The
Critical
Personal
Narrative
Critical personal narratives are counternarratives, testimonies,
autoethnographies, performance text, stories, and accounts that disrupt
and disturb discourse by exposing the complexities and contradictions
that exist under official history (Mutua & Swadener, 2004). The critical
personal narrative is a central genre of contemporary decolonizing
writing. As a creative analytic practice, it is used to criticize
“ prevailing structures and relationships of power and inequity in a
relational context” (p. 16) …. The utopian counternarrative offers
hope, showing others how to engage in actions that decolonize, heal,
and transform …. The critical democratic storytelling imagination is
pedagogical. As a form of instruction, it helps persons think critically,
historically, and sociologically. It exposes the pedagogies of oppression
that produce injustice (see Freire, 2001, p. 54). It contributes to a
reflective ethical self-consciousness. It gives people a language and a
set of pedagogical practices that turn oppression into freedom, despair
into hope, hatred into love, doubt into trust.
autoethnographies, performance text, stories, and accounts that disrupt
and disturb discourse by exposing the complexities and contradictions
that exist under official history (Mutua & Swadener, 2004). The critical
personal narrative is a central genre of contemporary decolonizing
writing. As a creative analytic practice, it is used to criticize
“ prevailing structures and relationships of power and inequity in a
relational context” (p. 16) …. The utopian counternarrative offers
hope, showing others how to engage in actions that decolonize, heal,
and transform …. The critical democratic storytelling imagination is
pedagogical. As a form of instruction, it helps persons think critically,
historically, and sociologically. It exposes the pedagogies of oppression
that produce injustice (see Freire, 2001, p. 54). It contributes to a
reflective ethical self-consciousness. It gives people a language and a
set of pedagogical practices that turn oppression into freedom, despair
into hope, hatred into love, doubt into trust.
Norman Denzin, 2005, pp. 946-948