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It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics
Activists and politicians have long recognized the power of a good story to move people to action. In early 1960 four black college students sat down at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave. Within a month sit-ins spread to thirty cities in seven states. Student participants told stories of impulsive, spontaneous action—this despite all the planning that had gone into the sit-ins. “It was like a fever,” they said.
Francesca Polletta’s It Was Like a Fever sets out to account for the power of storytelling in mobilizing political and social movements. Drawing on cases ranging from sixteenth-century tax revolts to contemporary debates about the future of the World Trade Center site, Polletta argues that stories are politically effective not when they have clear moral messages, but when they have complex, often ambiguous ones. The openness of stories to interpretation has allowed disadvantaged groups, in particular, to gain a hearing for new needs and to forge surprising political alliances. But popular beliefs in America about storytelling as a genre have also hurt those challenging the status quo.
A rich analysis of storytelling in courtrooms, newsrooms, public forums, and the United States Congress, It Was Like a Fever offers provocative new insights into the dynamics of culture and contention.
Francesca Polletta’s It Was Like a Fever sets out to account for the power of storytelling in mobilizing political and social movements. Drawing on cases ranging from sixteenth-century tax revolts to contemporary debates about the future of the World Trade Center site, Polletta argues that stories are politically effective not when they have clear moral messages, but when they have complex, often ambiguous ones. The openness of stories to interpretation has allowed disadvantaged groups, in particular, to gain a hearing for new needs and to forge surprising political alliances. But popular beliefs in America about storytelling as a genre have also hurt those challenging the status quo.
A rich analysis of storytelling in courtrooms, newsrooms, public forums, and the United States Congress, It Was Like a Fever offers provocative new insights into the dynamics of culture and contention.
256 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2006
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February 12, 2024
Had to write a review for class, decided to post here. TLDR: too academic, substantively flawed.
It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics, published in 2006 by American sociologist Francesca Polletta, evaluates the efficacy of invoking narrative in movement building and politics. In each chapter, she studies a site of movement, protest, or politics through the lens of storytelling and aims to answer questions that have befuddled movement scholars for years. What she finds often runs contrary to what movement scholars understand about persuasive advocacy, deliberation in participatory democracy settings, moral suasion in the courtroom, and storytelling by public officials. She concludes that “narrative’s power stems from its complexity, indeed, its ambiguity.” We often imbue stories with our own meanings. While storytelling can be politically powerful, according to Polletta, “narrative comes with risks as well as benefits” for “disadvantaged groups.” Because certain spaces (like in legislative chambers and courtrooms) treat stories told by laypeople as unserious or easily manipulable, narrative has not realized its full potential to ignite change.
Throughout the book, Polletta cites both historical and contemporary examples of storytelling in movement building and politics. Written in the aftermath of the Bush v. Kerry election, Polletta opens the book by describing Republicans’ effective use of narrative to capture the votes of the American public. In the wake of 9/11, Republicans gave voters “villains and heroes; new characters in age-old dramas of threat, vengeance, and salvation,” whereas “the Democrats ticked off a dry list of issues.” In her second chapter, Polletta analyzes how the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) narratively reconstructed the sit-ins they organized as “spontaneous,” facially contradicting the extensive strategic planning that the sit-ins depended on. Polletta argues that, when describing the sit-ins as “spontaneous,” “students conveyed the sit-ins’ urgent, moral, and local character,” standing stark contrast to the “sheer timidity that students saw in adult protest.” In the third chapter, Polletta argues that metonymic structures led to the peaks and troughs in radical southern civil rights movement organizations. Next, Polletta analyzes storytelling in deliberative forums, such as the online forum convened after the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. She found that narratives’ openness to ambiguity fostered agreement and compromise across differing opinions on how to commemorate the site of the attack. In chapter 5, Polletta explores whether battered women hindered their own advocacy efforts by “styling themselves as victims,” and argues that disadvantaged groups can benefit from sharing non-canonical stories that merge victimhood with agency and survival. Finally, Polletta examines storytelling about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the House and Senate floors, finding that his legacy served competing discursive purposes across racial and political lines, seldom to substantive legislative ends.
Polletta convincingly describes how certain people and places legitimate storytelling as epistemically valuable, whereas other people and places do not. Privileged people and groups are more likely to reap the benefits of storytelling and less likely to face its risks than marginalized people and groups, says Polletta. For example, she notes that “stories are differently intelligible, useful, and authoritative depending on who tells them, for what purpose, and in what setting.” She notes that people doubt value of narrative in “technical, policy-oriented, information-driven, or otherwise politically serious” settings. If a litigant tells their story in small claims court, the judge will find it difficult to fit within the “straightforward chains of causality” that the court requires, and thus storytelling may disadvantage the litigant. So, too, for survivors of rape, sexual assault, or domestic violence. In short, many people view storytelling as unserious when compared with formal research and evidence, and people invoke narratives with varying degrees of success depending on their own identity and the forum in which they sit.
The book also expertly analyzes the role of ambiguity in storytelling and how storytelling can be unnecessarily cordoned off from policymaking discussions. While narrative’s ambiguity can sometimes lead to confusion, Polletta argues that it often fosters greater understanding between disparate parties. During an online deliberative forum regarding the 9/11 site, Polletta’s analysis found that narrative’s openness to interpretation “allowed deliberators both to disagree with previous claims and to suggest compromises, all in the guise of telling similar stories.” In other words, at least during an online deliberative forum, narrative fostered empathy and consensus building. However, Polletta also acknowledges that forum participants failed to invoke stories in their discussions of established policy. The same reality held true for policymakers invoking Dr. King: they overwhelmingly invoked his legacy in speeches on commemorative occasions and often failed to invoke the past in “substantive legislative discussions” that could achieve tangible progress for communities of color. While ambiguity in narratives can bridge divides, people hesitate to invoke narratives in political settings.
Despite the redeeming aspects of her argument, Polletta’s overall style, the book’s structure, and many of her substantive arguments fail to inspire, convince, or captivate the general reader. First, stylistically, Polletta writes academically, frequently invoking terms of art like “canonicity,” “metonymy,” “polysemous,” “semantic dissonance” and “perspectival.” Perhaps this vocabulary resonates with an audience of sociology or linguistics graduate students and professors, but to the general reader, her arguments are overly theoretical and vague. Problematically, her esoteric style makes her book less accessible to constituencies – i.e. movement builders – who could benefit from reading it. This stylistic choice also stands in stark and ironic contrast to the central focus of the book: storytelling. Polletta could have taken a different approach, writing in a more narrative non-fiction style to mirror the subject matter of the book, or simply could have followed one of the hallmarks of writing advice: avoid pretentious language, or write like you speak. This approach would have made her argument more accessible to a general readership and more closely resembled the subject matter of her book.
The author’s failure to explain why she structured the book the way she did and her failure to account for potential limitations in her research also limited the book’s readability and credibility. While the introduction sets a road map for the book, it goes into unnecessary detail about each chapter’s theme, making it difficult to understand without greater context. Polletta did not explain why she chose each case study that she did, nor why she ordered them in the way that she did, nor the extent to which each case study could be taken as representative of a broader trend or phenomenon. For instance, when invoking her study of the post-9/11 deliberative forum, she explains the process by which she and other researchers identified and coded every story told – 197 altogether in 5,345 messages – and then extrapolated data points and themes from the analysis. However, she failed to acknowledge the limitation in applying those themes to other settings by recognizing that this was only one study of one online deliberative forum about an extraordinarily emotionally charged incident. She made a similar misstep in reporting the data on legislators invoking Dr. King by failing to acknowledge the limitations of the dataset. Conscientious researchers typically acknowledge potential limitations in their work and explain why even still the results are relevant, something Polletta failed to account for.
Finally, while Polletta made many valuable substantive arguments about storytelling in movements and politics, others lacked fortitude. For instance, in her analysis of SNCC’s structural impediments during the 1960s, her link to narrative and storytelling is tenuous at best. She argues that participatory democracy became “metonymically associated” with unwieldy programmatic styles and the increasing dominance of whites within the organization. Did “metonymic relations” in SNCC workers’ characterizations of their organization really explain “key features of SNCC’s shift in strategic commitment?” It seems much more likely that other substantive factors, such as the swift expansion of the organization overall, the growing dominance of whites within the organization, and the over-theorization of effective organizing techniques contributed to the shift in SNCC’s strategic direction. In another substantive flaw, Polletta often draws upon oversimplified dichotomies instead of pointing directly to the nuance contained in them. See, for example: “Is storytelling in deliberation good or bad for disadvantaged groups? Both,” and, “Is narrative fundamentally subversive or hegemonic? Both.” Perhaps she meant to use these dichotomies to eventually draw out nuances, but they read as reductionist rather than illuminating.
Nearly twenty years since the publication of It Was Like a Fever, storytelling remains an effective yet fraught advocacy and communications tool. The Harvard Kennedy School offers a course taught by famous organizer Marshall Ganz called Public Narrative: Leadership, Storytelling, and Action, based on the premise that stories move people to action, leadership necessarily entails storytelling, and that storytelling can bridge otherwise insurmountable divides. Given the continuing relevance of storytelling to our political and movement-building discourse, many academics could benefit from reading It Was Like a Fever to understand the sociological benefits and drawbacks of narrative in movements and politics. However, the book will likely not reach those who could benefit most from its wisdom and cautions: movement builders.
It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics, published in 2006 by American sociologist Francesca Polletta, evaluates the efficacy of invoking narrative in movement building and politics. In each chapter, she studies a site of movement, protest, or politics through the lens of storytelling and aims to answer questions that have befuddled movement scholars for years. What she finds often runs contrary to what movement scholars understand about persuasive advocacy, deliberation in participatory democracy settings, moral suasion in the courtroom, and storytelling by public officials. She concludes that “narrative’s power stems from its complexity, indeed, its ambiguity.” We often imbue stories with our own meanings. While storytelling can be politically powerful, according to Polletta, “narrative comes with risks as well as benefits” for “disadvantaged groups.” Because certain spaces (like in legislative chambers and courtrooms) treat stories told by laypeople as unserious or easily manipulable, narrative has not realized its full potential to ignite change.
Throughout the book, Polletta cites both historical and contemporary examples of storytelling in movement building and politics. Written in the aftermath of the Bush v. Kerry election, Polletta opens the book by describing Republicans’ effective use of narrative to capture the votes of the American public. In the wake of 9/11, Republicans gave voters “villains and heroes; new characters in age-old dramas of threat, vengeance, and salvation,” whereas “the Democrats ticked off a dry list of issues.” In her second chapter, Polletta analyzes how the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) narratively reconstructed the sit-ins they organized as “spontaneous,” facially contradicting the extensive strategic planning that the sit-ins depended on. Polletta argues that, when describing the sit-ins as “spontaneous,” “students conveyed the sit-ins’ urgent, moral, and local character,” standing stark contrast to the “sheer timidity that students saw in adult protest.” In the third chapter, Polletta argues that metonymic structures led to the peaks and troughs in radical southern civil rights movement organizations. Next, Polletta analyzes storytelling in deliberative forums, such as the online forum convened after the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. She found that narratives’ openness to ambiguity fostered agreement and compromise across differing opinions on how to commemorate the site of the attack. In chapter 5, Polletta explores whether battered women hindered their own advocacy efforts by “styling themselves as victims,” and argues that disadvantaged groups can benefit from sharing non-canonical stories that merge victimhood with agency and survival. Finally, Polletta examines storytelling about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the House and Senate floors, finding that his legacy served competing discursive purposes across racial and political lines, seldom to substantive legislative ends.
Polletta convincingly describes how certain people and places legitimate storytelling as epistemically valuable, whereas other people and places do not. Privileged people and groups are more likely to reap the benefits of storytelling and less likely to face its risks than marginalized people and groups, says Polletta. For example, she notes that “stories are differently intelligible, useful, and authoritative depending on who tells them, for what purpose, and in what setting.” She notes that people doubt value of narrative in “technical, policy-oriented, information-driven, or otherwise politically serious” settings. If a litigant tells their story in small claims court, the judge will find it difficult to fit within the “straightforward chains of causality” that the court requires, and thus storytelling may disadvantage the litigant. So, too, for survivors of rape, sexual assault, or domestic violence. In short, many people view storytelling as unserious when compared with formal research and evidence, and people invoke narratives with varying degrees of success depending on their own identity and the forum in which they sit.
The book also expertly analyzes the role of ambiguity in storytelling and how storytelling can be unnecessarily cordoned off from policymaking discussions. While narrative’s ambiguity can sometimes lead to confusion, Polletta argues that it often fosters greater understanding between disparate parties. During an online deliberative forum regarding the 9/11 site, Polletta’s analysis found that narrative’s openness to interpretation “allowed deliberators both to disagree with previous claims and to suggest compromises, all in the guise of telling similar stories.” In other words, at least during an online deliberative forum, narrative fostered empathy and consensus building. However, Polletta also acknowledges that forum participants failed to invoke stories in their discussions of established policy. The same reality held true for policymakers invoking Dr. King: they overwhelmingly invoked his legacy in speeches on commemorative occasions and often failed to invoke the past in “substantive legislative discussions” that could achieve tangible progress for communities of color. While ambiguity in narratives can bridge divides, people hesitate to invoke narratives in political settings.
Despite the redeeming aspects of her argument, Polletta’s overall style, the book’s structure, and many of her substantive arguments fail to inspire, convince, or captivate the general reader. First, stylistically, Polletta writes academically, frequently invoking terms of art like “canonicity,” “metonymy,” “polysemous,” “semantic dissonance” and “perspectival.” Perhaps this vocabulary resonates with an audience of sociology or linguistics graduate students and professors, but to the general reader, her arguments are overly theoretical and vague. Problematically, her esoteric style makes her book less accessible to constituencies – i.e. movement builders – who could benefit from reading it. This stylistic choice also stands in stark and ironic contrast to the central focus of the book: storytelling. Polletta could have taken a different approach, writing in a more narrative non-fiction style to mirror the subject matter of the book, or simply could have followed one of the hallmarks of writing advice: avoid pretentious language, or write like you speak. This approach would have made her argument more accessible to a general readership and more closely resembled the subject matter of her book.
The author’s failure to explain why she structured the book the way she did and her failure to account for potential limitations in her research also limited the book’s readability and credibility. While the introduction sets a road map for the book, it goes into unnecessary detail about each chapter’s theme, making it difficult to understand without greater context. Polletta did not explain why she chose each case study that she did, nor why she ordered them in the way that she did, nor the extent to which each case study could be taken as representative of a broader trend or phenomenon. For instance, when invoking her study of the post-9/11 deliberative forum, she explains the process by which she and other researchers identified and coded every story told – 197 altogether in 5,345 messages – and then extrapolated data points and themes from the analysis. However, she failed to acknowledge the limitation in applying those themes to other settings by recognizing that this was only one study of one online deliberative forum about an extraordinarily emotionally charged incident. She made a similar misstep in reporting the data on legislators invoking Dr. King by failing to acknowledge the limitations of the dataset. Conscientious researchers typically acknowledge potential limitations in their work and explain why even still the results are relevant, something Polletta failed to account for.
Finally, while Polletta made many valuable substantive arguments about storytelling in movements and politics, others lacked fortitude. For instance, in her analysis of SNCC’s structural impediments during the 1960s, her link to narrative and storytelling is tenuous at best. She argues that participatory democracy became “metonymically associated” with unwieldy programmatic styles and the increasing dominance of whites within the organization. Did “metonymic relations” in SNCC workers’ characterizations of their organization really explain “key features of SNCC’s shift in strategic commitment?” It seems much more likely that other substantive factors, such as the swift expansion of the organization overall, the growing dominance of whites within the organization, and the over-theorization of effective organizing techniques contributed to the shift in SNCC’s strategic direction. In another substantive flaw, Polletta often draws upon oversimplified dichotomies instead of pointing directly to the nuance contained in them. See, for example: “Is storytelling in deliberation good or bad for disadvantaged groups? Both,” and, “Is narrative fundamentally subversive or hegemonic? Both.” Perhaps she meant to use these dichotomies to eventually draw out nuances, but they read as reductionist rather than illuminating.
Nearly twenty years since the publication of It Was Like a Fever, storytelling remains an effective yet fraught advocacy and communications tool. The Harvard Kennedy School offers a course taught by famous organizer Marshall Ganz called Public Narrative: Leadership, Storytelling, and Action, based on the premise that stories move people to action, leadership necessarily entails storytelling, and that storytelling can bridge otherwise insurmountable divides. Given the continuing relevance of storytelling to our political and movement-building discourse, many academics could benefit from reading It Was Like a Fever to understand the sociological benefits and drawbacks of narrative in movements and politics. However, the book will likely not reach those who could benefit most from its wisdom and cautions: movement builders.
July 13, 2022
I'm really drawn to the ideas in this book about narrative epistemology and using a sociological approach to studying narratives that inspire change (in the form of social movements, rebuilding from tragedy, legal proceedings, etc). Using narrative epistemology, the author argues that students that effective narratives have a level of interpretative ambiguity that keeps audiences coming back to participate in their retelling, which then spurs more interpretation. For example, during the 1960's Greensboro sit-ins that jump-started the Civil Rights Movement, students described the pull to protest as spontaneous or "like a fever" inviting other students, whose identity was increasingly tied with that of "activist": on the world stage, to experience the fever for themselves. Moreover, because we expect work to have to interpret narratives, especially fictional narratives, we are better able to hold the tension of disparate ideas that fosters deliberation and empathy.
This idea of ambiguity (and its different types) was new to me even though I've been studying narrative for a while. For that reason, I feel like I learned a lot from this book but there was still some things I didn't quite grasp from the example she used (perspectival ambiguity in a particular activist organization).
This idea of ambiguity (and its different types) was new to me even though I've been studying narrative for a while. For that reason, I feel like I learned a lot from this book but there was still some things I didn't quite grasp from the example she used (perspectival ambiguity in a particular activist organization).
May 10, 2023
This book by Francesca Polletta studies storytelling in collective movements aimed at bringing social changes. She analyses the linguistic dynamics embedded in the narratives to make sense of why or why not they may work.
Polletta takes into consideration five different examples from American history where the storytelling has bore critical implications for movements, their strategising, public deliberations, in case of legal judgements or in congressional debates.
It is quite an engaging read but replete with academic jargon, especially when discussing linguistics, that may restrict the readership. Also, since the context is strictly American, one might wonder how the analysis may relate to storytelling elsewhere eg in a country as diverse as India. I don’t think it can offer us much insight into how narratives in collective social movements might work in the socio cultural and political dynamics of our society.
Polletta takes into consideration five different examples from American history where the storytelling has bore critical implications for movements, their strategising, public deliberations, in case of legal judgements or in congressional debates.
It is quite an engaging read but replete with academic jargon, especially when discussing linguistics, that may restrict the readership. Also, since the context is strictly American, one might wonder how the analysis may relate to storytelling elsewhere eg in a country as diverse as India. I don’t think it can offer us much insight into how narratives in collective social movements might work in the socio cultural and political dynamics of our society.
March 4, 2019
For the most part it felt like the theoretical contributions of this book were somewhat light and uninvolved - stories and narratives were often talked about in very general terms, rather than with any great specificity. That being said, the case studies examined were very interesting and the data used to draw some rather fascinating conclusions about the cultural use of narratives was really engaging. Polletta's style is very fluid and easy to read, which made the whole endeavor an enjoyable one, even as I felt at times that there could have been a bit more detail brough into the theoretical components of the book.
May 5, 2019
Mind blown! Polletta explores the use of storytelling and its devices in politics, protest, and the law, in order to tease out its many uses and abuses. Her book uses case study chapters to look at how stories mobilize people to political action, but also how they can reinforce assumptions based in existing power, gender, and racial structures. Once you get past the academic jargon, the book has so much to offer, especially at a time when we’ve come to understand how many evils a good story can cover up, even one with few words: “We’re going to build a wall and Mexico is going to pay for it.”
December 14, 2020
I read this in my Storytelling for Social Justice class in graduate school. The case studies through each chapter were very interesting but I wished there was more synthesis throughout regarding their relation to one another. They all held important points regarding the importance of context for storytelling, but it felt a bit disjointed to read it cover to cover.
May 9, 2015
Мы испытываем двойственное отношение к историям. Это настоящее раскрытия себя, "обнажение", но одновременно байка. Это заземление разговора, но одновременно болтовня. Двойственное отношение, возможность разных трактовок создает для слабой стороны риск, что сильная сторона разговора из двух трактовок в каждом случае сможет добиться выгодной для себя. Известно: "начальник задерживается, ты -- опаздываешь".
Книга Франчески Полетта показывает, что несмотря на сомнения протестным движениям стоит использовать рассказывание историй. Истории, как следует из статистики, порождают больший отклик, чем рассуждение, большую поддержку и, что еще более важно, большее вовлечение в разговор, в развитие темы.
Также существенно, что обращение к историям ясно показывает, что речь идет о ценностях, о настоящей политике, а не об экспертном решении проблем (аналогу школьного "решения задач"). Истории делают то, что делают хорошая литература: позволяют понять человека с существенно другим жизненным опытом, человека другого статуса и даже другой эпохи. Привилегированные группы используют истории, а нередко Историю, для той же цели -- ценностного разговора. Рассуждения и статистика для этого плохо подходит. Это означает, что есть вопрос, который проливает свет на политическую жизнь в стране: "как у нас сторителлингом?"
Книга Франчески Полетта показывает, что несмотря на сомнения протестным движениям стоит использовать рассказывание историй. Истории, как следует из статистики, порождают больший отклик, чем рассуждение, большую поддержку и, что еще более важно, большее вовлечение в разговор, в развитие темы.
Также существенно, что обращение к историям ясно показывает, что речь идет о ценностях, о настоящей политике, а не об экспертном решении проблем (аналогу школьного "решения задач"). Истории делают то, что делают хорошая литература: позволяют понять человека с существенно другим жизненным опытом, человека другого статуса и даже другой эпохи. Привилегированные группы используют истории, а нередко Историю, для той же цели -- ценностного разговора. Рассуждения и статистика для этого плохо подходит. Это означает, что есть вопрос, который проливает свет на политическую жизнь в стране: "как у нас сторителлингом?"
July 29, 2014
What I enjoy most about Polletta's work is that she so carefully and smartly defines the tensive space we inhabit whenever we employ narrative--and especially personal narrative. She explores the often false dichotomies: reason and emotion, authenticity and schlock, victimization and agency, and more. With the many facile applications of "story," "storytelling," and "narrative" out there today, Polletta's study reminds us that we can never talk about story divorced from context, politics and ideology.
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