Believing Palamedes: The Ethical-Political Responsibility of Relational Narration from Cavarero to North American Black Feminisms

Abstract

Reading the Greek sophist Gorgias today challenges us to consider our responsibility toward the many "Palamedes" whose stories we learn about only because their public credibility is delegitimized by a defamatory narrative. In the first part of this article, I explore this issue through the work of Adriana Cavarero, who adopts the concept of ontology of plural singularity and develops its ethical-political implications concerning relational narration. In the second part of the article, I examine how Christina Sharpe and Saidiya Hartman, with a more radical approach than Cavarero’s, view relational biographical narration as a political practice of care against the erasure of Black lives in historical and institutional sources.