Guest Editors’ Introduction: Decentering and Decolonizing Feminist Oral Histories: Reflections on the State of the Field in the Early Twenty-First Century

This special section of the Oral History Review had its origins in 2014 at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, held for the first time outside the United States in Toronto, Canada. The central conference theme—“Histories on the Edge/Histoires sur la brèche”—inspired numerous panels, performances, workshops, and public history tours that engaged feminist oral histories, including a roundtable discussion involving both of us, about the now twenty-six-year-old classic feminist oral history text, Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History.¹ We did not know what sort of audience to expect for our early morning roundtable, scheduled for the first day in a room some distance from the central conference buildings. But, to our delight, more than one hundred people arrived and shoehorned themselves into a space more suitable for thirty. Our discussion was lively; it highlighted the still-important insights of Women’s Words and other early feminist oral history scholarship, particularly the need to center the stories and experiences of women and other marginalized people in discussions of the past, and it raised difficult questions about feminist oral history. As an audience member, Lorraine Sutherland, one of our special section contributors, asked panelists to explain how her Ininiwuk storytelling traditions fit within feminist oral history. She, for one, did not see herself in most of the conversation about the field that day.

For us, the remarkable presence of and engagement with feminist oral history on the Berkshire program were clear indications that across disciplines and generations, and among Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, activists, and scholars from around the world, feminist oral history remains a dynamic field. And the questions posed during our roundtable indicated that we were long overdue for a collective conversation that raised pressing and sometimes uncomfortable questions: What are the centers and edges of feminist oral history? What has kept some stories and storytellers in these locations? In what ways does our scholarship challenge or perpetuate structures of privilege and power? And, simply put, what are feminist oral histories for the early twenty-first century? These questions have led to a two-part publishing endeavor that focuses on these matters and includes this special section of the journal as well as a forthcoming twenty-five-chapter edited collection titled Beyond Women’s Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century.²

The articles published here engage these questions through scholarship that seeks to decolonize and decenter the field of feminist oral history. To decolonize is to engage in oral history practices and produce scholarship that challenge ongoing and historic forms of colonialism. This process privileges Indigenous voices and ways of knowing and, as contributor Ioana Radu explains, has great potential to “expand oral history praxis.”³ Decentering supports decolonization by forcing us to reflect critically on the centers and edges of our field—to pick up the Berkshire conference theme—in the spirit of anticolonial thinkers who have long researched, written about, and talked back to global imperialism in all its forms.⁴ Beyond this, decolonizing and decentering are deeply contextual and relational processes, with no “ten-point plan,” as Katrina Srigley and Lorraine Sutherland note in their article.⁵ To challenge feminist oral history’s centers and edges, we must be willing to accept the messy and intellectually rigorous reality of this demanding and complex scholarship that is not only responsive to the epistemological, ontological, and methodological contours of varied histories and historiographies, but also largely built on and sustained through diverse and complex relationships. Working this way is neither linear nor a simple march of progress over time. It requires vigilance against perpetuating colonial hierarchies of knowledge and power, and it leaves space for intellectual journeys to learn new things. It may even circle back, respectfully, to such still-important insights of and approaches to feminist oral history as one-on-one life-course interviewing and sharing authority.⁶ To decolonize and decenter is...