ABSTRACT

This is an indispensable group of chapters that speak to the collective labor of memory work, collaborative storytelling, and how feminist oral historians create new and more democratic relationships between interviewers and narrators, performers, audiences, and territories, as well as museum professionals and surrounding communities. Oral historians work today in a time of global crisis. Our narrators demand more than ever that we use digital technologies to engage in the fight to combat oppression in all forms. 1 The authors in this section demonstrate how feminist oral history positions itself in opposition to global capitalism’s destruction of the commons, and how narrative storytelling can challenge the frightening intensification of misogyny, racism, and economic inequality that plagues the world. In their piece, Shahrzad Arshadi, Hourig Attarian, Khadija Baker, and Kumru Bilici point toward the vital role that oral history and performance play in these struggles by noting that the wounds they talk about and retell have “deep historical roots.” Their performance “enabled us to explore a history that comes out of a specific place, of lands lost, to imagine and reclaim them.” 2