Listening to stories from the borders - Uprooting, Disjuncture, and Metamorphosis through Contemporary Storytelling Events on Migration

This study explores the context of storytelling events: oral performances in which migrants interpret their life experiences in front of an audience. The research focuses on how listening to life stories on migration affects the listeners, at an individual and a collective level. More specifically, it investigates the role of storytelling events as a mediator between the listeners’ understanding of their narrative identity and the narratives on migration built by mass media and NGOs. In order to explore the existential and social dimensions of storytelling, 10 semi-structured interviews have been conducted with usual participants of storytelling events on migration, organized in different parts of the world. The conceptual core of this study is first informed by Ricoeur’s theory of narrative identity, and second by Van Gennep’s conceptualization of the rites of passage, and in particular of the liminal stage. Through this interdisciplinary approach at the cross path of philosophy, sociology and anthropology, the analysis demonstrates the listeners’ understanding of storytelling events as a collective rite of liminality: as a transitory, in-between state, from disruption to potential for social change. Participants, after an initial a form of rejection and tension towards the story, are able to negotiate what they heard and reincorporate those feelings in a critical reflection on their own society’s stereotypes and limits. Therefore, the context of storytelling events creates a bridge between migrant and host society’s members by inviting both groups to experience dialogic moments. Finally, the potential of a theoretical approach to storytelling joins the vibrant conversation on the postcolonial approach by positing storytelling events on migration as a form of knowledge production disruptive of Eurocentric knowledge. By giving voice to migrant experiences and memories, storytelling events can become the environment in which deep-rooted prejudice can be transformed into new, culturally democratic, discursive forms.