ABSTRACT
As Honor Ford-Smith’s assessment of the import of “tale-telling” suggests and as Troubling Beginnings has argued, the various ways in which we imagine ourselves as socially situated bear directly on the modes and effects of our efforts to produce social transformation. Nevertheless, the tale-telling she celebrates is not entirely unproblematic, and her statement stands as a powerful expression that threatens to explode under the force of the very questions it cannot ask. Our exploration has invited just such an explosion by raising questions that ask how we should understand the trans(per)formative possibilities engendered by stories that both constitute the groups about which they speak, and necessitate the policing of the always oscillating boundaries of community and self. The challenge that remains before us is to consider how active ambivalence in the midst of cultural activity might present itself and how it might reconfigure our understanding of ourselves as re-membering agents.
