Performing South Africa's Truth Commission

Performing South Africa's Truth Commission PDF Author: Catherine M. Cole
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253353904
Category : Apartheid
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commissions helped to end apartheid by providing a forum that exposed the nation's gross human rights abuses, provided amnesty and reparations to selected individuals, and eventually promoted national unity and healing. The success or failure of these commissions has been widely debated, but this is the first book to view the truth commission as public ritual and national theater. Catherine M. Cole brings an ethnographer's ear, a stage director's eye, and a historian's judgment to understand the vocabulary and practices of theater that mattered to the South Africans who participated in the reconciliation process. Cole looks closely at the record of the commissions, and sees their tortured expressiveness as a medium for performing evidence and truth to legitimize a new South Africa.

Performing South Africa's Truth Commission

Performing South Africa's Truth Commission PDF Author: Catherine M. Cole
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253353904
Category : Apartheid
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book Here

Book Description
South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commissions helped to end apartheid by providing a forum that exposed the nation's gross human rights abuses, provided amnesty and reparations to selected individuals, and eventually promoted national unity and healing. The success or failure of these commissions has been widely debated, but this is the first book to view the truth commission as public ritual and national theater. Catherine M. Cole brings an ethnographer's ear, a stage director's eye, and a historian's judgment to understand the vocabulary and practices of theater that mattered to the South Africans who participated in the reconciliation process. Cole looks closely at the record of the commissions, and sees their tortured expressiveness as a medium for performing evidence and truth to legitimize a new South Africa.

South African Literature After the Truth Commission

South African Literature After the Truth Commission PDF Author: Shane Graham
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780230615373
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
In the wake of apartheid, South African culture conveys the sense of being lost in time and space. The Truth Commission provided an opportunity for South Africans to find their bearings in a nation changing at a bewildering pace; the TRC also marked the beginning of a long process of remapping space, place, and memory. In this groundbreaking book, Shane Graham investigates how post-apartheid theatre-makers and writers of fiction, poetry, and memoir have taken this project forward, using their art to come to terms with South Africa’s violent past and rapidly changing present.

Narrating Political Reconciliation

Narrating Political Reconciliation PDF Author: Claire Moon
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739140451
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 194

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Book Description
Narrating Political Reconciliation advances a distinctive discourse analysis of South Africa's reconciliation process by enquiring into the politics of the following: writing national history, confessional, and testimonial styles of truth, and reconciliation as theology and therapy. Moon argues that the TRC was the catalyst for, and shaped the parameters of, what is now powerful 'reconciliation industry, ' and her insights provide a theoretical framework through which to think and problematise the politics of transitional justice in post-conflict and democratizing states more generally

South African Literature after the Truth Commission

South African Literature after the Truth Commission PDF Author: S. Graham
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230620973
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This book studies a broad and ambitious selection of contemporary South African literature, fiction, drama, poetry, and memoir to make sense of the ways in which these works 'remap' the intersections of memory, space/place, and the body, as they explore the legacy of apartheid.

Memorializing the Past

Memorializing the Past PDF Author: Heidi Grunebaum
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351506102
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 188

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Book Description
This work is a meditation on the shaping of time and its impact on living with and understanding atrocity in South Africa in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It is an examination of the ways that the institutionalization of memory has managed perceptions of time and transition, of events and happenings, of sense and emotion, of violence and recovery, of the past and the new. Through this process a public language of memory has been carved into collective modes of meaning. It is a language that seems deprived of the hopes, dreams, and possibilities for the promise of a just and redemptive future it once nurtured.Truth commissions are profoundly implicated in the social politics of memorialization. Memory, as a conceptual, historical, and experiential discourse about the past, relates to the ways in which cruelty is integrated into societal understandings, which include cognitive and philosophic frameworks and constructions of social meaning. The politics of historical truth, of memory and of justice, play out in unintended ways. There is not only the ongoing struggle for survivors of state terror, but also the ways that the everyday shapings of silences, the emptiness of reconciliation and the fracturing of hope remain embedded in political life.

Ubu and the Truth Commission

Ubu and the Truth Commission PDF Author: Jane Taylor
Publisher: Juta and Company Ltd
ISBN: 9781919713168
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
"Ubu and the Truth Commission" is the full play text of a multi-dimensional theatre piece that tries to make sense of the madness that overtook South Africa during apartheid.

From Apartheid to Democracy

From Apartheid to Democracy PDF Author: Katherine Elizabeth Mack
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271066385
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings can be considered one of the most significant rhetorical events of the late twentieth century. The TRC called language into action, tasking it with promoting understanding among a divided people and facilitating the construction of South Africa’s new democracy. Other books on the TRC and deliberative rhetoric in contemporary South Africa emphasize the achievement of reconciliation during and in the immediate aftermath of the transition from apartheid. From Apartheid to Democracy, in contrast, considers the varied, complex, and enduring effects of the Commission’s rhetorical wager. It is the first book-length study to analyze the TRC through such a lens. Katherine Elizabeth Mack focuses on the dissension and negotiations over difference provoked by the Commission’s process, especially its public airing of victims’ and perpetrators’ truths. She tracks agonistic deliberation (evidenced in the TRC’s public hearings) into works of fiction and photography that extend and challenge the Commission’s assumptions about truth, healing, and reconciliation. Ultimately, Mack demonstrates that while the TRC may not have achieved all of its political goals, its very existence generated valuable deliberation within and beyond its official process.

Ambiguities of Witnessing

Ambiguities of Witnessing PDF Author: Mark Sanders
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Ambiguities of Witnessing explores the complex relationship between law and literature in testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the body that investigated crimes of the apartheid era in South Africa.

Conditional Tense

Conditional Tense PDF Author: Antjie Krog
Publisher: Africa List
ISBN: 9780857421746
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
When apartheid ended in 1994, a radiant optimism suggested a bright future for the new, unified South Africa. But today, even in the midst of a vibrant economy, the cumulative effect of the country's corrosive past--three hundred years of colonialism, the Anglo-Boer War, the displacement, dispossession, and disenfranchisement of millions of people, and the ravages of racism and capitalist exploitation--continues to eat away at what Desmond Tutu admiringly called "the Rainbow Nation." Using the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission as starting point, acclaimed writer Antjie Krog's essays explore texts from every corner of South Africa in an attempt to remap the borders of her country's communities. In these pages, texts from black women, Afrikaner men, and comic strips are discussed alongside ideas from African philosophers, an archbishop, and a Nobel Prize winner. Through this extraordinary marriage of academic observation and poetic intervention, Krog endeavors to move South Africa beyond the present moment and toward a vocabulary of grace and care.

Country of My Skull

Country of My Skull PDF Author: Antjie Krog
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307420507
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
Ever since Nelson Mandela dramatically walked out of prison in 1990 after twenty-seven years behind bars, South Africa has been undergoing a radical transformation. In one of the most miraculous events of the century, the oppressive system of apartheid was dismantled. Repressive laws mandating separation of the races were thrown out. The country, which had been carved into a crazy quilt that reserved the most prosperous areas for whites and the most desolate and backward for blacks, was reunited. The dreaded and dangerous security force, which for years had systematically tortured, spied upon, and harassed people of color and their white supporters, was dismantled. But how could this country--one of spectacular beauty and promise--come to terms with its ugly past? How could its people, whom the oppressive white government had pitted against one another, live side by side as friends and neighbors? To begin the healing process, Nelson Mandela created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, headed by the renowned cleric Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Established in 1995, the commission faced the awesome task of hearing the testimony of the victims of apartheid as well as the oppressors. Amnesty was granted to those who offered a full confession of any crimes associated with apartheid. Since the commission began its work, it has been the central player in a drama that has riveted the country. In this book, Antjie Krog, a South African journalist and poet who has covered the work of the commission, recounts the drama, the horrors, the wrenching personal stories of the victims and their families. Through the testimonies of victims of abuse and violence, from the appearance of Winnie Mandela to former South African president P. W. Botha's extraordinary courthouse press conference, this award-winning poet leads us on an amazing journey. Country of My Skull captures the complexity of the Truth Commission's work. The narrative is often traumatic, vivid, and provocative. Krog's powerful prose lures the reader actively and inventively through a mosaic of insights, impressions, and secret themes. This compelling tale is Antjie Krog's profound literary account of the mending of a country that was in colossal need of change.