Negotiations in Performance: The Storytelling Performances of Two Adolescent Afghan Narrators
Benjamin Gatling
The Ohio State University
Abstract:
This paper examines the storytelling performance of two adolescent male Afghan narrators. In the summer of 1976, the two narrators, Jalaludin and Mohammed Asef, sat down with Margaret Mills and her tape recorder in Kabul, Afghanistan. Their performance encompassed items across the spectrum of oral, Persian fictive genres, from conventional stories similar to those found across the Islamic world to obscene märchen. During the performance, the narrators repeatedly parsed notions of identity, ethnic, linguistic, and otherwise, within in a joke cycle. This paper illustrates how their ambiguous handling of issues of identity in the performance is reflective of the boys’ ambiguous relationship to the categories named in real life. (more…)
RSS Feed
