Editor’s Introduction

Volume 45.1 begins with a special section, “Decentering and Decolonizing Feminist Oral Histories: Reflections on the State of the Field in the Early Twenty-First Century,” guest edited by Katrina Srigley and Stacey Zembrzycki.Their introduction outlines the contours of recent feminist oral history practice, one deeply influenced by anticolonial thinkers, but also owing much to feminist oral historians who have been theorizing since the 1970s about what it means to center women’s stories. The four articles in the special section operate along the lines of in-depth case studies, as Katrina Srigley and Lorraine Sutherland, Iona Radu, Margaretta Jolly (with Li Huibo and Ding Zhangang), and Jennifer Brier describe and analyze in careful detail the innovative projects in which they have aimed not only to listen to “women’s words” but also to allow those words to challenge many facets of our practice.

Although arriving at the journal through the normal channels of submission, Noah Riseman’s article turns on many of the same concerns as those developed in the special section: how to share authority in doing Indigenous research, how to ground research in Indigenous epistemologies, and the ways in which ethical research requires questioning colonial power relations. His work is further evidence of how deeply the theorizing and practicing of feminist oral history have influenced the development of the field over the last several decades.

Two other articles round out the issue, one probing the nature of memory, always a foundational concern in our practice, and the other the nature of embodiment as it exists in oral history practice, a much newer line of inquiry. Christine Nugent explores the transmission of memory between mothers and daughters about the mothers’ experiences and involvement in National Socialism, and she analyzes the circumstances under which a meaningful reckoning with the Nazi past could—and more often could not—take place. Nien Yuan Cheng considers ways that oral historians, who even in the digital age still find value in transcribing their interviews, might embody the oral history transcript so as to better record the aural, visual, and emotional content of our interviews.

The reviews assembled for this issue continue to demonstrate the range, scope, and complexity of oral history as it is practiced and understood in our own time. Here I highlight just two of the book reviews, one squarely in our universe, the other more of an outlier and interesting for that very reason, and one media review that is particularly germane to the discussion of embodiment presented by Nien Yuan Cheng.

Valerie Yow reviews the fourth edition of Paul Thompson’s The Voice of the Past, to which Joanna Bornat and Lynn Abrams also contributed. About her first encounter with Thompson’s book in an earlier edition, Yow writes, “There was something about this textbook—the feeling for humanity, I think—that made me excited about pursuing oral history.” Yow still feels that excitement in this latest edition, and she concludes, “Best of all, The Voice of the Past inspires an awareness of the strength and sophistication of oral history today.”

Ron Grele reviews Jean Stein’s West of Eden, a book that, while it has been widely reviewed, has not been considered nor critiqued as a work of oral history—until book review editor Dave Caruso asked Grele to consider it within the genre of oral history. After describing how the interview material in the book was significantly reshaped by Stein, Grele asks, “Can we talk of shared authority (which, by the way, as Michael Frisch has often pointed out, is not something one does; it is something inherent in the form itself) when the testimony has been so heavily edited? What is the line that separates a writer from an oral historian?” Grele’s review leads him to this conclusion: “This piece of bricolage [West of Eden] relies more than usual on an imagined community history that has its origins in Stein’s personal view of her own history. West of Eden is her edited conversation with herself about herself where the words are spoken by others. Perhaps that is where we begin in our attempt...