Scenes From a Collective Biography of Cold War Childhoods: A Decolonial Ethnodrama

Abstract

This article is written as and ethnodrama. Approaching memory work as decolonial practice, we aimed to multiply stories of Cold War childhoods while simultaneously making the politics of collective biography processes explicit. The script is based on nonfictional reality and is expanded by both researched and speculative elements to compose an evocative text and the characters of the drama. Ethnodrama offers a sense of how it was to “be there,” attending to unspoken and embodied knowledges, questioning habits and assumptions, and making visible the hierarchies and power, and the intricacies and coloniality of knowledge production that emerge in research practices.