Local Legends: Narrating Everyday Belonging in Shared Places of Wonder

Many today feel like strangers where they live. We call this overlooked facet of non-belonging estrangement, distinct from loneliness. Bridging the insights from political philosophy and literary studies, this paper offers a conceptualization of estrangement and explores a novel remedy. We identify two influential normative models in political philosophy and show why both are wanting. The Inclusion Model, defended by liberal-egalitarians and neo-republicans, treats belonging as formal citizenship; but recent empirical research, such as on affective citizenship, shows that formal inclusion does not fend off estrangement. The Rootedness Model, defended by communitarians and liberal nationalists, is right that estrangement calls for roots; but its narrative tool — grand national epics with their long temporal arc, grand telos, and heroic roles — excludes not only immigrants and minorities, but also long-standing residents whose banal, fluid lives find no place in the epic. In a novel attempt to plant inclusive roots, we reappropriate the Grimms' German Legends as an alternative narrative tool of local belonging. In contrast to national epics, we argue that the narrative form of local legends — (a) centered around shared place rather than shared history, (b) rooted in the present rather than the past or future, (c) oriented toward everyday miracles rather than grand political epics, and (d) featuring bottom-up multi-versional narration rather than top-down unified narration — is well suited to modern lives in diverse, banal, and fluid societies. We conclude by drawing out the practical implications of an everyday belonging rooted in a shared place of wonder.