Legends Reappraised: Toward Inclusive Narratives of Belonging

In cooperation with prof. Martin Wagner (University of Calgary).

Political philosophers have long debated the role of narrative in constituting communities of belonging. Communitarians (e.g., Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor) and liberal nationalists (e.g., David Miller, Rogers Smith) argue that while shared universal moral principles or joint deliberation can forge a community of free and equal individuals, they are insufficient to create a community of belonging, in which citizens recognize one another as particular members, worthy of mutual pride, loyalty, and sacrifice. In their view, to build communities of belonging, historical narratives must be told to connect individual citizens to the nation’s history and shared values, such that they understand their parts in a larger coherent whole. This communitarian view of stories of peoplehood, however, has faced challenges. Liberal, multiculturalist, and critical theorists warn that national narratives often rest on distorted or oppressive histories. Told from the standpoint of victors, these historical narratives tend to presuppose long, transgenerational ties to the community, frequently legitimize conquest, and center majority religions or values in ways that demean or erase minority identities and newcomers.

But like it or not, national narratives have always oriented political communities and shaped national identities—and today, they do so with xenophobic and racist overtones. As we see it, the more fruitful and pressing question is not whether societies need national narratives to build communities of belonging, but rather what kinds of narratives can forge inclusionary ones. We believe literary studies offer rich resources to answer this question.

In this paper, we seek to revive the communitarian view of political belonging by drawing on insights from the Grimm Brothers’ studies of legend, in the Deutsche Sagen. We argue that what the Grimm Brothers classified as local legends (in contrast to historical legends), as a distinct narrative genre, offers a promising and underexplored resource for constructing non-oppressive belonging. In contrast to dominant national narratives—often based on shared values and told from the standpoint of victors—local legends are (1) rooted in shared ties to one’s land rather than to ethnicity, shared historical ancestry, or ideology; (2) irreducibly plural, resisting narrative closure and hierarchy; and (3) more like myth and less like history, honoring local experience of the inexplicable and marvellous without necessarily asserting factual truth. By creatively fusing insights from political philosophy and literary studies, this paper seeks to recover an overlooked genre of narrative, local legend, as a new source of belonging for our modern, pluralistic society.