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I am one who tells the truth and exposes evil and seeks with Beauty and for Beauty to set the world right. That somehow, somewhere eternal and perfect beauty sits above Truth and Right I can conceive, but here and now and in the world in which I work they are for me unseparated and inseparable.
-W. E. B. Du Bois, "Criteria of Negro Art" (1926)1
In a November 2000 Harper's Magazine article on reparations for slavery, Alexander Pires Jr. speaks to the legal power of narrative:
[Y]ou have to remember that the judiciary is the only branch of our government that has nothing to do. It sits there, waiting. The legislature writes laws, and the executive carries them out. But our judges sit and wait for us to come with a complaint, which is a kind of prayer. It says, "Judge, I have this story to tell. It's a story of an injustice. It's a new story-a new way of understanding an old injustice. And I ask you today to hear this case, to listen to my story."2
Pires, one of the lawyers who won an unprecedented multimillion dollar class-action suit against the federal government for black farmers in the 1990s, understood well how dramatic storytelling can function as a strategy for restitution. Pires's characterization of storytelling as redressive action may seem counterintuitive; after all, the roles of the humanistic arts of literature, theatre, and performance in relation to the legal discourses of redress, reparations, and restitution have been, historically, antagonistic. In the expedient rhetoric of the courtroom, "stories" are often opposed to fact, narrative opposed to evidence, and fiction opposed to truth. But as Pires describes it, at its best, the prayerful bid for justice is part of an almost ritualistic ceremony in an orderly world in which telling the right story in the right way and in the right time and right place to the divinely ordained authorities can effect change. Storytelling calls for what anthropologist Victor Turner describes as the "redressive action" necessary to resolve the "social drama" of conflict. In Turner's four-phase framework, an injustice-such as slavery-creates a "breach" and "crisis" in the social fabric that can only be healed through "reintegration" or, if it cannot be healed, will lead...