Under Storytelling’s Spell?: Oral History in a Neoliberal Age

Storytelling—in the form of public talk about oneself—has become a new social phenomenon over the past quarter century. The case of StoryCorps illuminates how autobiographical (often confessional) storytelling in public comes out of the simultaneous democratization and neoliberalization of Western society since the 1970s. The storytelling phenomenon, which frequently aligns itself with (or appropriates) oral history, reinforces neoliberal values of competitive individualism and thus depoliticizes public discourse. Oral historians, rather than embracing storytelling, need to investigate it as a historically situated social phenomenon that often undercuts the epistemological, methodological, ethical, and political aims of oral history.