In Conversation with Yasmin Nair: Storytelling as a Formation of Neoliberal Personhood

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My brain, like a crumpled piece of clothing freshly delivered from the washing machine, emerged from Yasmin Nair’s The Politics of Storytelling tangled, chewed up and wrung out in all the wrong places. “I am here today to speak out against storytelling as a political strategy,” she announced, qualifying her position with, “stories help us to forget the systemic forms of exploitation and oppression that surround us and in which we are all implicated…[as well as] storytelling has become a substitute for political analysis, especially amongst those who consider themselves to be on the left, and especially amongst people of color.” Intrigued by her piece, I sought out other places where she expounded on her argument and happened upon an  interview she did with Michael Kinnucan of Hypocrite Reader (an internet magazine).

Nair reasons that storytelling, as it has been used in public discourse, disappears or masks political and economic realities in webs of personal anecdotes and interpersonal experiences of oppression that do not always explore the ways in which these individual accounts are situated within systems of power and histories of oppression. She analyzes narratives employed under logics of  neoliberal personhood, how they fixate so wholly on the personal and conceal structures, as well as how they create a “confessional subject” who is “authenticated by trauma,” who identifies him/herself solely as a site of trauma, and mobilizes intersectionality to claim multiple and compounded traumas as per the plurality of his/her identities. Along with that, she observes the ways storytelling has been deployed in this neoliberal age to cultivate a politics that homogenizes, constantly measures narratives against each other, as well as values and elevates certain stories of trauma while invalidating, or alienating others. She goes as far as to say “the personal is neoliberal,” rejecting the objectifying of bodies and personal narrative by using them to evoke emotion and generally as means to ends.

I am uncomfortable, however, with her assertion that all storytelling as theory is problematic and her diminutive description of it as mere neoliberal performance, a “putting up [of] these nice sad little brown bodies” for the public’s sympathy, as she puts it.  Not only that but her critique along with her social location in the ivory tower of academia resurfaced for me histories of marginalization of the personal narratives of oppressed people. Her argument is especially familiar to people of color who have long endured rebuke over their traditions of testimony and storytelling as social critique as anti-intellectual, non-evidentiary, rudimentary or emotionally manipulative simply because it is artistic and affective. This rhetoric has served to colonize and deny oppressed groups agency over their stories as well as over their chosen forms of political protest and expression.

E. Patrick Johnson best articulates my concerns with Nair’s critique in his piece, “Quare” Studies, or (almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from my Grandmother, from the book, Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. He takes issue with queer theorist John Champagne’s critique of an affective speech delivered by Essex Hemphill, a queer poet and activist:

If, as Gayatri Spivak has suggested, we might term the politics of an explanation the means by which it secures its particular mode of being in the world, the politics of Hemphill’s reading of Mapplethorpe might be described as the politics of tears, a politics that assures the validity of its produced explanation by appealing to some kind of “authentic,” universal truth, and [thus] uninterrogated human emotional experience.

“What about the authenticity of pain…that may supersede the cognitive and emerges from the heart- not for display but despite display?” Johnson interjects of Champagne and even Nair. He interrogates the way in which “…many queer theorists, in their quest to move beyond the body, ground their critique in the discursive rather than the corporeal” (Johnson, 132). Their theory is anchored in “bibliographic knowledge” and “citations of scholars”  to the exclusion of the very real, lived experiences of the people to whom the theory concerns. Theorists “constitute [themselves] as “sovereign subjects…a positionality that renders [them] ‘overseers’ of…the cultural practices and discourse” (Johnson, 133). Nair seems to channel such a disposition of theorist ‘overseer’ as she generalizes storytelling in itself as THE problem that “makes for shitty organizing... makes for really shitty analysis… and makes for a very insufficient and haphazard critique of capitalism,” and asserts that it should be excised as a political strategy.

I want to insist that personal testimony is a relevant and powerful tool of protest and healing, as well as it is alive, tangible, and raw in a way that theory is not, especially “on the front lines, in the trenches, on the street, or any place where the racialized and sexualized body is beaten, starved, fired, cursed- indeed when the body is the site of trauma” (Johnson, 129). Calling attention to a reality one has experienced does not inherently essentialize it or connote a universality of experience as Nair suggests, in the same way that ignoring narrative does not erase it or make it any less real than it is. It actually works to challenge and even destabilize essentialized notions of identity by drawing attention to the multidimensionality of experience, and to all the diverse ways people embody different identities. It is not only accessible to all, including those who do not reside in elite intellectual space, but it also holds theory (academia) accountable to the oppressed - “theory in the flesh” in the words of Gloria Anzaldua.

I wonder how Yasmin Nair might respond to E. Patrick Johnson in his argument for the importance of performative, artistic and affective mediums of storytelling and “radical subjectivity,” along with his request that “we grant each other time and space not only to talk of the body, but through it as well” (Johnson, 132). What might Nair say to Johnson who invites us to view storytelling/performance as, “a moment of self-reflexivity that has the potential to transform one’s view of self in relation to the world… a need to exercise control over the production of [one’s] images so [to] feel empowered… and the recognition, construction, and maintenance of self-image and cultural identity [which] functions to contest and subvert dominant meaning systems” (Johnson, 138)?.