It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (review)

Stories are everywhere. But, as Francesca Polletta skillfully demonstrates, this ubiquity is both strength and liability. Because anyone can tell a story, everyone does. Telling a story can either express unacknowledged truths or spread falsehoods. Because of this ambivalence, people often don't take stories seriously. Unfortunately, neither do social researchers. And that, according to Polletta, is a mistake. Storytelling makes sense of situations and issues, providing a significant means for transforming settled issues into points of contention. She weaves a compelling narrative on narrative, carefully exploring how stories can empower and how they can constrain, and the structural conditions that make one more likely than the other. Her goals are thus both modest and ambitious. Ostensibly, she seeks simply to understand how stories work and don't work in protest and politics, showcasing narrative's key role at every stage of political action from initial mobilizations to tactics and deliberation, to outcomes and memories. But she always has her eye on a bigger goal – to use story to understand better the complex relationship between culture and structures. She succeeds admirably on both counts.

The book's title comes from the rise of the sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement. Despite all the planning and organization that went into the successful action, participants described them as spontaneous, "like a fever." They portrayed the sit-ins as immediate expressions of moral outrage, not political strategizing, marking a break from the gradualism and politics of adult activists. Polletta shows how narrative is particularly powerful in early stages of mobilization, as stories help define collective identities and actors, not by resolving ambiguity, but by containing it. This ambiguity is critical; it demands interpretation, knitting together multiple perspectives and meanings. This ambiguity is kept in check by stories' canonical nature – we always interpret within a known structure. Narratives motivate action because they "represent without explaining" (p. 50), a point captured nicely in feminists' stories of political transformation, when after hearing the experiences of themselves and others, "…click! A moment of truth." (p. 49) These feverish "click! stories" require the listener to interpret what happens during the ellipsis, to understand how to go from one place to the next. But while activists use stories strategically, stories also set the terms of strategic action. Polletta shows how SNCC's rejection of participatory democracy can be explained best by neither instrumental rationality nor ideological consistency. Rather, she argues that certain strategies and tactics "may be appealing mainly on account of the social groups or conditions with which they are symbolically associated" (p. 80), in this case, Northern white activists. Ironically, these same Northern white activists were drawn to it for the opposite reason, that it was the tactic of Southern black organizations. Plots can twist, but cannot be twisted too far.

Polletta's later chapters analyze primarily how, and under what conditions, stories constrain, drawing on a rich set of cases – deliberation over plans for the WTC site, legal representations of battered women's syndrome, and how activists and elected officials narrate the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. She illustrates how the power of stories is curbed by people's ambivalence towards them. That is, stories are only deemed appropriate for certain situations. In the WTC discussions, for politics, not policy; with legislators, for commemoration, not contention. These norms not only exclude stories from certain forums, but also exclude groups more likely to draw on stories as reasons, groups likely already excluded from such places. Audience expectations further limit the narratives' effects. Battered women find their stories of victimhood trapped in their own canonicity; the standard stock of plots leaves little room for one to be both victim and moral guide. Challenging groups should, nevertheless, continue telling stories, but Polletta urges them to learn to tell better, and more literary, stories.

She also urges scholars to not only pay more attention to storytelling and other discursive forms, but to tell better stories as well...