It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics presents a sociological account of the role of stories and narrative in a variety of situational contexts involving protest and politics. With broad strokes, Polletta presents a compelling analysis of why storytelling sometimes does and other times does not work to leverage social or political changes. She identifies the problematic notion of “audience” as being key to understanding this, writes: “Narrative’s role in social life cannot be understood outside the institutional conventions of its interpretation and use” (16). As the name of the introductory chapter, “Why Stories Matter,” suggests, Polletta argues that “narrative analysis can help to explain not only the emergence of contentious issues but other processes that are central to politics and protest” (21). Through a better understanding of the epistemology of storytelling, Polletta moves beyond functional and textual analysis to understand the belief systems that shape use and interpretation.
An interesting and very accessible book, each chapter points to a different set of discursive forms and contexts, and arguably each merits additional attention to the details of the narrative and theoretical analysis. The second chapter continues the ideas begun in the introduction, asking “Why People Protest.” The third, fourth, and fifth chapters consider narrative strategies and ask how different stories mean for different tellers in different contexts. The sixth chapter looks more generally at how stories about movements create meaning and impact for the speaker and her audience. The seventh chapter presents her conclusion titled, “Folk Wisdom and Scholarly Tales.” While the diversity of story types and genres is distracting at times and confusing at others, Polletta does successfully present her point that different goals of social activists can be met through different narrative strategies.
Chapter 2 introduces narrative formulations as interpreted by students participating in sit-ins and organizing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Many interesting parallels are drawn between student actions and student narratives as found especially in student newspapers of the time. Polletta considers the different frames used in telling the stories and their insistence on certain conventions, including what was portrayed as “spontaneity” by the speakers and the organization. Absent from this chapter is a discussion of the different registers of language used in performance. To read Polletta’s sociological discussion of stories in protest alongside Richard Bauman’s “keys” to performance (1977) or other folkloristic and linguistic studies would enrich any student’s study of narrative as used in protest.
Chapter 3 continues this textual analysis of SNCC stories largely collected in print form, while chapter 4 considers stories collected from an online discussion about the future of the World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan. Chapter 5, “Casting Oneself as a Victim Sometimes Hurts the Cause,” uses stories of women, especially from court cases for gender equality and cases investigating domestic violence. Particularly notable in this chapter, but noticeable in others as well, is the absence of many of these voices that are being analyzed. Polletta’s text would benefit from more specific and longer narratives from those whom she researched. By not choosing to use as many direct quotes from her fieldwork and research, and instead simply retelling many stories herself, the author loses the perspective and nuance that other storytellers of the movement may have tried to bring to their personal narratives and stories.
This speaks to a very short conversation that Polletta begins in the conclusion of the text, asking what role storytelling and narrative should have in scholarly work and application. As each of the chapters recounts the stories of a particular situation or organization, they are smoothly and compellingly crafted, bringing the reader through the text with more emphasis on acquiescence than critical dialog. However, then comes a realization that the chapter has been about narrative and how people tell stories, yet there has not been a single block quote or any significant quoting of story lines. We are dependent upon Polletta’s “story” to understand the role of the stories she is retelling in political and social arenas. She argues that narrative presents unique opportunities for scholarly writing because as a rhetorical form it is distinctive for “its synthesis of description and explanation,” but also for “its synthesis of explanation with normative prescription” (182), thereby opening new frameworks that can embrace normatively awkward theories. The point that she makes merits additional attention, but in her text I also hoped for greater distinction between her narrative-creating explanations and the narratives as text.
Also in her final chapter, Polletta begins to bring the different threads of text and genre together, suggesting two analytical tasks for those interested in the relations between storytelling, protest, and politics: one, “to identify the features of narrative that allow it to achieve certain rhetorical effects,” and two, “to identify the social conditions in which those rhetorical effects are likely to be politically consequential” (166-167). This points to the narrow focus that she brings to the study of these diverse story types and situations. This narrow focus could prove useful to many students of sociology, folklore, and other disciplines, but it also limits the rich potential found in narratives and stories of protest and politics--a richness that arguably can be found in many texts and articles written by folklorists and other scholars not referenced. These scholars’ works on the different registers of language and use of narrative would prove helpful alongside Polletta’s text for a more rigorous understanding of the roles of stories involving protest and politics.
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[Review length: 912 words • Review posted on May 24, 2007]