Oral History and the Discursive Construction of Identity in Flint, Michigan

Abstract

This article explores the ways that Flint residents report on their encounters with various kinds of “outsiders” who are influenced by mass‐mediated images that position Flint and its residents in a certain way. Through the voicing of outsiders who engage in the circulation of negative discourses about Flint, residents then insert their own voices as they contest negative discourses about the city. Here, the images that they project about life in Flint provide a powerful counternarrative about what it means to have lived in the city during its deindustrializing period. This suggests that oral history interviews are an important site for the discursive production (and contestation) of individual and collective identities for Flint residents.

Uncertain Times: Linguistic Anthropology in 2019

“…Smalls shows how, in response to this diffuse and widespread discourse, “African transnational youth discursively perform nonthreatening selves” (356). In a related vein, Britt (2018) considers the negative media images of majority African American Flint, Michigan, and how, in oral history interviews, residents contest this media “truth” through a chronotope that sorts insiders and outsiders and draws on a variety of voicings to suggest alternative sources of evidence.…”

Penetrating Historical Discourse’s Truth Matrix: A Corpus Analysis of Oral History Testimonies

“…In summation, it is worth discussing the collective effect of the three mental process verbs presented above. It has been outlined that I think expresses epistemic modality with evidential properties, I remember aligns with the notion of mirativity, while I suppose is used with connectives to framing reported thought (Britt 2018), feeling or experience. A liberal usage of such verbs, in accordance with the literature on hedging might initially assume the effect of mitigating the authority of the witness as reliable presenters of historical events.…”

“…Historical witness testimonies have previously been used adjacent to historical research to explore sociological issues such as identity construction (Britt, 2018) and community (Schiffrin, 2009). In this study, such testimonies are seen as a profitable platform to explore how truth is linguistically constructed as they attempt to accurately portray historical events through narratives influenced by, in this case, military discourse (Achugar, 2008), the passage of time (Cubitt, 2013) and master narratives (Hendry, 2009).…”

Imagining the city in lockdown: Place in the COVID-19 self-recordings of the Lothian Diary Project

“…Here we are most interested in approaches that foreground a geographic location or place in the chronotope. Britt (2018) examines "discourses of place" and chronotopic representations of Flint, Michigan, "that cast the locale (Flint) as a certain type of place (i.e., "apocalyptic" and in decline) populated by a certain type of person . .…”

“…Here we are most interested in approaches that foreground a geographic location or place in the chronotope. Britt ( 2018 ) examines “discourses of place” and chronotopic representations of Flint, Michigan, “that cast the locale (Flint) as a certain type of place (i.e., “apocalyptic” and in decline) populated by a certain type of person … at a certain moment in time” (Britt, 2018 , p. 253). This chronotope is the way residents of Flint depict the views of outsiders, and they then counter this view in their own narratives, distancing the views of the outsider through the use of reported speech.…”