ABSTRACT

In Chapter 19, Jeff Leinaweaver tells us about the antenarrative dynamics that influence the identity process of becoming a global human. In this, he leverages the lens of the internationally adopted person to speak to the storytelling dynamics that influence global identity making, in general. Questions like, “Who are you?,” “Where are you from?” pose problems for global humans such as the internationally adopted person. These are people constructed in-between multiple narrative identities and locations of self. Their storytelling crosses boundaries of culture, race, kinship, and otherness. They are caught in what Leinaweaver calls an eddy of stories that push, pull and buffet them about. Leinaweaver uses antenarrative inquiry to develop a critical antenarratology, a more critical storytelling, to get at the dynamics of narrative marginality. The contribution the chapter makes is demonstrating that all the living story web of relationship identities do not collapse into one cultural, racial, kinship, and/or citizenship narrative that comes with a BME arc. No story of the story, or narrative of the narratives will do. Marginality is too polysemic (too many meanings), too polyvocal (too many voices), too polydimensional (which is where holograms come in), too polylogical (too many logics), too poly-plotted (all those emplotments, how to choose), and too polychromic (too many temporality differences). The global collective storytelling dynamics of retro-narrative, living story webs of identity, and antenarratives of so many future possibilities makes for a fascinating study, but a strange life on the margins. Antenarrative is on the edges of the now, especially when its antenarrating going on for the very first time. There are those pregnant pauses where one stands on the edge of the abyss, contemplating how to storytell.