on my experience teaching in a tenured posi-
tion at a US research university in Hawai‘i and at the other end on the opportunity
I have had over the years to learn, in and out of the academy, from the conflicted
histories, stories, and people of Hawai‘i. Hawai‘i is an occupied and colonized nation,
and in my position as a settler here I feel a responsibility to teach folk, literary, and
popular-culture narratives in ways that seek to support Hawaiian sovereignty4 as
well as a hopeful and engaged politics of relation. My own history—growing up
in Italy as a biracial bilingual girl child, becoming educated in Euro-American
and Eurocentric classics, experiencing the violent disenchantment of the “years
of lead” (gli anni di piombo) as well as the challenging promise of feminism, and
eventually participating in a new kind of Italian migration to the United States—has
shaped my understanding of and engagements with narrative cultures in Hawai‘i.
Conversely, it is only from my life experience, work, and networks in Hawai‘i that I
tell the stories of what brought me here and kept me here, opening myself up to a
place and mix of narrative cultures that continue to trouble and enrich my sense
of the worlds and stories I live in, of the stories I choose to retell.
Because of where I came from and where I am, colonial and decolonial stories
are in the forefront of my interest in narrative cultures and the material force of
their ongoing competition. The stories of and for decolonization that most resonate
with me are those where knowledge is nurtured by the sensuous, that fullness of
feeling a disembodied rationality conspires to keep in check, the erotic in Audre
Lorde’s passionate and expansive redefinition. On my department’s website, my
publications and research interests are identified as fairy-tale studies, folklore and
literature, gender and fairy tales, translation studies, narratology, feminist theory
and literature, folkloristics and colonialism, and Hawaiian mo‘olelo (stories and
histories that intertwine oral and literary traditions) in translation. It is from this
located nexus of personal history and geopolitics, culturally specific knowledges
and narrative as knowledge, disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity that I think of

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narrative culture and narrative cultures as situated practices in relation to one

another. This means I am especially interested in how diffferences are negotiated
within narrative cultures; how boundaries between narrative cultures may persist
or shift, but always act on our perception of these cultures; how there are bodies
and stories that can and cannot move across from one to another culture; and
how storytellers may take action to change those boundaries.5 In what follows, I
tell how I currently approach such power dynamics in the discipline of fairy-tale
studies, where multiple narrative cultures intersect, and how I situate my approach
in relation to other networks of narrative cultures.
What (I Think) I Do, or Why I Approach Adaptations in a Worldly

Fairy-Tale Web
In the Department of English at the University of Hawai‘i–Mānoa, I teach courses

like “Folklore and Oral Narratives,” “Fairy Tales and Their Adaptations,” “Fairy Tales
and Social Struggles,” and “Folklore and Literature: Questions of Translation and
Adaptation.” Increasingly, my focus on translation and adaptation has encouraged
me to reflect on the place of folk and fairy tales in contemporary narrative culture,
or to ask what tales of magic and tales of wonder from the past do in today’s world.
While often dismissed as simple stories for children, remnants of outdated modes
of life, or escapist entertainment, such tales persist in their myriad permutations
and pervade dominant American and globalized culture, acting as residual and
emergent forces that work not only to reinforce it, but also to oppose it and
possibly offfer an alternative.6 Some of these tales demand suspension of disbelief;
others attune us to undervalued ways of knowing and marginalized desires; some
do both and then more.7 Regardless, these narratives play with the world, as we
believe we know it, both instructing us about our place within it and offfering
pathways to transform us and/or it. As such, these tales of magic and wonder
shape dreams and nightmares, project possible futures, and afffect people’s sense
of what is possible.
All good stories do this to some extent, but tales that in varied ways defy the
codes of (commercial) realism are enabled by a double vision that transforms
“things as they are.” These transformations are culturally and historically specific
and implicated in the making and unmaking of both histories and dreams. One
reason that inspires me to teach such “nonrealist” narratives of magic and wonder

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is that, because “fantasy” deploys the language of dreams, it matters, has material
consequences, and structures how we live in the world. Another is to break the
spell of the dominant and escapist image of the American tale of magic that is con-
stantly reproduced and exported in blockbuster forms of popular culture for global
consumption, and instead expose students to its less commercialized traditions,
ideological hotspots, and more activist adaptations. Yet another is to discuss the
strategies and efffects of genre remixing that characterize much millennial literature
and film of the fantastic, to work toward understanding the sociocultural dynamics
that inform them—an understanding that is necessarily enabled and occluded by
our participation in the narrative cultures we analyze.
In my recent book, Fairy Tales Transformed? Twenty-First-Century Adaptations
and the Politics of Wonder, I take an intertextual and geopolitical fairy-tale web
of reading and writing practices as my methodological field; I highlight divergent
yet interwoven social projects that fairy-tale adaptations in the early twenty-first
century envision and instigate; and I argue that today’s fairy-tale transformations
activate multiple intertextual and generic links that both expand and decenter
the narrow conception of the genre fixed in Disneyfied pre-1970s popular cultural
memory.8 Proposing the fairy-tale web as a general site for critical inquiry into
the genre’s activity has a twofold purpose: to envision current fairy-tale cultural
practices in an intertextual dialogue with one another, a dialogue that is informed
not only by the interests of the culture industry and the dynamics of globalization
in a “postfeminist” climate, but also by more multivocal and unpredictable uses
of the genre; and to further the construction of a history and remapping of the
genre that take capitalism, colonialism, coloniality, and disciplinarity into account.
As Christine Jones and Jennifer Schacker aptly describe it, the fairy-tale web is
“tangled,” its “many tendrils interlock,” and its “patterns change depending on the
vantage point from which one looks at them” (37). In responding to this multivocal-
ity, I focus specifically on activist adaptations—that is, variously situated responses
that contest the hegemony of a colonizing, Orientalizing, heteronormative, and
commercialized poetics of magic. In my experience, such activist adaptations
circulate in independent feature films and shorts, experimental as well as genre
fiction, visual arts, web comics, fan fiction, and blogs. In the book, I discuss a few
to show that, while they do not represent wonder or wonders, these adaptations
work in diffferent modes and media to cultivate our taste for wonder and attune
us to its power in fairy tales. And I see these activist adaptations as potentially
transformative of the fairy tale, a genre too often put to work hegemonically in

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globalized consumer popular culture. I say “potentially” transformative because the

efffects of activist adaptations depend also on our reading practices, our openness
to forming a diffferent habitus. For instance, if what is being tapped in activist
adaptations so as to cultivate our sense of wonder is quite often the fictional tale’s
meshing with local legends, emplaced knowledges, oratures that are activated to
query the dominant fairy-tale’s poetics of magic, then, for scholars in fairy-tale
studies, in particular, I believe a lot depends on our willingness to engage the
question of how storytellers/adapters from varied locations of subaltern and
colonial diffference turn to the folk and fairy tale today for making “the impossible
possible” (Hopkinson and Nelson 98)—which is something that Nalo Hopkinson,
spec-fiction author of Taino/Arawak and Afro-Caribbean descent, and other artists
do and also say they are doing.
Publications such as Contemporary Fiction and the Fairy Tale (2008), The En-
chanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy-Tale Films (2011), and Channeling
Wonder: Fairy Tales on Television (2014) show that scholars are quite aware of how
the twenty-first-century fairy-tale web is complex and multimedial, and of how not
all its links are equal since maintaining a socioeconomic and cultural divide is built
into a for-profit globalizing economy of cultural production. The current inequality,
I underscore, reaches back to normative constructions of the fairy-tale’s history as
a genre and its geopolitics of knowledge. Historically, the trafffic of folk and fairy
tales has been regulated by commerce, religion, and prejudice—which results in
an unequal flow of tales and an unequal valorization of diffferent tellers’ located
knowledges. If we see the intertextual web as a methodological field—whereby the
web is experienced in the activity of reading, rather than as a received or preexist-
ing object—then it matters how through the construction and reconstruction of a
web of intertextuality we make multiple (hi)stories of the genre visible/narratable,
or not. This reconstruction of the web includes considering how we link fairy tales
with folktales and also how fairy-tale texts become available in print or other media
for teaching. Overall, my approach in Fairy Tales Transformed? is to pay attention
to how certain activist fairy-tale adaptations in diffferent media relocate the genre
from counterhegemonic perspectives on embodied orality and wonder, and to take
note of how these reorienting practices suggest as a critical task that we remap the
fairy tale—as one among many wonder genres—onto a worldly web.

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Challenges and Opportunities: Fostering a Culture of Translation
Presented with this approach to reading fairy tales, their adaptations, and fairy-tale
studies as part of a worldly web, and thus of narrative cultures, a reader of my book
manuscript astutely suggested I address the “‘impossibility’ of comparative fairy-
tale studies on a global scale.” I was asked, “How do we train the next generation
of scholars? Do we still need specialists in national languages and literatures, or
will they be displaced by a new generation of scholars who think globally, even
when it means sacrificing precision and depth?” Such questions bring home the
importance in our scholarship of language skills and of specific cultural knowledges.
I see how meeting the challenge of truly comparative fairy-tale studies may never
be a reality, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s Death of a Discipline is relevant here.
But in relating fairy-tale studies to narrative culture I am not so much calling for
comparativism as for remapping the fairy-tale genre onto a worldly, not world wide,
web. What does this mean?
“Worldly” here is not the same as “worldly wise”—which marks a “pragmatic,
street smart, opportunistic” mindset “trained in the ways of the bustling, practical,
material world” (Radhakrishnan 148). Rather, I am of course referring to Edward
Said’s insistence on how “all texts” are “worldly and circumstantial” (Orientalism
23), advancing a particular perspective and bringing about consequences in the
social world from which they can never be separate. Said writes that whether
“preserved or put outside for a period . . . on a library shelf or not . . . considered
dangerous or not,” individual stories are always worldly (The World, the Text, and
the Critic 35) because they are events that have “sensuous particularity as well as
historical contingency” (39). Their worldliness is inseparable from how “they make
their way in the world.”9 Colonialism, imperialism, and globalization are some of
the power structures that matter to which tales of wonder have traveled and with
what authority since the 1500s at least.
In her 2010 book, The Story-Time of the British Empire: Colonial and Postcolonial
Folkloristics, Sadhana Naithani asks questions about how, for whom, and thanks to
whose labor traditional stories or folktales from the British colonies made their way
in the world, especially to the imperial island in the Atlantic. From her analysis,
colonial folkloristics emerges as a central articulation of British colonial narrative
culture because of the many ways in which collecting and publishing the folktales
of the colonized in India and Africa worked to support at the turn of the twentieth
century the grand narrative that the British empire was telling of itself and its

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people—those who had writing and those who did not.10 Folktales from colonized
India were “making their way in the world” as English-language books of “fairy tales,”
and this translation (across media, languages, genres, and continents) codified
and reinforced not only the need for salvage folkloristics but also the ideologies
attending colonialism and imperialism.
Naithani’s critical insistence on the agency, silences, and work of Indian story-
tellers and the folklorists’ “native assistants”—the practices that colonial folklorists’
consistently elided or underplayed in their narratives—tells a decolonizing story
that honors the knowledge, feelings, actions, and lives of humans who have mostly
been considered instrumental to the production of the “story-time of the British
empire.” Thus Naithani’s project calls for a relocation of knowledge in the present
from the perspective of local histories and of what Walter Mignolo calls “colonial
diffferences” in resistance and alternative to the “coloniality of power” (2002). This is
what my work on English-language colonial and anticolonial translations of Native
Hawaiian tales and histories at the turn of the twentieth century (Legendary Hawai‘i)
called for as well.11 Jill Rudy’s “American Folklore Scholarship, Tales of the North
American Indians, and Relational Communities” is another significant example of
such a call. And while starting from a place of colonial diffference to tell this story will
matter diffferently and with varying intensities to diffferent groups, I believe it is not
to exclude anyone in narrative studies, folkloristics, or folktale or fairy-tale studies.
If folktales and other wonder genres—and thus the knowledges and ways of
being in the world they articulate—have, via colonial processes of print publication
and translation that are structured by a politics of inequality, made “their way in the
world” quite often garbed as fairy tales or tales of magic, this awareness demands
that in folktale and fairy-tale studies specifically, we turn away from universalizing
or dichotomizing, taking on instead the situated and self-critical work that un-
derstanding “fairy-tale production and reception precisely as acts of translation,
transformation, and transcultural communication” (Haase 30) demands. That we
pay closer attention to the politics of translation as imperialist violence, then, is one
of my answers to the questions of how to train the next generation of scholars. But
the other side of this answer is that we at the same time foster, in S. Shankar’s words,
a “culture of translation”—that is, “a widely disseminated and rich understanding
of translation” (141) that recognizes not only the pitfalls of translation as violence
but also foregrounds the value of translation as interpretation and activism.12 Such
a focus in the study of fairy tales has been at work in recent discussions of Angela
Carter’s strategies as translator and adapter. Specifically, Mayako Murai argues that

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in Carter’s edited anthology, The Virago Book of Fairy Tales, “culturally divergent
voices” are “made more audible through translation” (118); and Martine Hennard
Dutheil de la Rochère’s Reading, Translating, Rewriting: Angela Carter’s Translational
Poetics provides an inspired reading of Carter’s oeuvre in light of “the profoundly
transformative nature of translation” (4) animating a contrapuntal “translation-re-
writing dynamic” (15).13
In a diffferent narrative-culture arena, the specifically decolonial and activist
potential of translation is a focus for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o—celebrated author of
Decolonising the Mind (1986) and many novels in English and in Gĩkũyũ that draw on
oral traditions from his native Kenya—as he advocates in a recent critical synthesis,
Globalectics, for translation as a two-way trafffic or “conversation among languages
and cultures” (1). Reminding us of how Aimé Césaire in Discourse on Colonialism
perceived “culture contact as oxygen” (2), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o underscores how,
within the framework of globalectics, translation is crucial because it can spread
decolonizing knowledge; for instance, when translating enables conversations
between marginalized or nonhegemonic languages and also when it provides
alternative cross-cultural connections in dominant or hegemonic languages that
contest the legacy of colonialism.14 Thinking of translation as both imperialist
and counterhegemonic practice within and across narrative cultures enables us
to become more responsible and response-able to the diversity of knowledge and
artistic systems of stories (King) across conceptual and cultural horizons.
Challenges and Opportunities: Reading Globalectically
While its author never refers to fairy tales or to specific folktales, I have found
Globalectics helpful in thinking about them “making their way in the world” and
in thinking about the scholarly tales we tell about them today.15 For one, Ngũgĩ
wa Thiong’o proposes his ideas as “poor theory,” which for him implies a “critique
of theory weighed down by ornaments” and seeks “to accord dignity to the poor
as they fight poverty, including . . . the poverty of theory” (Globalectics 2). Poor
theory names located, improvisational, experimental practices that embrace the
potential of limited resources in the spirit not only of survival, but of survivance.
Ngũgĩ does not state this in so many words, but fictional and belief stories are a
form of poor theory; as such, poor theory is quite familiar to storytellers, writers,
adapters, folklorists, and fairy-tale scholars too. In 1990, Angela Carter invited us to

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view folk and fairy tales, stories from the oral tradition, as poor theory that provides
“the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men
and women whose labour created our world” (ix). Sociohistorical approaches to
the genre have continued to develop this perspective, as Andrew Teverson synthe-
sizes in Fairy Tale. But in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s version of it, poor theory is further
mapped onto a politics of place and colonial diffference, and as such afffects how
we approach “the organization of literary space and its impact on the politics of
knowing” (Globalectics 7).
For this reorganization, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o invites us to think globalectically. I
quote: “Globalectics combines the global and the dialectical to describe a mutually
afffecting dialogue, or multi-logue, in the phenomena of nature and nurture in a
global space that’s rapidly transcending that of the artificially bounded, as nation
and region” (Globalectics 8). This is another way in which his tale about narrative
cultures speaks to how the fairy-tale web offfers a methodological alternative to
the problem of choosing between studying narratives in one national tradition
and theorizing globally. A decolonizing way of relating to the world in an era
of globalization, globalectics emerges specifically from Ngũgĩ’s experience of
postindependence at the University of Nairobi in the 1960s—and it “embraces . .
. interconnectedness, equality of potentiality of parts, tension and motion” as part
of Ngũgĩ’s “unrelenting interest in the aesthetics of decolonization” (8). Derived
from the shape of the globe, globalectics has no single or predetermined center.
Rather, it is enabled by and moves from the “here” of situated experiences, or as
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o put it in the discussion that closed the Words in the World
Symposium in Honolulu, on February 9, 2013, “I have to know where I am in order
to know where I am going.”
So thinking globalectically of how stories make their way in the world always
starts not in a preset or assumed “here,” but in a narrative culture that situates us, in
order to consider the tensions with “there”—especially more powerful, occupying
“theres”—and the movements to and back from “there,” in order to efffect mutual
change. For Ngũgĩ “here” is at times Kenya and the University of Nairobi of his youth,
at others the University of California–Irvine International Center for Writing and
Translation, a network of anticolonial performance practices as well as struggles,
and the aesthetics of decolonization. Just as each “here” relates to multiple “theres,”
“here” is not simple or easily accessible. For instance, whatever our position is in
a colonized or a postcolonial place where language, memory, and education were
turned against place-based ways of knowing, we know that “here” can be in no

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simple opposition to “there.” But starting from the “here” that was overwritten and
devalued is, then, all the more important.
To think globalectically of folk and fairy tales is to read the global circulation
of folktales as inseparable from the spread of colonialism and capitalism since
the sixteenth century and into the present, but also—and this is what I want to
emphasize now—to approach the place-specific consequences of that spread, in a
spirit of critical conversation and movement from and back to here, not insulation.
What “from here to there” in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s poor theory suggests to me is that
one cannot and should not escape the politics of relation, its interconnectedness
and tensions, the movement from the “here” of specific narrative and linguistic
traditions to their global circulation and the space they occupy in the hierarchical
systematization of narrative cultures and “world literature”—and then the move-
ment back to “here,” where they resignify in place. A specific pathway in folk and
fairy-tale studies that globalectics gives further credence to is to start, in colonized
and postcolonial locations, from and explore the understanding that colonizers’
narrative traditions will have been appropriated and creolized.
Reading globalectically, then, “should bring into mutual impact and compre-
hension the local and the global, the here and there, the national and the world”
(Globalectics 60). Specifically relevant to how to approach narrative cultures today
is Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s discussion of both obstacles to such a reading and know-how
to overcome them. One obstacle that I referred to earlier is the hierarchy of orature
and literature that informs not only the institutions of world literature but also our
general valuing of narratives—a “linguistic feudalism” whereby selected European
languages function as aristocracy (60–61) supports this hierarchy.16 As an alternative,
and in addition to the decolonizing powers of translation, Ngũgĩ foregrounds the
need for us to reconnect with the alliance of orature and literature, an alliance
that many indigenous and postcolonial fiction makers and scholars also enact.17
In order to unmake the hierarchy that, in valorizing a particular kind of literature,
has devalued orature, a globalectic approach takes into account the way art forms
in traditional practice are often interlinked (dance, poetry, theater, and more) and
does not confine the stories of the colonized to orality alone. Globalectics further
speaks to today’s convergence culture (Jenkins) where orality is mediated by writing
in cyberspace and where we are, as Ngũgĩ notes, experiencing the emergence of
“cyborature” (Globalectics 85). By studying the interconnectivity of oratures, liter-
atures, and cyboratures in ways that counter hierarchical ideologies and account
for the complexities of anticolonial aesthetics in a globalized world, globalectics

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is a networking approach, where old and new technologies as well as hegemonic

and counterhegemonic knowledge systems are not in harmony with one another,
but are approached in “a web of connections of mutual dependence” (77).
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o points to an afffinity with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s
“rhizome,” but also claims the distinctiveness of his network approach as rooted in
a diffferent narrative culture. For him, and he refers to how South African sculptor
and poet Pitika Ntuli put it in “Orature: A Self-Portrait,” reading globalectically is
grounded epistemologically in the understanding of orature as “the conception
and reality of a total view of life” (75); in a worldview of interconnectedness not
only of art forms, but of humans, nature, spirit.18 Just as Thomas King states that
the distinction of Native literatures lies in their ways of knowing the world and
connecting with it,19 for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o an “interactive mutuality between the
various realms of being” (Globalectics 76) informs the oratures of the world. In
the face of the disembodied networks of globalization to which capitalism and
consumer culture have habituated us, this cosmology and its narrative practices
construct networks of people and stories that take action in worldly matters of land
use, justice, education, sexuality, militarism, intellectual property, and economic
development (see Yamashiro and Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua). Significantly intervening in
a genre that glamorizes an individual-centered narrative of progress and hierarchy
in popular culture, some contemporary adaptations of fairy tales across media seek
to reconnect us to a world-making and knowledge system of interdependence.
Engaging with these stories globalectically may not only lead us to reexamine
established narratives and mappings of folk and fairy tales, but also to reevaluate
our own cultural paradigms and responsibilities more generally.
Reflecting on the narrative culture of folk and fairy tales today demands that
we pay attention to the politics of translation, we cultivate a culture of transla-
tion, and we learn to think globalectically, endeavoring to undermine the orature
and literature hierarchy that continues to sustain other forms of social inequality
today. I will not generalize from here to what working with other narrative cultures
demands. My hope in reaching from the situatedness of my own discipline out to
link with approaches to narrative culture that rest on postcolonial and indigenous
cosmologies is that my stories about stories foreground how much is at stake in
the politics of relation and in believing that “the truth about stories is that that’s
all we are.”

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Cristina Bacchilega teaches at the University of Hawai‘i–Mānoa. The coeditor of Marvels &
Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, she published essays in Marvelous Transformations: An
Anthology of Fairy Tales and Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2012), Channeling Wonder:
Fairy Tales on Television (2014), and The Cambridge Companion to the Fairy Tale (2015).
n notes
1. To mark the journal’s incipit, Regina Bendix and Ulrich Marzolph turned to
editorial board members, myself included, for contributions that would offfer “an
opportunity to formulate a vision of ‘narrative culture.’” They asked: “What is your
vision for the scope of the concept of narrative culture? What disciplinary and
interdisciplinarity opportunities are entailed in it? What kind of challenges would
you like to see taken up in future research?” I thank the editors for the opportunity
to reflect publicly on these questions. I presented parts of this essay at the
American Folklore Society meeting in 2013 and then, thanks to support from the
SSHRC grant, “Fairy Tale Culture and Media Today,” at the University of Winnipeg
in 2014.
2. I am working with Stuart Hall’s approach to representation. For an extensive
and accessible discussion of it, see Representation: Cultural Representations and
Signifying Practices (2nd edition), edited by Stuart Hall, Jessica Evans, and Sean
Nixon (London: Sage, 2013).
3. Within Euro-American theories, this take on culture and narrative culture emerges
from semiotics’ “cultural turn” and some strands of cultural studies, at least this is
how I have experienced it in the course of my studies of literature, folklore, and
popular culture from the 1970s on. But the concern with the relationship between
power and story is grounded in much older “traditional” practices in varied
locations.
4. The Hawaiian word that is often translated as sovereignty is ea and, as political
scientist Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua and Hawaiian language scholar Leilani
Basham explain, it holds multiple meanings. “Ea refers to political independence
and is often translated as ‘sovereignty.’ It also carries the meanings ‘life’ and
‘breath,’ among other things. A shared characteristic in each of these translations
is that ea is an active state of being. Like breathing, ea cannot be achieved or
possessed; it requires constant action day after day, generation after generation”
(Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, Hussey, and Wright 3–4). Since “ea is based on the experiences
of people on the land, relationships forged through the process of remembering

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and caring for wahi pana, storied places” (4), it follows that ea is political
sovereignty and “the environment that sustains life for creatures such as fish or
humans. . . . In that sense, ea refers to the mutual interdependence of all life forms
and forces” (5).
5. While scholars of folk narrative often focus on communities as “celebrated
bounded niches,” Charles Briggs and Sadhana Naithani suggest folklorists could
explore more “how boundaries are formed through conflict, appropriation
and erasure” (262), and Dorothy Noyes argues for conceptualizing diffferential
identities and networks, and focusing on how “one of the most important uses of
local tradition [is] the collective negotiation of intracommunity conflict” (28).
6. In the chapter “Dominant, Residual, and Emergent,” Raymond Williams
activates the profoundly dynamic Gramscian understanding of hegemony by
diffferentiating between “residual” and “archaic” as well as “emergent” and “novel,”
and by pointing out how diffficult it is to understand what makes a newly created
practice “substantially alternative or oppositional to [dominant culture]” (123).
Significantly, for those of us working with traditional or folk narratives, the
residual “has been formed in the past, but is . . . an efffective element in the present”
(122), allowing to reach back to meanings and values that the hegemonic culture
“neglects, undervalues, opposes, represses, or even cannot recognize” (124). It is
of course important to think about these dynamics not only temporally but also
spatially or geopolitically.
7. Commenting on two types of “situated myth” and “situated fantasy” in
contemporary North American literature inspired by Ursula Le Guin, Brian
Attebery writes, “One employs sciencefictional and metafictional techniques to
create multiple perspectives; the other brings diffferent ways of seeing into the plot,
drawing on traditional motifs from fairy tale and legend, such as the enchanted
eye” (192). To connect the situated stories of science and science fiction with
myth and fantasy, Attebery draws on Donna Haraway’s discussion of “situated
knowledges” much more explicitly and fully than I do.
8. Most of this paragraph and of the next two draw on my book’s preface (ix–x),
introduction (especially 20–21), and epilogue (195–96).
9. A qualification: Said’s focus is on “texts,” not stories. But he does refer to them
as “events,” foregrounding their intervention in discourses and their interplay
of speech and textuality. In his discussion of “worldliness,” Radhakrishnan
emphasizes that by insisting on texts’ worldliness, Said was “also advancing the
thesis that they have a savoir faire, that ‘they make their way in the world.’ In other

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words, works of art and literature are not marooned in some never-never land of
idealism” (151).
10. Like Naithani, I find Walter Mignolo’s focus on coloniality—as discursive building
block for colonialism and capitalism—helpful (“Geopolitics of Knowledge and the
Colonial Diffference”).
11. Naithani’s and my work, however, depend on and point to significant place-based
critical variables. I write from my position as a settler in Hawai‘i, still an occupied
nation, and the extremely high percentage of literacy within the kingdom
of Hawai‘i that ensued from the introduction of writing in 1820 necessitated
extraordinary amounts of willful ignorance on the part of settlers collecting and
translating Hawaiian stories they insisted were disappearing and purely oral
traditions (Lyons; Nogelmeier).
In diffferent disciplinary contexts and with diffferent stories in focus, I have found
the work by Lee Haring on storytelling in Mauritius and by Marina Warner on
European fairy tales and more recently The Thousand and One Nights inspirational.
12. In translation studies, Maria Tymoczco asks questions that I also apply to
adaptations:
What cultural, ideological, and social changes in target cultures are promoted
by specific translation movements and specific translators? What is resisted and
opposed in any particular translation? . . . To whom are translators committed and
with whom do they engage? . . . What range of activist translation strategies can be
discerned? . . . What limitations are there to activist translations? (19)
Tymoczco’s work has been pivotal to situating translators’ social and artistic
engagement, thus moving away from Lawrence Venuti’s model that more generally
valorizes “foreignizing” translations over “domesticating” ones.
In the specific context of translating from Hawaiian into English, Bryan Kamaoli
Kuwada has argued translators are activists by virtue of making mo‘olelo, Hawaiian
histories and traditional stories, more accessible to Hawaiians—especially the
older generation that most sufffered from the suppression of the language. A
scholar of translation and a translator himself, Kuwada has also written about a
nineteenth-century Hawaiian translation of “Bluebeard.”
13. I was quite taken by Valdimar Hafstein’s recent idea of a “republic of editors”
in response to his question, “Could we model a new understanding of creative
agency on the figure of the folklorist?” Hafstein proposes that everyone—“the

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rapper, the storyteller, the singer, the author, the programmer, the poet, the
mash-upping contributor to YouTube, the guy cracking jokes at the offfice party,
the student writing a Facebook status in class”—engages in the activities of
“faithful reproduction or scholarly reconstruction” and “creative elaboration,”
which characterized the teamwork of the Grimm Brothers and other collectors
and editors. “Faithful reproduction” and “creative elaboration,” both as ideals
and practices, of course, characterize the work of translation. So I offfer a friendly
amendment to Hafstein’s “immodest proposal” (36–37): as (meta)storytellers aren’t
we all a “republic of translators and editors”?
14. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s example in his presentation as part of the “Translation(s)”
panel at the Words in the World symposium (Honolulu, February 7–9, 2013) was
his participation in a translation project initiated in Mauritius to commemorate
Mauritian independence: the translation of one poem from Mauritian Creole
into many marginalized languages. Ngũgĩ translated the poem into Kĩkũyũ. While
Ngũgĩ’s and other translators’ participation in this experiment was enabled by
their using an English-language translation of the poem, “Little Paper Boat,” their
goal was to converse among themselves, circulating and adding to the hope for
multilingual decentering.
15. The final chapter of Globalectics, “The Oral Native and the Writing Master:
Orature, Orality, and Cyborality,” expands a 2007 paper on performance theory of
orature and discusses the interlinked genres of “riddle, proverb, story, song, poetry,
drama, dance, and myth” (77). For diffferent examples of contemporary creative
mixes of orature, DVD/CD, and print in Oceania that promote decolonizing
connectivity, see Down on the Sidewalk in Waikiki with songs and poems by Wayne
Kaumualii Westlake (1947–84) and Nights of Storytelling: A Cultural History of
Kanaky–New Caledonia.
16. Introduced by the Ugandan linguist Pio Zirimu, orature is conceived as an
alternative to the oxymoron of oral literature, as an aesthetic practice in parallel
with literature, just as the technology of orality is connected with that of
writing. What a globalectic reading of “orate” and “literate” assumes is that they
are “connected by the word; they [have] their adequacies and inadequacies as
representations of thought and experience. Writing and orality are natural allies,
not antagonists; so also orature and literature” (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Globalectics 72).
17. To approach Native Hawaiian narrative culture, for instance, “Mo‘olelo . . . is a
more culturally appropriate designation to interpret and analyze literature as it
incorporates both history and story, oral traditions and literature, intertwining

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these disciplines in ways that are impossible to unravel, and reference to history,
oratory, or literature as separate practices is inadequate” (ho‘omanawanui xxxvii).
18. This is how globalectics connects with Gayatri Spivak’s “planetarity,” again
without coinciding with it. While Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s examples are from Africa
as well as from Homer, Ovid, and Indian epics, Oceanic older and present-day
oratures and literatures also enact this cosmology of interdependence (Hau‘ofa;
ho‘omanawanui).
19. “The magic of Native literature—as with other literatures—is not in the themes of
the stories—identity, isolation, loss, ceremony, community, maturation, home—it
is in the way meaning is refracted by cosmology, the way understanding is shaped
by cultural paradigms” (King 112).
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Narrative Cultures, Situated Story Webs, and the Politics of Relation

Author(s): Cristina Bacchilega

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Narrative Cultures, Situated Story

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Scholars of folk narrative have long operated on a complex understanding that

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narrative culture and narrative cultures as situated practices in relation to one

What (I Think) I Do, or Why I Approach Adaptations in a Worldly

In the Department of English at the University of Hawai‘i–Mānoa, I teach courses

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globalized consumer popular culture. I say “potentially” transformative because the

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Challenges and Opportunities: Fostering a Culture of Translation

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Challenges and Opportunities: Reading Globalectically

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is a networking approach, where old and new technologies as well as hegemonic

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Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2014.

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Murai, Mayako. “Voicing Authenticities through Translation: Framing Strategies in the

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Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.

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