A discussion of religion and parrhesia as a way of life between the 3rd century martyr Perpetua and the abolitionist Sojourner Truth.
bA Scandalous Ethics: Foucault’s Cynics, Sojourner Truth, and Parrhesia in the Flesh
Not Light, but Fire: Frederick Douglass, St. Perpetua, and Reorientation
In the account of the martyrdom of Perpetua, a series of scenes maintains a steady insistence on manifesting the truth as a central claim and posture of the text – both for Perpetua before Rome and the text before its reader. This paper examines the mechanics and stakes of this posture of truth-telling through the analytic of Michel Foucault, to argue that the martyr account not only helps to illuminate questions Foucault asks of early Christian practices of truth telling, but that the text is also a site through which to configure the relationship between the early part of Foucault’s genealogical work on power, late work on ethics, and the role of Christianity in his critical project. This paper also raises the role of Perpetua’s pain, and the relationship between body, rhetoric, and text, to pose additional critical questions for religious studies and the contemporary afterlives of martyrdom.