Dominant Cultural Narratives

Dominant cultural narratives are the widely circulated stories, myths, and frames through which a society explains its past, defines its values, and makes sense of who belongs and what is normal. They appear in education, media, politics, and everyday talk, and they often present the perspectives of powerful groups as universal. Jean-Francois Lyotard described grand or metanarratives as legitimizing accounts of progress and emancipation, and Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony explains how dominant ideas secure consent. Roland Barthes analyzed myths as naturalized meanings in popular culture, and Michel Foucault’s work on discourse examined how knowledge and power define truth. Edward Said’s Orientalism showed how Western narratives constructed the East as inferior, while Benedict Anderson argued that national narratives create imagined communities. Hayden White examined the narrative structure of history, and Stuart Hall studied how media encode dominant meanings. Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie warned of the danger of a single story, and counter-narrative scholars such as Daniel Solorzano and Tara Yosso, working in critical race theory, highlight stories that challenge dominant accounts. Dominant cultural narratives remain central to research on ideology, identity, memory, media, and social change.