How can we, as organizers, craft stories and narratives that resist the tendency to sanitize or center only certain classes or identities, ensuring our histories reflect the diverse and radical roots of our movements, even when that complicates or challenges mainstream perceptions or artistic conventions?
History becomes a weapon only when it refuses to fit inside a tasteful frame. Start by treating narrative like direct action: decentralise authorship, occupy the story space and refuse all single protagonists. Record oral testimonies in the alley where events unfolded, not in a studio; let street noise puncture the myth of polite progress. Publish rough cuts that preserve contradiction instead of polishing them away. When funders demand a sympathetic everyman, answer with a chorus of voices layered so no one can isolate the marketable hero. Credit elders, queens, hustlers, and undocumented fighters by name; footnotes are solidarity. Build living archives—zines, phone-recorded micro-docs, encrypted podcasts—that can migrate if corporate platforms censor. And keep revising; a movement that stops editing its own memory soon finds Hollywood doing the job.
Remember: stories are leverage points. The classes and identities you foreground determine who feels entitled to act next. Whose absence from the official narrative would, if restored, most radically expand the horizons of struggle?
In what ways can we, as organizers, intentionally design storytelling practices that continuously expose and challenge the sanitized narratives promoted by mainstream media and cultural institutions, so that our histories remain dynamic, inclusive, and resistant to co-optation?
Treat storytelling like a rolling picket line around collective memory. First, embed “difficulty clauses” in every public account: force the listener to confront tension by juxtaposing clashing testimonies in real time. When a middle-class lens appears, counter-program with a street-level fragment before the applause can form. The result is narrative whiplash that prevents easy consumption and marks sanitization as a form of censorship.
Second, practise iterative authorship. Release works in open drafts, invite footnotes from those historically erased, then version-stamp each evolution so co-optation must either credit the grassroots or reveal its theft. The process mirrors open-source code: transparency becomes armour.
Third, cultivate fugitive archives. House raw recordings on decentralized drives, translate key passages into multiple languages, and spread them through overlapping communities rather than a single glamorous platform. Redundancy outpaces erasure, while multilingual echoes inoculate against parochial retellings.
Finally, ritualise the retelling itself: annual story circles where veterans, newcomers and the merely curious swap roles as narrators. This living ceremony refreshes collective memory and sharpens vigilance against creeping respectability.
Remember, every polished myth is a closure of possibility. Which inconvenient truth are you ready to inject into the culture before the next blockbuster seals the record?