Constituting Communities

Download or read book Storied Communities written by Hester Lessard and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2011-01-01 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political communities are defined, and often contested, through stories. Scholars have long recognized that two foundational sets of stories � narratives of contact and narratives of arrival � helped to define settler societies. Storied Communities disrupts the assumption that Indigenous and immigrant identities fall into two separate streams of analysis. The authors juxtapose narratives of contact and narratives of arrival as they explore key themes such as narrative form, the nature of storytelling in the political realm, and the institutional and theoretical implications of foundation narratives. By doing so, they open up new ways to imagine, sustain, and transform political communities.