Storied Communities

de Hester Lessard, Rebecca Johnson, Jeremy Webber

"It is neither easy nor commonplace in contemporary Canada to realize a coming together of storytellers and scholars immersed in Aboriginal identities on one hand and recent immigrant identities on the other. That is what this book promises and largely delivers."--Shauna Van Praagh, Faculty of Law, McGill University. "Delightfully original and daring ... Storied Communities presents the most original and challenging uses of narrative methodology as a tool for legal and political analysis."--Constance Macintosh, Faculty of Law. Dalhousie University. 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. --Book Jacket.