November 30 marked the ten year anniversary of the WTO Protests in Seattle. Like many events I look back on from my past, I have this weird dual sensation of "Wow, has it only been ten years?" and "Wow, that seems like a lifetime ago."

I presented the paper "'Whose Streets? Our Streets! Whose World? Our World!' -- Narratives & Negotiation after the WTO" at the California Folklore Society meeting in the spring of 2000. It was a difficult paper both to write and to present as the trauma from the day -- the teargas, the police, the media, those darn Eugene anarchists -- impacted me deeply. (It's a trauma that remains, I found, when I tried to re-watch some footage from the protests.)

Many of the ideas I started to formulate in this paper -- how protest, performance, and personal experience narrative help shape community -- were developed throughout much of my academic work. In addition, the idea of being a participant-observer, of being implicated by the subject-matter one is documenting, was important for me as I tried to negotiate being an activist and a scholar.

Looking back on the paper now, I am struck by how important the Internet was in sharing the stories of those who'd participated in the events. While much of this essay examines the content of activists' messages, I spend very little time looking at their form or method.

An excerpt:

Political activism is about doing ?? marching, protesting, teaching, organizing ?? but it is also about talking ?? negotiating, evaluating, persuading, telling stories. Narratives play an important role in political activism, constructing and maintaining individual and community identities.

In telling the story of our becoming ?? as an individual, a nation, a people ?? we establish who we are. Narratives may be employed strategically to strengthen a collective identity but they also may precede and make possible the development of a coherent community, or nation, or collective actor.

Activists' narratives are an important vehicle to promote and legitimate a cause, to garner support, to recruit new members, and to sustain those already in the movement. Narratives provide a forum for mediating, arbitrating, and resolving meanings, identities, and strategies. These protest narratives are performances, but they are also performative, constituting political subjects, actors, agents. Speaking truth to power, these narratives configure events in such a way to re?present the past with a moral, even revolutionary, telos.

For the full essay, click here: http://audreywatters.com/wto.pdf