Reviewing my blog posts, I can trace a gradual shift in the way I approached questions of narrative power, authorship, and the ethics of representation. What began as close reading of individual writers steadily developed into a broader philosophical investigation: How does a narrative assert authority? What kinds of knowledge and what kinds of erasure does it produce? And what does responsible reading look like when the texts themselves emerge from imperial contexts?
My first post on Isabelle Eberhardt started from a sense of discomfort with her conflicting origin stories. At first, I treated these contradictions as unusual biographical details, but the more I examined them, the more they pointed toward a deeper issue: the deliberate construction of the self as a form of power. Her shifting accounts were not evidence of confusion but a method of controlling access to herself and shaping the responses of others. Writing that post pushed me to consider narrative instability not as failure, but as strategy.
By the second post on the Balfour Declaration, my focus moved from individuals to the political force of language itself. The distinction between “a national home” and “the national home” revealed how grammatical choices can carry enormous ethical consequences, allowing ambiguity to mask responsibility and justify domination. As I analyzed the document, I became increasingly aware that my frustration with its wording reflected a larger concern about how vagueness operates as an instrument of power. Language in these contexts helps construct reality, and sometimes erase it.
The playlist response to Freya Stark allowed me to approach her writing from a different angle. Her observational precision is impressive, yet I found myself more attuned to what her narrative style consistently avoided: emotional involvement, reciprocity, or genuine recognition of the people she wrote about. Using music to frame my critique helped me articulate the tension between aesthetic appreciation and ethical engagement. It made me think seriously about the limits of empathy in travel writing and about how beauty can sometimes obscure the violence embedded in a narrative stance.
By the time I reached T. E. Lawrence, I was more attuned to the rhetorical habits that run through many of these writers. Lawrence’s early admission of his own bias, rather than destabilizing his authority, effectively strengthens it. His self-awareness allows him to preempt critique and maintain control over the narrative. This led me to consider how a text constructs epistemic authority not only through what it includes, but through the way it anticipates and absorbs objections. Confession becomes another technique of consolidation rather than a gesture of vulnerability.
Across all four posts, I see my writing shifting from description to analysis of the underlying logics that shape these texts: imperial frameworks, narrative ownership, aesthetic distance, and the subtle but consequential operations of grammar. I hope to study more explicitly how empires produce and regulate knowledge, and how marginalized voices challenge or reconfigure those epistemic structures. I am especially drawn to the question of when storytelling becomes an ethical practice and when it becomes a form of harm.
A moving, brilliant post Givarra. I really appreciate how you reflect on your own writing/analytic practice in the previous posts, and the ways in which you are able to turn an initial affective heuristic–what you refer to as a descriptive response–to then asking questions about underlying logics of systemic knowledge-production, in whose service the confessional form becomes a decoy. Very interesting indeed! I also like the way you go back to the notion of attending carefully to ways seemingly inconsequential grammatical choices produce consequential after-effects–what you term linguistic vagueness as an instrument of power.
I hope you will continue asking the excellent questions you have outlined here–in service of ethical storytelling.