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Fictional IR and imagination: Advancing narrative approaches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 September 2014

SUNGJU PARK-KANG
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Abstract

In the field of International Relations (IR), narrative approaches and an alternative way of writing seem to have gained growing attention in recent scholarship. Autoethnography and autobiography can be taken as primary examples. The article aims to advance this growing scholarship by proposing the concept of fictional IR. The idea is concerned with how to use the imagination in IR. I suggest that fiction writing can become a method for dealing with lack of information and contingency surrounding it. Fictional IR is more than reading and using fiction as a reference source or vehicle for analysis. It can incorporate the employment of fiction writing in IR scholarship. One of the benefits could be to articulate sensitive and complicated problems in a more flexible and imaginative way, making the most of the power of story and imagination. It should be stressed that the focal point is to write fiction; it is not to write about fiction. To support this suggestion, the article offers a short fictional-factual story. By using imagination, creating characters, combining data with fictional narrative, or with one's own experience, I believe that more original and empathetic IR writing is possible.

Type
Articles
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , April 2015 , pp. 361 - 381
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2014 

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References

1 For example, Review of International Studies published forum articles on this subject in 2010. Other important examples include, to name a few, Wibben, Annick T. R., Feminist Security Studies: A Narrative Approach (London: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar; Inayatullah, Naeem (ed.), Autobiographical International Relations: I, IR (London: Routledge, 2011)Google Scholar; Weber, Cynthia, I am an American: Filming the Fear of Difference (Bristol: Intellect, 2011)Google Scholar; Dauphinee, Elizabeth, The Politics of Exile (London: Routledge, 2013)Google Scholar; Ling, L. H. M., Imagining World Politics: Sihar & Shenya, A Fable for Our Times (London: Routledge, 2014)Google Scholar; Löwenheim, Oded, The Politics of the Trail: Reflexive Mountain Biking Along the Frontier of Jerusalem (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It is also important to note the following developments: the recent launch of Journal of Narrative Politics (2014) and the initiatives of new IR journals, such as Critical Studies on Security (2013) and Critical Military Studies (forthcoming 2015), that receive fiction or poetry in their special sections.

2 For ‘writing about fiction’, see among others, Weldes, Jutta (ed.), To Seek Out New Worlds: Science Fiction and World Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Neumann, Iver B. and Nexon, Daniel H. (eds), Harry Potter and International Relations (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006)Google Scholar; Moore, Cerwyn, ‘On Cruelty: Literature, Aesthetics and Global Politics’, Global Society, 24:3 (2010), pp. 311–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hutchison, Emma, ‘Unsettling Stories: Jeanette Winterson and the Cultivation of Political Contingency’, Global Society, 24:3 (2010), pp. 351–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Sylvester, Christine, Feminist International Relations: An Unfinished Journey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 307–13Google Scholar.

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24 Meanwhile, Iver B. Neumann, who holds two PhDs in Politics and in Social Anthropology, offers his reflection on Löwenheim's piece as follows: ‘I cannot see why it should be referred to as autoethonographical, not least because there was no writing … going into the data collection.’ He instead calls it ‘a successful exercise in IR autobiography’. Neumann, Iver B., ‘Autobiography, Ontology, Autoethnology’, Review of International Studies, 36:4 (2010), p. 1055CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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42 Apart from autoethnography and autobiography as scholarship, I would add that the self has frequently haunted academic publications across the disciplines. Consider acknowledgements or prefaces of books (and sometimes articles). They usually reveal authors' struggles to publish, ‘personal’ stories, research networks/interlocutors, families and even lovers, all of which could constitute the above auto-scholarship to some extent.

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48 In other fields, ethnographers and sociologists seem to have blurred the writing boundaries much earlier and more frequently. Feminist ethnographer Kamala Visweswaran explicitly states that ethnography is fiction and fiction is ethnography, and furthermore offers a short story. Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994). For imaginative/fictional writings and experimental ethnography, see among others, Behar, Ruth, Translated Woman: Crossing the Border with Esperanza's Story (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Richardson, Laurel, Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Ellis, Carolyn, The Ethnographic I: A Methodological Novel about Autoethnography (Walnut Creek: AltaMira Press, 2004)Google Scholar. In IR, Christine Sylvester attempts to employ a fiction writing style based on her fieldwork in Zimbabwe. Producing Women and Progress in Zimbabwe: Narratives of Identity and Work from the 1980s (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2000), pp. 1–16. Cynthia Enloe offers a ‘feminist archaeological’ account of her childhood in relation to militarisation and femininity, in an unconventional way of writing. The Curious Feminist: Searching for Women in a New Age of Empire (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 309–17. Marysia Zalewski's book shows another possibility. Feminist International Relations: Exquisite Corpse (London: Routledge, 2013).

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83 Wibben, Feminist Security Studies, p. 43. Wibben makes a case for a narrative approach from a feminist perspective.

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