Social constructivist approaches to the analysis of narrative are well established now; key works include Bamberg, De Fina, & Schiffrin (Reference Bamberg, De Fina and Schiffrin2007), De Fina & Georgakopoulou (Reference De Fina and Georgakopoulou2012), and others. It is an approach to which I have contributed myself (e.g. Baynham & De Fina Reference Baynham and De Fina2005), so any critical reflection in this review can be taken as in part self-criticism. In brief, this approach emphasizes the discursive construction of identities, subject positions, and values in narrative, methodologically drawing on discourse analysis and linguistic ethnography. The story in important ways does not precede the telling, as fact to be reported, but is talked up in the telling. Much of this work has focussed more or less explicitly on questions of identity, examining for example how identity is talked up or brought about discursively, rather than as a pre-existing essence. As such, the approach aligns with similar developments in discursive psychology.

The book adopts this approach whole-heartedly, and it would be easy to review it simply as a contribution to narrative analysis. As I read it, however, other ways of evaluating it came to mind, as I attempt to explain below. The authors focus on a historical corpus: narratives told by former slaves, collected on the website ‘Voices from the days of slavery’,Footnote ¹ where the audio-recordings of the interviews, conducted largely in the 1930s and 40s, with one in the 1970s, can easily be accessed along with the original transcriptions. One of the pleasures of reading this book is being able to click onto the sound file and hear the stories told.

Typically in a contemporary study a researcher would supplement the linguistic analysis of the narrative with ethnographic data. In the case of a historical corpus such as this one, it is not an option, so the authors rely on historical writing to flesh out the contexts in which these stories are told. This brings in the shaping influence of the history of slavery in the United States—its violence and its painful and sustained intertwining with emergent ideologies of white supremacy, longue durée history—leading up to that history which was within the memory of those interviewed, immediately prebellum and postbellum, the last years of slavery and its abolition. Also relevant are the historical context and circumstances that led to the focus on collecting narratives from these witnesses in the 1930s and 40s. The book provides important and informative background by way of historical contextualization, but I wanted to know more, particularly about the historical context that gave rise to this attention to hitherto unheard voices, in relation to the strong emergence of black voice and activism that led up to the civil rights movement. Why this sudden anthropological and sociological interest in black lives, black religion, and black music? Many of the interviewers involved in the project, black and white, were also active in the emergent civil rights movement. Two of the white interviewers appeared before McCarthy's Un-American Affairs committee. One of these, as a consequence, left the US to live and work in Europe for ten years. Interviewers had studied the emerging field of urban sociology in Chicago and Philadelphia and folklore in Texas. The black researchers have connections with Fisk University, a key place in the civil rights struggle. With all of the methodological flaws and silencing that Clifton & Van De Mieroop highlight in their analysis, these projects can and should be connected to the broader activist and progressive trends of the times.

The social constructivist approach emphasizes context and the local construction of meanings. Yet it can also be seen as remarkably generic and value-free. It can be applied to any sort of narrative data. The story of some trivial contretemps I experience at the supermarket is just as analytically interesting qua narrative as the terrifying story of a migrant crossing the Mediterranean, the queer asylum seeker recounting experience of police or crowd violence, or, as here, the day-to-day experience of slavery. Clifton & Van De Mieroop have not shied away from these hard topics. Previous research includes the narratives of a former Nazi storm trooper and former Belgian colonialists. My suggestion though is that such research needs to be evaluated, not just as an opportunity to display and contribute technically to narrative analysis, but also through how it contributes additional insights into the substantive topics addressed—here slavery and ideologies of white supremacy, remembering and forgetting, speaking back or being silenced. So how do the authors do this?

Analytically, the authors draw on Bamberg's positioning framework: Level One concerning the positioning of characters in the story world; Level Two concerning the positioning of speaker and interlocutors in the context of telling; Level Three positioning the narrating self in relation to prevailing belief systems, norms, and ideologies. The authors here connect Level Three positioning with James Gee's Big D discourse and the notion of the master narrative, which forms part of the title. I would argue and I think, given the way they highlight it analytically, the authors would agree, that it is Level Three consideration of these master narratives that enables my second evaluative question to be addressed. These master narratives are the point of suture with pervasive discourses of white supremacy, justifications of violence, and the historical silencing of black voices on the one hand and speaking back on the other. We can see, with the help of Clifton & Van De Mieroop's analysis, a micropolitics of voice being played out in these interviews.

In line with its social constructivist orientation, the analysis emphasizes throughout the talking up of master narratives and counter narratives: meaning is brought about interactively. Yet I would also advocate (as I do in Baynham Reference Baynham, Risager and Dervin2015) attention to the historical trajectories of sedimented brought along meanings—here the master narratives and emergent counter narratives identified, through careful genealogical and historical work to trace and nail the development of racist and white suprematist discourses. A recent book, Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the beginning (Kendi Reference Kendi2016), does just that.

The present study focuses primarily on master and counter narratives but does not neglect the construction of the story world, with its slaves and masters, its ‘good’ and ‘bad’ slaves, and resistance in the form of underground religious meetings, sometimes violently disrupted. These are the small stories of a violently coercive institution, often, however, reflecting its peaceable surfaces, and as such they are at times very poignant. Nor does it neglect the impact of the interactional construction of the interview context. We see moments when university-educated black researchers struggle to develop rapport with their interviewees, as when eminent sociologist Charles Johnson tries to interest George Johnson in talking about jazz and blues, while he only wants to talk about brass band. Elsewhere white interviewers cut off talk that is veering into uncomfortable areas, changing topic abruptly, contributing to a silencing of counter narratives but also highlighting (rarer) occasions when such stories get told, and contributing in a micropolitics of voice, to the voices that say no to racist constructions.

In the conclusion, the authors strike a note of puzzlement at the expression of conflicting master narratives, often within the same stretch of discourse: ‘In our data, both Fountain Hughes and Charlie Smith are found to take up contradicting positions to different master narratives within the space of a single interview’ (208).

This is a conclusion that Kendi also comes to, writing ‘Anyone can believe both racist and anti-racist ideas’ (Kendi Reference Kendi2016:10). An ongoing project of decolonizing the mind is to grapple with this muddle of half-articulated ideas, to make them visible and available for critique and sense-making. To answer my two evaluative questions, the book makes a distinctive contribution to narrative theory, giving substance to the somewhat less well articulated Level Three positioning through the use of the master narrative analysis. In terms of a contribution to thinking about slavery and discourses of racism and white supremacy, it shows how easily unexamined positions can inform and distort interaction, even on the part of those who approach with goodwill and political commitment such as the researchers who conducted the interviews. We see how these master narratives are sustained and re-enacted conversationally, in small stories that nevertheless evoke big issues. Since the publication of this book, the American polity has taken another lurch, making the critique of racist and white suprematist tropes in everyday discourse ever more urgent. This book shows how to notice these tropes in the small stories of everyday life.