Circulating narratives: Theorizing narrative travel translation and provocation

Abstract

When I received the set of four essays from Hugo Canham 1 , I was deeply humbled by the trust and then swept by the responsibility of "translation". A white woman in North America, trained as a social psychologist and critical participatory researcher, I was asked to reflect on a quartet of provocative articles created by talented writers from the Global South, who have carefully interpreted rich interviews voiced by South Africans narrating pain, poverty, violence and exclusion during apartheid and since, speaking through pride, desire and resistance. Across these textured layers of telling, listening and writing, the narratives sailed across oceans and over the equator, in search of yet another translation, to be offered up to audiences both near and far. With the modest transfer of texts, together we agree to delicately stitch a transnational project of resistance, revision , and responsibility-fraught and important. It is this delicate process of circulating narratives, passing on stories, laying on of hands local and far away, that deserves some thought. This short reflective essay is an invitation to theorise the historically colonial but also sometimes loving travels of narratives as stories of survivance (Vizenor, 2008). In this case, the stories are borne in the bodies of those most aggrieved as they journey through the hands and ears and fingertips of these South African theorists / researchers to a white North American woman who spent time in South Africa last summer, in the mo(u)rning after Donald Trump's victory.

A postcolonial and pan‐African feminist reading of Zimbabwean women entrepreneurs

“…From the interviews we constructed three microstorias (Boje, 2001;Canham & Langa, 2017) to reflect on their lives and experiences as entrepreneurs. The writing of these microstorias implies a co-constructed narration (Tuck et al, 2014) that could encapsulate the postcolonial and African feminist history of the women participants as part of a dialogue, rather than a translation (Fine, 2017). Following , microstorias is an analytical method that challenges the hegemony of western grand narratives such as entrepreneurship.…”