In this essay, I engage Adriana Cavarero’s narrative theory and put it into conversation with the work of Black feminist scholars who engage in practices of narrative rewriting of the archives of Black life in the wake of slavery. First, I elucidate the importance of Cavarero’s narrative theory for developing a framework for understanding selfhood in relational terms. Next, I turn to Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, reading it as an example of the kind of relational narrative that Cavarero seeks to promote in her work. I suggest that Hartman, like Cavarero, ventures to trace the contours of the extraordinary singularity of the women and girls whose lives she narrates in her work – lives that would have been rendered invisible and silent had it not been for her insistence on putting them into what she calls a counternarrative. I also engage Christina Sharpe and M. NourbeSe Philip, among others, to expand my analysis of how it is that narration, and especially counternarratives, can serve as practices of care in the wake of violence and destruction. My hope is to open avenues for relating the narratives of these distant traditions to one another, through their shared commitment to relational uniqueness and their mutual desire to narrate history – and histories –otherwise.

This essay examines Italian philosopher Adriana Cavarero's ontology of uniqueness through a reading of Alex Haley's novel Roots, and the recent television adaptation of that book. If Cavarero has insisted throughout her work that we need to challenge the philosophical privileging of abstract universality and focus instead on the irreducibility of embodied singularity, and if such a move in her work has always relied on a feminist analysis of the role women play in such a drama, I argue that attention to issues of race and the institution of slavery both supports and complicates her analysis in meaningful ways.