ABSTRACT
In her recent keynote address at the Sixth International Digital Storytelling Conference, civil rights activist and cultural worker Jane Wilburn Sapp talked to the audience about creating opportunities for listening as the most important part of community-based storytelling work. During her own upbringing in the southern U.S., Sapp spent hours listening to the adults around her share their stories with one another, noting their similarities and differences of experience, their shared struggles and their unique perspectives. She described how this listening allowed her to see herself, an African-American girl, and the Black community she belonged to as rich and complex, full of solidarity and contradiction, full of possibility despite segregation and systemic marginalization. Sapp argued that the introduction of dominant storytelling technologies, like the television, has meant that instead of listening to a multiplicity of stories about Black life and community from each other, we more often than not only get to hear the one story available to us via mainstream media. Through community-based storytelling work, Sapp argued, we are able to honor the diversity of narratives within a community and, perhaps more importantly, recapture the experience of listening to each other as a basis for community-and self-formation. This recalls Godard’s (2014) point about the importance of collective stories that foster a “culture of possibility” rather than “keep us powerless” (15) and the role these can play in strengthening the ties of community.
