Oral History
Assignment
Conduct an interview with someone who has been affected by empire. Your interviewee should live in the United States or be part of a diasporic community. Transcribe portions of the interview that you consider to be most important. Then, narratively reconstruct an aspect of your interviewee’s story. Your story should present the historical context that surrounds your interviewee’s experience and indicate your own interpretation of these historical events. How does your interviewee’s individual narrative deepen, complicate, or even contradict the larger social history of his or her community?
Your interview subject must give you written permission to release the interview content. Please submit a completed consent form with your final draft. Your final paper will be between 4–6 pages in length and will be worth 25% of your writing grade.
Note: Your instructor may allow you to complete this assignment as a multimedia project, but you must first ask permission to do so. Please see the Multimedia Digital Tools for more information. Final multimedia projects should be 5–7 minutes in length.
Learning Goals
- Reinforce and hone skills acquired in the fall and winter quarters: to compose rhetorically persuasive introductions and conclusions, present cohesive paragraphs with well-selected and well-contextualized evidence from interview and contextual secondary sources, and develop organic transitions and warrants that show the progress of ideas over time
- Gather, transcribe, and synthesize evidence from an oral history interview
- Adopt the appropriate stance, style, and genre conventions characteristic of a literary reconstruction of an oral history while recognizing and adapting to differences in the genre and audience expectations of a more literary style
- Develop more advanced information literacy skills for locating contextual information, conducting research at the university library, and using online journalistic databases
- Demonstrate flexible strategies for actively generating, revising, editing, and proofreading drafts while also reflecting on the process of writing itself
Required Reading
Before you begin brainstorming for this assignment, make sure you have read the following:
• Vo, Linda. “Basic Guidelines for Conducting Oral Histories.” Humanities Core Writer’s Handbook, edited by Larisa Castillo and Tamara Beauchamp, XanEdu, 2018, 123–132.
• Pierson, Patricia and Larisa Castillo. “Literary Journalism.” Humanities Core Writer’s Handbook, edited by Larisa Castillo and Tamara Beauchamp, XanEdu, 2018, 133–140.
The Writing Process
Your Oral History Assignment is composed of two parts: an oral history interview and a narrative reconstruction that crosses the disciplines of history, literature, and journalism.
Before thinking about the writing portion of the assignment, you will have to find someone to interview: a person who has been affected by empire. Your choice of interviewee depends on the definition of empire you have developed over the course of the year. Surely, part of what you have learned thus far in Humanities Core is that empires and imperialism can be political, economic, linguistic, and cultural. As our discussions about American expansionism and imperialism have suggested this quarter, it is often difficult to ascertain when and where an empire’s influence begins and ends.
When you think broadly about empire, you will find that you have a wide choice of interviewees: family members, neighbors, roommates, teachers, members of a religious community, immigrants, scholars, business people involved in international trade, members of the military, etc. Your only constraint is that you cannot interview your parents (though one of your classmates may). Focus on a person who is important to you personally or who has lived through a cultural moment that interests you.
Before you conduct your interview, make sure you have read Linda Vo’s Writer’s Handbook chapter “Basic Guidelines for Conducting Oral Histories.” This will help you to anticipate the interpersonal issues and technical requirements of the interview and to begin drafting questions for your interviewee. To assist with the technological components of recording and transcribing, we provide a guide to Multimedia Digital Tools, which includes no-cost software, web apps, and online services for audio recording, editing, and mixing. Once the interview is complete and you decide on the events that you wish to reconstruct in your story, familiarize yourself with the constraints and conventions of literary journalism by reading Larisa Castillo and Patricia Pierson’s Writer’s Handbook chapter on “Literary Journalism.” This will help you understand how “framing” helps you present your perspective alongside a narrative reconstruction of your interviewee’s experiences. The chapter also explains various rhetorical strategies for reconstructing episodes from or aspects of your interviewee’s experience.
To understand this new style of writing, it will also be helpful to read successful past oral history papers posted on the website. As you will see from these samples, effective narrative reconstruction should include vivid, sensory descriptions of setting/context of events, the relationship between the writer and interviewee (when relevant), and the behavior, physical gestures, and surrounding environment of the interviewee at the time of the interview. Your story should blend summarized speech with direct/indirect/free indirect quotation. You should interweave evidence garnered from outside research with interview material, thus showing how the individual story merges with a collective history. Your reconstruction should foreground point of view, both your own and the perspective from which the story being told. Finally, your essay should offer an emotional “core” or central takeaway of the narrative.
Most important in understanding this assignment is that the goals of the interview and the narrative reconstruction of your interviewee’s story are distinct. The interview should give voice to your narrator’s memory of the past, that is, his or her individual history. Without a specific agenda or view, you should interview with the intention of foregrounding their memory. After completing your interview, interpret the transcript from your own perspective. Did the narrator’s story reinforce or contradict the social history you researched? How has that history shaped their memory of the past and their present identity? How has it shaped your own understanding of that history? By responding to these questions, your story will present both the narrator’s perspective and your own.
Last updated 3/19/2019
