Counternarrative

In their broadest formulation, counternarratives are stories/narratives that splinter widely accepted truths about people, cultures, and institutions as well as the value of those institutions and the knowledge produced by and within those cultural institutions. The term counternarrative itself clearly highlights its essence in expressing skepticism of narratives that claim the authority of knowledge of human experience or narratives that make grand claims about what is to be taken as truth. This entry describes the nature and potential effects of two types of counternarratives identified by scholars: one that challenges the assumption of the West as superior and one that focuses on the knowledge of those who are marginalized within a society.

The first form of counternarrative challenges modernist grand narratives that position the West at the pinnacle of development and civilization, casting Western ideals and knowledge as irrefutable representations of human knowledge and experience. This first version of counternarratives has dismantled the idea of a universal culture and cultural ideal through the retelling of stories that have revitalized Indigenous cultures, languages, ethics, aesthetics, and epistemologies that are different from Western forms. The expressions of this form of counternarrative, in which non-Western knowledge forms and epistemologies not only are celebrated but also have emerged as a separate and different way of thinking about and narrating experience, are at the heart of decolonizing and postcolonial works found in virtually all disciplines today.

A second form of counternarrative counters unquestioned narratives or “official stories” that are sometimes backed by “scientific” evidence or unquestioned conventional wisdom—that state “truths” about people, situations, or places. An example of a contemporary official narrative is that which conflates Islam with extremism and terrorism and then uses this as a justification for Western intervention in Iraq. This second form of counternarrative highlights the “little stories” of groups and/or individuals that are produced at the margins of the telling of “official stories.” For instance, stories of ordinary peace-loving people in war zones of Iraq living everyday lives counter the official war narrative that equates all Muslims with fundamentalism, extremism, and/or terrorism. Counternarratives that tell those little stories emphasize their social and political dimensions, not merely the personal ones. Furthermore, those counternarratives highlight the ways in which the marginalization of groups or individuals within a culture are legitimized and used to justify their exclusion, subjugation, and erasure from the official truth telling. Those little stories that constitute the counternarratives of this form engage and deconstruct the official apparatus (e.g., systems of education, justice, and religion) used to create and sustain “otherness” and maintain marginality.

What the two forms of counternarrative have in common is the production of an invisible silent “other” who stands unrecognized at the borders of grand/official narratives that assimilate the other by weaving a narrative of a common culture and shared language. Both formulations of counternarratives hold emancipatory possibilities for groups that are marginalized when stories concerning them are created by other entities. They dismantle the grand/official narratives that sustain hegemony, raise questions about the presumed superiority of one group over another, and take away the power of those entities that characterize, define, and/or claim to speak for all. Furthermore, counternarratives create new spaces and possibilities for the theorizing of a different form of knowledge that is new and non-Western/nonofficial. In this way, counternarratives go beyond merely countering or opposing Western/official knowledge to producing a different way of representation that is distinctly non-Western/nonofficial.

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