In June 2024, British author Bernadine Evaristo used her invitation to speak at the Sir Thomas Gresham Annual Lecture Series to talk about the power of stories. As Evaristo summarized so eloquently, “We are stories. Stories are us. We breathe stories. We create stories. Stories are made up about us and we leave stories behind when we’ve passed on.” Stories are central to what it means to be human.
As feminist women of color, including Elif Shafak and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, have also reminded us, stories and storytelling are intimately linked to power. According to Adichie in her widely viewed 2009 TED Talk, there is danger in the single story; a risk of critical misunderstanding if we continue to only “hear one story of people and places.” In “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman offers a strategy, which she calls “critical fabulation,” to recover and reclaim the power of those voices and those stories that have been systematically ignored or erased from the archives.[1] For me, the relationship of storytelling to power also draws attention to the importance of story-listening. Indeed, I would posit that failure to listen to peoples’ many stories has produced the legacy of archival erasure with which we are grappling today.
Story-listening requires us to stop and devote time and effort to creating spaces where people feel able to share their experiences. Equally important is knowing when to be silent and when and how to ask questions. Story-listening, like storytelling,is an active and reciprocal process. It is also messy and complicated. Story-listening provides the time and space we need to stop, pause and reflect; actions that are particularly important when the stories people are telling may contain uncomfortable truths.
At HECAA@30 I was reminded of the value of both storytelling and story-listening and the myriad complex and nuanced questions that ensue as a result. One aim of the conference was to use Boston as a context for beginning to trace “the cultural legacies of racism and social injustice between the eighteenth century and today.” In the two-part panel “What’s Race Got to Do With It?: Interrogating the Norms of Domestic Space, Race, and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century Home,” Victoria Barnett-Woods and I sought to facilitate that aim by working with participants to create a safe space for previously overlooked and ignored stories of peoples, places, objects and texts to be told and listened to, and for a collaboration of disciplines and continents to be fostered.
The inspiration for our panel arose from a realization that we, as practitioners and academics, tend to normalize whiteness, from the perspectives of both production and consumption. As a result, we fail to acknowledge that notions of “whiteness” and “blackness” not only “portend an ideology of white supremacy and male hegemony” but also serve aesthetic purposes, with “whiteness” commonly encoded as a sign of feminine delicacy and “blackness” as a sign of the Other.[2] By normalizing whiteness, we not only fail to engage fully with the power dynamics of race and gender, but also tend to ignore the hidden voices integral to the architectural buildings that we visit and research and the objects, textual and non, with which we interact and furnish our homes.
So, what do we do? How do we interrogate effectively the norms of domestic space, race, and gender, and how do we teach a global eighteenth century in inspirational and informative ways, helping our students to become critical thinkers who will shape our future? One powerful teaching tool could be David Martin’s portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and Her Cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray (c. 1778).[3]
When faced with a double portrait such as this, that at first seems to so clearly pair racialized blackness and whiteness, or indeed when faced with any eighteenth-century architectural building or artifact whose materials and makers might also encode racialized or othered identities, I think it is important to acknowledge what we do not know as well as what we do. To let the silences speak does not mean we do nothing. It is not a passive action. Rather it is a recognition that history is not about facts but about argument, about navigating the complexities of power and privilege, of fluid constructions of femininity, of racial and ethnic identity, of beauty and social status. Appreciating the complexities of our shared history is also about collaboration. As scholars and practitioners, we cannot do everything alone. We need to work with other scholars and institutions, with our students and with local community groups. Central to the work at The Royall House and Slave Quarters, which we visited during the conference, is their collaboration with the local community. Together they are giving space to the secrets that the house and former slave quarters reveal. Together they are letting the silences “speak” and they are making time to listen.
The Royall House and Slave Quarters functions as a site of memory and of reclamation and narrative. For me that twinning of reclamation and narrative took a personal turn during our visit, as I reflected on one of my own stories as the child of enslaved relatives in Guadeloupe. Our visit also highlighted the complex power dynamics that infuse and shape any discussion about reclamation and narrative, as it does when we consider the categories of racial difference, gender, and space from an intersectional perspective. But such discussions are also about accountability. I firmly believe that it is our responsibility as scholars to think more comprehensively, and in nuanced, diverse, and potentially challenging ways, about the home, gender, and racial identity, and, as well, about our roles as practitioners, academics, and scholars in dismantling our colonial, Eurocentric approaches. By using our two-part panel to raise the question “What’s Race Got to Do With it?,” we sought to provide a stepping-stone to continue to undertake the work of storytelling and story-listening together, and with humility and courage long after the conference ended.
Karen Lipsedge is Associate Professor in English Literature at Kingston University, in Kingston upon Thames, UK
[1] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 11, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115.
[2] Jill Burke, How to be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity (London: Wellcome Collection, 2024): 85.
[3] Jane Card, “The Power of Context: The Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay and Lady Murray,” Teaching History 160 (2015): 8-15, https://www.history.org.uk/publications/resource/8541/the-power-of-context-using-a-visual-source; Jennifer Germann, “‘Other Women Were Present’: Seeing Black Women in Georgian London,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 54, no. 3 (2021): 535–553, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2021.0037.
Cite this note as: Karen Lipsedge, “The Power of Storytelling and Story-Listening: Reflections on HECAA@30” Journal18 (October 2024), https://www.journal18.org/7429.
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