Revelation of Self in Language: Narrative Identity as Emergent in Conversation

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Human beings have always been storytellers: civilizations have thrived on stories, cultures have been sustained through stories, and societies have always shared stories as a way to reiterate moral notions of good and bad. But what do our personal stories tell others about us? Do personal narratives too reify cultural notions and social stereotypes of good and bad? Or are interpersonal stories more grounded in contextual realities, anchored in embodied, gendered lives, and therefore fragile re-presentations of our selves for others? This book draws us into such questions about personal identity as gleaned from narratives recounted in various contexts. Firmly ensconced within the discipline of linguistics and using the framework of Conversation Analysis, it nevertheless goes beyond these boundaries to finely capture the moment of interlocution when our stories define us in conversation. It proffers insights into why and how we tell our life-stories - always in awareness of an 'other' with whom we are conversing and who has the power to reframe our stories thereby 're-creating' us. Morality, goodness, gendered identity are all powerful and complex social notions and categories, and yet this book-through its fine-grained analysis of storytelling within contexts of conversation- tells us how stories fashion us, recreate us and sometimes even save us from our own traumatic pasts.

This is a useful book for theorists of language, identity and narratives; at the same time the general reader will be drawn into the mysterious and alluring ways in which language, even while creating our selves, depends on others for self-affirmation. The author presents candid snapshots of people from varied backgrounds sharing their life-stories and revealing their selfhood in language.

Suranjana Barua is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at the Indian Institute of Information Technology Guwahati (IIITG). After completing her MA, MPhil and PhD from the University of Delhi, she worked at the Centre for Assamese, Tezpur University, Assam, before joining IIITG. Her current areas of academic interest are sociolinguistics, gender studies, and the socio-cultural and political history of Assam. She has served as a language consultant for various organizations across India, and is an accredited aviation English expert and trainer under the Ministry of Civil Aviation, Government of India. Barua has several research articles to her credit, published in books and journals. She is also a well-known translator from Assamese to English, and has translated works by eminent litterateurs including Rajanikanta Bordoloi, Arun Sarma, Golap Khound, Chandraprabha Saikiani, Bishnu Prasad Rabha, Bhupen Hazarika and Indira (Mamoni Raisom) Goswami. She is an editorial committee member of the journal Language and Language Teaching.

This book hinges on the premise that humans are default storytellers. A story is a human being's first encounter with the universe and with the world at large. It is that fantastic make-believe world we imagine, come to inhabit, and derive pleasure and life lessons from. Stories introduce us to our societies and anchor us in our cultures - they are our escape pods from harsh reality and yet (as some theorists say and as you will find out in later pages of this book!) stories sort of 'prepare us for life itself and, in that sense, are our life coaches. But what does our personal storied universe really look like? And why do we tell stories about ourselves? What is it that makes us interesting as the heroes of our own worlds?

This book makes the claim that our stories about ourselves (or, our selves) are not mere 'historical recreations' of our own pasts. We tell stories about ourselves, for others, at a particular moment in time and towards a certain end. In this sense, our life stories are startling portrayals and yet contingent projections of our 'selves' as good and worthy individuals for the benefit of 'others' from whom we seek recognition and validation for our very existence through this act of storytelling. Thus, humans are not just perennially geared towards storytelling it is imprinted in our cultural and cognitive DNA, so to speak - but stories are also a yardstick of human sociality (example, gossip) and 'immortalize' our personal lives by becoming articulated and thus externalized at a moment of interlocution with and for an other. What exactly our life stories reveal about us and how narrating a life story positions us as good selves for others to acknowledge us are, in a nutshell, the primary curiosities that this book indulges in.

Indexicals is a hot topic now, within the so-called 'third wave of sociolinguistics, but when we started twenty years back - and Suranjana was one of the students freshly out of the MA (Linguistics) batch of the University of Delhi who took the bait gladly and willingly- we were making inroads into the domain by throwing up the challenge of deciphering 'social meanings' from social 'texts' (conversations), and very loudly NOT from social contexts. The hypothesis that I was interested in testing as a supervisor was to show how language need not be predicated upon the predictable social variables (like class, caste, gender, etc.); that is, how language (in the form of social 'texts') need not index social contexts.

To set up such a hypothesis, let alone test it from real-life conversational situations, was a challenge- and was resisted locally, quite aggressively, to say the least. There was pressure from an unexpected gendered coalition against the topic and the theme, and the idea that two male professors are proposing to supervise a thesis (even though it was only an MPhil) on gender. Finally, the unfamiliarity of the committee with Judith Butler's work, especially her first book Gender Trouble, on which I was running a reading group at that time with my students, Suranjana being at the forefront of the group, saved the day and we were 'allowed' to proceed with the dissertation.

On the one hand, mine was essentially a Foucauldian project, and on the other, an attempt to rid sociolinguistics of its inherent bias of sentencing forever a social group or individual to their social context, with no hope of ever emerging out of one's class, caste or other minority status.