Oral History as an Enactment of Critical Community Psychology

Abstract

I describe an oral history project as an enactment of critical community psychology that was triggered by an academic and social impulse, stirred by a South African liberatory moment that legitimated recovery of marginalized voices and community knowledge as part of a process of affirming community self-identity. Oral history was positioned as a performance, a collection of historical materials, a transformative force linking the past to the present to interpret social conditions, and a generative modality for establishing community, evidence of the implicit shaping influences of Black Consciousness on enactments of psychosocial praxis at a particular South African moment. The description briefly draws attention to ambiguities arising from oppressive psychosocial scripts and the repressive authority of disciplinary power on the enactments of oral history, so as to offer a critical voice to forthcoming dialogues about how to place project materials, collected two decades ago, within the public realm.

Critical oral history: Reflections on method and medium

“…These processes surrounding recruitment and data collection demonstrate how critical oral history method could become a medium in which larger forces of dominance materialized. Seedar (2015) and others have spoken of how people's stories can become distorted and diluted in academic texts, but here we saw how that distortion was woven into the work much earlier in the process. In the first example, our collaborators seemed to believe that participant bodies must be classified into categories that fit our LGBT lens.…”

“…Oral history is described as the recovery of memory and narratives previously left out of historical records (Seedar, 2015). In the bringing together of a skilled, engaged interviewer, and a willing, reflective subject, oral history research aims to unearth community-centred collective histories (Haynes, 2010;Seedar, 2015).…”

“…Oral history is described as the recovery of memory and narratives previously left out of historical records (Seedar, 2015). In the bringing together of a skilled, engaged interviewer, and a willing, reflective subject, oral history research aims to unearth community-centred collective histories (Haynes, 2010;Seedar, 2015). Although the story or history told undoubtedly constitutes a narrative, its positioning within a set of broader narratives that define a specific time and place defines these narratives as oral histories (Patel, 2005).…”

“…Our collaborators regularly had their offices vandalized and ransacked as part of intimidation and persecution in their home countries. Destruction of such records and erasure of marginalized histories is a common tool of suppression, designed to erode social memories and collective identities (Seedar, 2015). Accordingly, an important aspect of knowledge mobilization from the project was the production of text, audio, and video that would be retained by the collaborating agencies, disseminated to the world, and safeguarded in Toronto-based archives.…”

Counterstorytelling as Epistemic Justice: Decolonial Community‐based Praxis from the Global South

“…We look to oral histories to trouble dominant notions of migration and belonging but also for alternative, radically inclusive, non-exploitative forms of belonging that do not rely on invidious categories of race and ethnicity (Sangster, 1994). Such restoration of Miya communities' own stories of historical and contemporary realities, and of complex relationships between people and place constitute powerful possibilities for promoting epistemic justice 9 (Seedat, 2015;Smith, 2012;Stevens et al, 2013).…”