Community Belonging in Local Character Anecdotes

Abstract

Local character narratives offer a fruitful corpus for exploring the relation between community belonging, identity and narrator stance. After summarizing North American scholarship on the local character genre, I explore the ways two narrators establish their storytelling rights to a rural Maine narrative tradition. Adopting an interactionist orientation toward discourse, I map the ways that the narrators position themselves with respect to each other and to their internalized other, the local character. I demonstrate that community belonging, and the storytelling rights that such belonging confers, is a discursive accomplishment that transcends stable class and geographic positions. The character story offers narrators a way to simultaneously identify with the most marginal, most emblematic members of their community while at the same time distinguishing themselves as normative citizens. Recognizing identities as plural, multi-voiced and sometimes conflicting, I challenge folklorists to explore how differently situated narrators can participate in a tradition that is attached to a particular place. I suggest we replace the notion of positionality –an enumeration of fixed identity features – with that of positioning – a discursive and social accomplishment – in our discussions of storytelling rights.

Keywords: local character anecdote, storytelling rights, positioning, identity, Maine