Our course has examined several counter-hegemonic narratives—two works of fiction (Chaneysville, Garcia Girls), a visual memoir (And the Pursuit of Happiness), and several works of art (You are not Yourself, Black Woman with Chicken, Birth of a Jalapeno). Each of these narratives has employed tools that are specifically designed to “destroy the masters house” (to counter a dominant history). These tools have included storytelling; backwards chronology; changes in the narrative voice (Garcia Girls); emphases on personal history, rather than national history, or the conflation of personal and national history; the visualization of stereotyping; etc. All of them have considered the role of individual and personal history in making meaning of the world.
For your final projects you will create your own counter-hegemonic narratives. In whatever media you prefer (writing, film, painting, photography, sculpture, etc), you will create a narrative that goes against the dominant one. You can consider the counter-hegemonic narrative of a Branson student whose experience is not a stereotypical one; a child whose family life is different from the stereotypical nuclear family; or a personal story about your own attempts to counter-act the historical and cultural narratives placed on you.
You must choose and utilize at least one counter-hegemonic tool that we have come across in our work this term, and your narrative must, on some level, consider the role of personal/small history in making meaning of one’s world and one’s experience.
