The arts and humanities contribute to the process of cultural translation by propagating and protecting what I call the "right to narrate"-the authority to tell stories, recount or recast histories, that create the web of social life and change the direction of its flow. The right to narrate is not simply a linguistic act; it is also a metaphor for the fundamental human interest in freedom itself, the right to be heard-to be recognized and represented. When I use the term "narrative," I do not mean to make a generic distinction between, say, novelistic narration, drama, and lyric. I use it more generally to signify an act of communication through which the recounting of themes, histories, and records, is part of a dialogical process that reveals the transformation of human agency. What I mean by narration is close to Hannah Arendt's conception of action and speech in The Human Condition: "Action and speech go on between men, as they are directed toward them, and they retain their agent-revealing capacity even if their content is exclusively 'objective,' concerned with the matters of the world of things." Thus, narrative as communicative action is concerned with "something which inter-est, which lies between people and therefore can relate and bind them together."
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