5.2. Counter-Storytelling

Critical Race Theorist Richard Delgado was one of the first to write about counter-storytelling in ‘Storytelling for Oppositionists and Others: A Plea for Narrative’ (1989). He explains how shared stories bring strength and cohesion to racially marginalised ‘out-groups’ and provide counter-realities to the unquestioned, naturalised stories of dominant ‘in-groups’, suggesting an in/out-group and master/counter-narrative binary. He explains how ‘stories, parables, chronicles, and narratives are powerful means for destroying mindset... ideology... the received wisdom’ that ‘makes current social arrangements seem fair and natural’ and how counter-stories ‘can shatter complacency and challenge the status quo’ (p.2413-2414). 

Delgado also describes the ‘community-building functions’ of counter-stories, how they ‘build consensus, a common culture of shared understandings’ and ‘open new windows into reality’ (p.2414), a point I build on in the next section. He highlights the ‘graphic quality’ of counter-stories, which can ‘stir imagination in ways in which more conventional discourse cannot’ and their ‘destructive function’ and ability to show us ‘the way out of the trap of unjustified exclusion’. And he explains how effective counter-stories are ‘noncoercive’, ‘insinuative’ but ‘not frontal’ (p.2415), situating this within a social constructivist paradigm, in which ‘narrative habits, patterns of seeing, shape what we see and that to which aspire’ (p.2417).

In zine 1 (2018), there is an illustration of two hands holding a sheet of paper containing a checklist including: ‘ethnic minority, female, low socioeconomic background, state school, contextual offer, intellegence’. The last word is intentionally misspelt and is the only box left unticked. The piece is titled ‘Did I Just Get In Because I Am Brown?’ and in the text beneath, the student illustrator Yasmeen Thantrey, tells their story of gaining a place at university and then being told this was only for the university to ‘tick a box’ and ‘fill a quota’ (2018, p.3). Thantrey reflects on how this affected them, adding to the racism they face every day and making them question their place at the university. This is an example of counter-storytelling that is insinuative and somewhat frontal, as it accuses the university of compromising standards to fill diversity quotas.

Equally insinuative but less frontal counter-storytelling is exemplified by DWN members editing Wikipedia pages. One example of this is by Alex Goodall, who added information about the activism of African American Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson, co-founder of the Dance Liberation Network, to the Wikipedia page on the repeal of the New York City Cabaret Law. Another example is by me and Lydia Wilks, in our editing of the 1911 Festival of Empire Wikipedia page. These Wikipedia edits were not overtly frontal or in combative opposition to the dominant narrative. Instead, they evolved the dominant narrative by adding more information, representative of the histories and perspectives of racially marginalised people – the ‘pluriversal imagination’ (Escobar in Ortiz, 2023). 

To highlight how marginalised perspectives can evolve or alter a story, Delgado offers different accounts related to one scenario within a US Law school. He describes one person’s account as ‘an authentic counter-story’ as it ‘directly challenges – both in its words and tone – the corporate story’ told by the Law school, rejecting the premise of the institution’s defence and mocking their self-conception of meritocracy. He describes how this counter-story ‘deviates stylistically... rebels against the “reasonable discourse” of law’, and is angry, an emotion discouraged in legal discourse. He claims that this counter-story was ineffective in that it ‘overwhelmed the audience’, with a call to action they were not ready for and an institutional attack that was too ‘frontal’ (p.2430), causing the counter-storyteller to be dismissed as a ‘hothead’ and ‘bad actor’ (p.2431). He offers another counter-story that does not attack people of the institution, but instead seeks to debunk the mindset of institutions. He describes this story as similarly oppositional and insinuative but with a ‘degree of explanatory power’, told in a way that prompts majority in-group (white) readers to jump between their own world and the storyteller’s world and to consider whether the two worlds can be reconciled (p.2435), creating the possibility for interests to converge and for the dominant narrative to be co-developed.

An example counter-story with explanatory power can be found in ‘Changemakers Talk: Decolonising the Curriculum London x Sao Paulo’ (February 2022), when Kledir Salgado, Senac Professor in Fashion Design, shares his experience as part of the first generation of Black people in his family with access to education, with no black teachers or classmates. He talks about how he, as a student and now Black designer, activist and professor, along with other students and professionals, have influenced the development of anti-racism and decolonial fashion educational practices at Senac and cites Foucault (1969) on how:

“Every education system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and powers it carries with it”.

Salgado emphasises the legal and public duty to promote anti-racist education in Brazil and the importance of talking, sharing and listening to the life stories and ancestries of Black and indigenous students.

This resonates with Delgado, who looks at the historical traditions of storytelling for oppressed groups, including African, Mexican and Native American communities. Delgado explains how:

‘This proliferation of counterstories is not an accident or coincidence. Oppressed groups have known instinctively that stories are an essential tool to their own survival and liberation. Members of out-groups can use stories in two basic ways: first, as means of psychic self-preservation; and, second, as means of lessening their own subordination’ (p.2436).

Storytellers and listeners gain from this differently, he explains: ‘The storyteller gains psychically, the listener morally and epistemologically’ (p.2437), akin to the bodily, onto-epistemologies of decolonial praxis mentioned previously. In this thesis, I pay attention to the counter-storytelling of the racially minoritised, out-group project participants, including myself. I have not collected evidence to understand the impact on the dominant, in-group listener; this is not what I seek to understand here. Instead, I am interested in the nature and value of the counter-story in the three projects, as a means of co-developing and/or challenging the dominant, colonial narratives of the arts curriculum.  

An example counter-story, which is both frontal and insinuative and prompts readers to jump between in/out-group worlds, can be found in zine 1 poem ‘Complicity’ by student Rayvenn Shaleigha D’Clark (2018, p.6). The poem addresses a white person and speaks to them about their quietness and lack of caring, their privileged, comfortable bubble existence in the haze of ‘white, western, academia’ that insulates them from threat. D’Clark expresses their jealousy at how this person avoids the negativity of real life and ignores the problem of others. D’Clark exclaim they have no choice but to cry, worry, fight ‘against an inherently racist, prejudice system which continues... to hurt us’ (2018, p.6). They state to the white reader that it is time to recognise their complicity.  

Adewumi and Mitton’s work on diversifying curricula promotes counter-storytelling to shed ‘light on the dominant ideology of whiteness that perpetuates racial stereotypes’ and highlight the ‘unique narratives of people of colour’ (2022, p.58). Meanwhile, Doharty et al (2021) write ‘critical race counter-stories from faculty of colour in ‘decolonial’ times’ and explain how counter-storytelling offers ‘humanising’ narratives of ‘the lived realities behind the grim statistics of under-representation’, as part of a call for curricula to centre the stories of colonised peoples. In ‘Counter-Storytelling as an Analytical Framework for Education Research’ (2002), Solorzano and Yosso explain how such methods expose ‘deficit-informed research that silences and distorts epistemologies of people of color’ and recognise that ‘the experiential knowledge of people of color is legitimate, appropriate, and critical to understanding, analyzing, and teaching about racial subordination’ (p.26). They explain how victims of racism gain strength through counter-storytelling when the endemic, invisible and unquestioned 'ideology of racism is examined and racist injuries are named’. They also explain how counter-storytellers:

‘...become empowered participants, hearing their own stories and the stories of others, listening to how the arguments against them are framed, and learning to make the arguments to defend themselves’ (p.27).

In this way, counter-stories expose and challenge the in-group master narrative that ‘essentializes and wipes out the complexities and richness of a group’s cultural life’. Such ‘monovocal’ accounts not only engender stereotyping, they write, ‘but also curricular choices that result in representations in which fellow members of a group represented cannot recognize themselves’ (p.27). This speaks to intention of the decolonisation projects reflected upon here, which in different ways expose and challenge the implicit racial bias of the HE curriculum and experience. 

Delgado explains how counter-stories challenge the ‘stock explanations’ that dominant in-groups rely on to justify privilege, which are ‘drastically at odds with the way most people of color would describe their condition’, and attack complacency towards redress and reform (1989, p.2438). He describes counter-stories as an ‘effective means of overcoming otherness, of forming a new collectivity based on the shared story’ (p.2438). The projects reflected upon here, facilitated counter-storytelling as part of an institutional commitment to listen to racially minoritised individuals and learn from their/our lived experience. This resonates with Delgado’s point about how ‘deliberately exposing oneself to counterstories can... enable the listener and teller to build a world richer than either could make alone’ and how institutions who listen to counter-stories ‘can overcome ethnocentrism and the unthinking conviction that our way of seeing the world is the only one’ (p.2439). The fact that one project prompted the funding and establishment of the next, suggests that UAL, at the time of sponsoring the projects, shared Delgado’s belief that listening to counter-stories enables institutions to see the world differently (p.2439) and ‘avoid intellectual apartheid... sameness, stiffness, and monochromaticity’ (p.2440), characteristics we might expect art schools to avoid.

Characteristics of counter-storytelling we might expect art schools to embrace and produce are imagination, emotion and graphic detail. Delgado explains how ‘telling stories invests text with feeling, gives voice to those who were taught to hide their emotions’ and how ‘hearing stories invites hearers to participate, challenging their assumptions, jarring their complacency, lifting their spirits, lowering their defenses’ in ways that formal legal and academic accounts do not (1989, p.2440). Solorzano and Yosso highlight examples of counter-storytelling with ‘varying emotions, even in traditional academic style texts’, and poetic and short story forms that help convey emotion and the ‘pained yet triumphant voices of experience’. They describe counter-storytelling as ‘a complex process that is experiential, intuitive, historical, personal, collective, and dynamic’ (2002, p.34) that address the question of “Whose stories are privileged in educational contexts and whose stories are distorted and silenced?” (p.37). Project 1: Zine 1 was collective, dynamic and attempted to avoid distortion and silencing by showcasing stories without editing and peer-review. Project 2: Changemakers operated in an experiential and intuitive way to support students to contribute experiences and examples of marginalisation to course development processes. While Project 3: Decolonising Wikipedia Network empowered people to address distorted and silenced (hi)stories through editing Wikipedia articles.

The ‘richness of a group’s cultural life’ (Solorzano and Yosso, 2002, p.27) is exemplified in a way that stirs the imagination by E Okobi in zine 1. She tells the story of studying blues music in an American Literature class in Arizona, influenced by debates going on about the use of African American Vernacular English (AAVE). She reflects on the cultural appropriation of blues and gospel melisma, ‘or the Vocal Run... instantly recognizable when heard, and inextricably linked with Black music’ and explains how:

‘...there is history, mystery and pain in that wait, and like much of Black culture, it seems only palatable to the wider world when detached from its deeper significance -- or indeed from descendants of the black and brown bodies who first produced and perfected it’ (Okobi, 2018, p.24).

Next to this are the lyrics to a song starting ‘Someday soon / We gonna / Get out free-ee-dom' which E sang at the Camberwell (December 2018) and Chelsea (January 2019) zine 1 events, using her body and voice to demonstrate melisma.  

Other examples of ‘the richness of cultural life’ can be found in the 1911 Festival of Empire Project Roundtable (May 2021). UAL Professor Jane Collins presents ‘Staging the Empire: Scale and the Performance of Power’, a photo illustrated presentation in which she interprets the festival from the perspective of the 1911 British audience, considering their varied social conditions and cultural positions. Wendy Cummins speaks as Director of the Radiate Windrush Festival, an event held on the same site as the 1911 Festival. Cummins talks about the purpose of the Radiate Festival in marking the date the Windrush generation arrived, responding to propaganda calls to people in the colonies to come and ‘rebuild Mother England’. She tells the story of her grandparents and great grandparents arriving, expecting the streets to be paved with gold due to the propaganda they were exposed to. She speaks about growing up around Crystal Palace, wanting to create an event there to represent and celebrate her community and culture. She describes how she made this happen by ‘normalising taking up space’ by young black people to counter the public fear of this inspired by popular media, and how this involved ‘empowering and enabling groups to represent their own narratives, using their own voices and culture’. In the next section I examine these community building aspects of counter-storytelling in more depth.