Glocal Narratives of Resilience and Healing

Abstract

The introductory chapter to this volume proposes the term “glocal narratives of resilience” to draw attention to a category of cultural narratives currently emerging all over the world and not only staging the resilience discourses that have become a global phenomenon, but engaging aesthetically and ideologically in (re)shaping them. It is divided in three sections. The first part tracks the origins and development of various strands of resilience thinking from the second half of the twentieth century to the present, when resilience has become a pervasive idiom of global governance. It also explores the use of alternative terms to talk about resilience in specific geopolitical contexts. For instance, special attention is paid to the theorization of resilience in Indigenous thinking through the notions of survivance, resistance, refusal and resurgence, which constitute a counterpoint to hegemonic resilience discourse by both contesting and affirming processes of adaptation, survival and radical transformation. The second section focuses on the agency of cultural narratives of resilience and their function as cognitive mechanisms for the generation and/or contestation of received notions of resilience. Finally, this introduction presents a survey of the twelve chapters in this volume, situating them within the various theoretical frameworks delineated previously and tying them together.