In the TED Talk by Chimamanda Adichie, she talks about how damaging and isolating the Single Story is to understanding and connecting to others around the world. She began her talk with her childhood and how she would love to read american and english literature. They would transport her to new worlds and introduce her to new ideas and items that would fascinate her. The only problem with it was that a majority of the stories were about the white male. As she began writing at a young age, her stories would follow the white male and the items/ ideas that were not in her life. She talked about how impressionable and vulnerable we are when reading literature, so encompassing a multitude of stories that represent people from all walks of life will closer connect people and see each other as fellow humans.
The single story is enforced by who tells the story, how they are told, where they are being told and how many are being told. This all plays into the power dynamics that plague our world. When Adichie came to America for University, her roommate was under the impression that she came from a poverty stricken third world country. Her roommate thought this because of the single story that has been fed to her by american media, literature and entertainment. Many stories that we are told only focus on the negatives which flattens the world, when in reality even the most impoverished locations are thriving with life and joy even under their hard and terrible circumstances. The single story creates stereotypes. Now Adichie talked about how stereotypes are true to an extent, but they are incomplete. What Adichie asked you to do is engage with all the stories of the location and person. We are all complex and have multiple facets to our lives, we are more similar than what power dominated literature and entertainment is depicting.
Looking at how to embrace the words of Adichie in one's everyday life will help further connect you to the world around you. With what I make and how this could be involved is interrogating who’s story is being told, how it's being told, and is the story specific to a person/ group or is it more vague and creating a simple “silhouette” in a sense, where it doesn't matter what the person looks like. I think just simply looking at all the stories of a place and person will help us further connect as one world.
Comments
Post a Comment