In this groundbreaking book, Eric Selbin argues that we need to look beyond the economic, political and social structural conditions to the thoughts and feelings of the people who make revolutions. In particular, he argues, we need to understand the stories people relay and rework of past injustices and struggles as they struggle in the present towards a better future. Ranging from the French Revolution to the Battle for Seattle, via Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam and Nicaragua, Selbin makes the case that it is myth, memory and mimesis which create, maintain and extend such stories.
Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance identifies four kinds of enduring revolutionary story - Civilizing and Democratizing, The Social Revolution, Freedom and Liberation and The Lost and Forgotten - which do more than report on events, they catalyse changing the world.
In this groundbreaking book, Eric Selbin argues that we need to look beyond the economic, political and social structural conditions to the thoughts and feelings of the people who make revolutions. In particular, he argues, we need to understand the stories people relay and rework of past injustices and struggles as they struggle in the present towards a better future. Ranging from the French Revolution to the Battle for Seattle, via Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam and Nicaragua, Selbin makes the case that it is myth, memory and mimesis which create, maintain and extend such stories.
Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance identifies four kinds of enduring revolutionary story - Civilizing and Democratizing, The Social Revolution, Freedom and Liberation and The Lost and Forgotten - which do more than report on events, they catalyse changing the world.
Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance: The Power of Story
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Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance: The Power of Story
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Overview
In this groundbreaking book, Eric Selbin argues that we need to look beyond the economic, political and social structural conditions to the thoughts and feelings of the people who make revolutions. In particular, he argues, we need to understand the stories people relay and rework of past injustices and struggles as they struggle in the present towards a better future. Ranging from the French Revolution to the Battle for Seattle, via Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam and Nicaragua, Selbin makes the case that it is myth, memory and mimesis which create, maintain and extend such stories.
Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance identifies four kinds of enduring revolutionary story - Civilizing and Democratizing, The Social Revolution, Freedom and Liberation and The Lost and Forgotten - which do more than report on events, they catalyse changing the world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781848137738 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 04/04/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 407 KB |
About the Author
Eric Selbin is Professor and Chair of Political Science at Southwestern University and a University Scholar. His books include Modern Latin American Revolutions and Understanding Revolutions (with John Foran and Jack Goldstone). He is currently completing Doing International Relations from the Margins with Meghana Nayak. In 2007 he was selected as one of Southwestern's all-time 'Fav Five' Faculty and received an Exemplary Teaching Award in 2001-2002.
Read an Excerpt
Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance
The Power of Story
By Eric Selbin
Zed Books Ltd
Copyright © 2010 Eric SelbinAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84813-536-9
CHAPTER 1
A prolegomenon, an apologia, and an overture
A no doubt apocryphal story, which is commonly taken to signify the end of the old and the beginning of the new, tells that on being told of the fall of the Bastille by his adviser the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, King Louis XVI of France asked 'C'est une révolte?', to which the clear-eyed and perceptive Duke replied, 'Non, Sire, c'est une révolution' (Cumberlege, 1953: 407). This is the most famous instance of the Duke's rather remarkable prescience, though it merits note that over the years even such a redoubtable repository of 'fact' as the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations has been unable to resist improving the story a little. Thus, in the fourth edition, almost forty years later, the King, perhaps feeling the weight of history and his sensibilities prompted by the Revolution's recent bicentennial, now asks 'C'est une grande révolte?'; the Duke, now a 'French social reformer,' assures his liege that these events are no mere revolt but, indeed, 'une grande révolution' (Parrington, 1992: 411; emphases added). Mindful, perhaps, of his own aphorism that 'there is a kind of revolution of so general character that it changes the tastes as well as the fortunes of the world' (La Rochefoucauld, 1896: 143), the Duke drew such a distinction and, presumably in somber and sonorous tones, portentously pronounced the fall of the Bastille 'une révolution.' C'est vrai – and most modern notions of revolution remain deeply in his debt.
Here is a more recent story, really little more than a vignette, and doubtless also apocryphal. A student studying in Mexico City attended an organizing meeting where a speaker sought to communicate the commitment to struggle with a story. A reporter asked the late Comandante Ramona of Mexico's Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN), who was leaving a meeting with Mexican officials, how long the Zapatistas were prepared to fight. The diminutive woman shrugged her shoulders and replied to the effect that, since they had been struggling for some five hundred years, if they had to struggle for another five hundred years, then it was really no big deal. Is the story true? It calls to mind Steffens's comment about a purported exchange between British Prime Minister Lloyd George and Italy's Duce, Mussolini: 'Authentic? I don't know ... Like so many rumors, it was truer than the records ... but somebody said it, somebody who understood what it was all about' (1931: 809). What this story conveys is that their struggle, the struggle, was operating according to another timetable in a whole different realm.
During the Renaissance in what would become Italy, Burckhardt relates, a town thought to be Siena had a particularly brave and talented military leader who 'freed them from foreign aggression.' Anxious to reward their hero and desiring to be as generous as possible, the townspeople met daily to consider a reward appropriate enough for this great man. Having determined that even making him 'lord of the city' would not be sufficient, they decided to kill him so they could '"worship him as our patron saint". And so they did, following the example set by the Roman Senate with Romulus.' What is of note here, according to Burckhardt, is that it is 'an old story – one of those which are true and not true, everywhere and no where' (Burckhardt, 1958: 40). That is, there are times when the greater or deeper truth might be arrived at whether or not the story faithfully captures 'what really happened.'
These brief stories are different and distant, varying in scope and scale, tone and tenor, intensity and subtlety. All can be condensed to little more a critical essence, meant to capture a larger meaning and transmit a message, albeit not always the one intended: that is, what becomes of the story as it is heard and understood is beyond the control of the storyteller. Such stories define a moment that does not end, suggest that there are concepts and matters that transcend time, and remind us that, in the end, if we have nothing else, we have our stories and hence each other to rely on.
What's the story?
If 'Once upon a time' are magical words for a child of any age, initiating a sequence with which they are broadly familiar, it is because the story they introduce is in some small way an elucidation of who, what, why, when, where, and how we were, are, and will be. Sometimes such stories are little more than descriptions of the details of daily life, deployed to share with others or perhaps simply our self what constitutes the material and ideological conditions of our everyday lives. But often we use them not just to narrate our lives – and narration and story are not identical – but to tell, to share news, information and much more: to guide, to warn, to inspire, to make real and possible that which may well be unreal and impossible. Stories allow us to imagine the transformation of our lives and our world.
The transformation of the material and ideological conditions of our everyday lives, not to mention the grander ways of the world that often seem well beyond our province, is often framed in terms of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. And it is revolution in particular that captures what we mean, what we seek when we speak of transformation. While definitions and explorations of revolution come and go, decades of social science research have done little to bring us closer to understanding why revolutions happen here and not there, now and not then, among these people and not those. The proposition here is that the crucial factor in explaining how and why revolution persists is the stories of revolution, rebellion, and resistance we tell. In particular, by using the concepts of myth, memory, and mimesis, it is possible to identify and illuminate four basic stories of revolution which show up in a surprising number of places and cultures across impressive stretches of time. These are not the only stories of revolution and something is doubtless lost in the effort to group them as such. Nevertheless there is much to be gained in recognizing what such stories tell us about who we are and how we behave, what we are willing to do and in what circumstances.
It is thus necessary to encourage the systematic return of stories to social science methodology, to argue for the powerful and pervasive roles of myth, memory, and mimesis, and to identify the basic stories which fundamentally undergird people's conscious efforts of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Central to this is recognition of the myth and memory of revolution and of the power of mimesis for the mobilization and sustenance of revolutionary activity. These are reflected in four basic stories of revolution which are legible, enduring tales that speak to the human condition, stories that exist not 'simply' to report on that condition but as catalysts for changing it. The contention here is that both to deepen our understanding of revolution and to maintain the utility of such a concept, we need a new approach that focuses on the thoughts and feelings of the people engaged in the revolutionary process, a perspective that seeks to tie the stories they relay (and perpetually rework) of past injustices and struggles to the struggle for a better future.
These four stories are the Civilizing and Democratizing story of revolution, the Social Revolution story, the Freedom and Liberation story, and the Lost and Forgotten story. Each represents an attempt to pull together disparate strands which nonetheless have enough in common to be usefully read as one way in which people seek to make sense of the past, explain the present, and envision and enable a future. These amalgamations are not meant to be ideal types and no one revolutionary situation or process fits any one of them; many revolutionary processes find themselves in several stories, depending on who is telling the story, where and when, and to whom. What is imperative, as I have argued elsewhere (Selbin, 2003: 84), is that along with the material and structural conditions which have guided our investigations of popular resistance, rebellion, and revolution, we must find a place for the role played by the stories (and narratives) that have animated and emboldened generations of revolutionaries across time and cultures.
The return of story to social science's exploration of fundamental human actions such as resistance, rebellion, and revolution seems overdue; hence the time might be ripe for a 'storied turn' in the discipline. The rejection during much of the twentieth century of neat narratives and palliating stories in the search for greater understanding, admirable enough in principle, opened up a distance from people's actual lives. In consequence, in the late industrial/postindustrial age, story and storytelling have been enjoying a renaissance of sorts, perhaps spurred by new technologies that simultaneously allow more people to tell stories than ever before and address the ancient human need for connection, to each other and to ourselves.
The return of stories
Scholars as diverse as Byatt (2001: 166), McNeill (2000: 9), and White (1984: 19–20), have challenged what might be read as modernist and post-modernist fixations with matters of consciousness and intentionality and sought to emphasize the human desire for stories. This is not to suggest that people 'simply' want description; stories are about far more than that. For they can open up for us people's attitudes and assessments, their conceptions of how the world works and why, as well as their sense of power and possibility.
This and much more is on display in work such as Polletta's compelling It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (2006), Tilly's delightfully challenging jeremiad 'The Trouble with Stories' (2002) or engaging Why? (2007), Smith's insightful Stories of Peoplehood (2003) and edited volumes such as Berger and Quinney's Storytelling Sociology: Narrative as Social Inquiry (2005a) or Davis's Stories of Change: Narrative and Social Movements (2002a). Whatever their differences, these works call for an examination of the rich resources represented by stories even as they are chary of their use and aware of their complexity and limitations. They help lay the groundwork for much of what follows here.
There has also been some attention, albeit limited, within the study of revolution. For example, historians such as Sewell (2005) and Furet (1981) and his associates, most notably Ozouf (1991) and Baker (1990), have to varying degrees afforded a place to stories. Also, the leading scholars of revolution have not completely ignored story: Goldstone's superb Revolution and Rebellion in the Early Modern World (1991) devotes a chapter to some of the factors that constitute stories; Parker's provocative Revolutions and History: An Essay in Interpretation (1999) makes a persuasive case for the place of narrative; and story and narrative are among the impressive array of factors that Foran marshals in his magisterial effort to cumulate the very latest on matters revolutionary, Taking Power: On the Origins of Third World Revolutions (2005). Less explicitly, recent work by Holloway (2002) and Khasnabish (2007) also stresses the importance of the articulation of compelling narratives and stories in any meaningful effort at change.
Several suppositions are central to this endeavor. Chief among them is that people are storytellers and that the stories we tell define us as people (a people or even the people); we create, understand, and manage the world through the stories we tell. If it is our biology that makes us human, it is our stories that define us as people; in particular the common and simple stories that manage to seem both 'universal' and 'timeless,' even as we conjure them as particular to our specific circumstances, stories that are surprisingly pervasive, evoking the past and our predecessors even as we conjure them in the service of the present and with an eye to the future. The proposition here is that who and what we are are inseparable from the stories we tell. That is, in the end, stories are everything; and everything, in some form or another, is a story.
Our stories are arranged and deployed for as many purposes as we can imagine, and for others we may not yet have discerned. They are the way we explain the world to ourselves as it is and how we hope it will be. Stories may be our most enduring evidence for many of the beliefs and values that matter most to us; a critical piece of the puzzle without which any answer is incomplete.
Scientists purportedly do not pose hypotheses to which they already have the answers – though I think a far more accurate rendition of scientific enterprise would acknowledge the reputed lawyer's verity that one never asks a question to which one doesn't already know the answer. The answer proposed here is but one among many. For answers, of varying quality and degrees of satisfaction, seem to come and go; it is the questions that remain. This work is driven by the questions that lead so many to the study of revolutions: why do revolutions happen here and not there, now and not then, among these people and not those? It is the articulation of compelling stories, as will be explored at length in the pages to come, that allows people to deploy them in ways which resonate with others and empower them to seek to change the material and ideological conditions of their everyday lives. The proposition is that through in-depth interviewing and the collection of instruments of popular culture such as folk tales, songs, plays, televisions shows, and so on, it may be possible to ascertain the extent to which the collective of resistance, rebellion, and revolution is possible in any given society and time.
What is to be done? Bringing story back in
In the early days of the social sciences, there were two major projects. One was the post-World War II effort to distinguish the social sciences and escape the thrall of 'great men,' epic empires, and the myths and fables attendant to both. The other reflected the increasing sway of Northern/Western liberal bourgeois conceptions in which the basic unit of analysis was the atomistic individual. As a result, it was deemed necessary to divvy up our understanding of the world into discrete and manageable packages, framing social (sociology), political (political science), economic (economics), psychological (psychology), and even cultural (anthropology) matters atomistically as well. Story was the first casualty, relegated to the margins and regarded warily with distrust. Three brief comments are warranted here.
First, 'History' is the term commonly used to label our knowledge reservoir; once it was lore, stories, tales. While History has traditionally told stories of fact mixed with fiction, in the flush of the Enlightenment and, particularly, nineteenth-century rationalism, this was suddenly viewed with horror. Much was invested in the notion that historians were craftsmen (not a gender-neutral term) who dealt only with 'facts.' While storytellers were free to invent at their pleasure, historians were bound to the Truth, a conviction subsequently picked up in the pursuit of 'science' that has dominated the social sciences to this day (Selbin, 2008: 132). We need not only the skills of modern scholarship but also the traditional tool of scholars, as well as of revolutionaries, rebels, and resisters: namely, powerful and purposive stories.
Second, those of us trained and/or living in the Northern/Western outposts have an inordinate amount invested in the notion that there are those things we designate as fact and those we denote as fiction. Stories are presumed to be largely the province of fiction. Yet the separation of the myriad stories we tell into fact and fiction is a relatively modern conceit, with the former seen as useful and important and the latter derided as entertainment or fluff, and certainly not a trustworthy guide to anything of import. Yet it is often in story that greater truths or hidden histories are revealed and made accessible.
Matters have finally begun to shift. The at times grudging recognition since the 1950s that perhaps 'native' informants had something useful to tell us began a process that has most recently been represented by the rehabilitation of Herodotus (Strassler, 2007; Romm, 1998; Thompson, 1996). Herodotus, though renowned as 'the Father of History,' was also long regarded as a fabulist and condemned for his 'lies,' but there is a growing sense that the baby may have been thrown out with the bathwater and therefore increasing appreciation for what he had to tell us. For now, it is enough to note that whatever the attractiveness of binaries such as 'fact' and 'fiction,' they are of little use in answering the kinds of questions being posed here. This is not to suggest that we can invent facts. Hobsbawm, in his persuasive formulation, argues that 'either Elvis Presley is dead or he isn't. The question can be answered unambiguously on the basis of evidence, insofar as reliable evidence is available, which is sometimes the case. Either the present Turkish government, which denies the attempted genocide of the Armenians in 1915, is right or not' (1993: 63). Yet matters are rarely so simple, and neither at times are the questions.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Revolution, Rebellion, Resistance by Eric Selbin. Copyright © 2010 Eric Selbin. Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
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Table of Contents
1. A Prolegomenon, an Apologia, and an Overture2. The Case for Stories: Stories and Social Change
3. Myth, Memory, and Mimesis
4. 'The Uprising of the Anecdotes': The Four Stories of Revolution
5. The Story of Civilizing and Democratizing Revolutions