Since the 1970s, truth and reconciliation commissions have become increasingly popularised as options for addressing historical injustices, especially within the context of dictatorial regimes. Of the many truth commissions to date, the South African TRC has been the one that has captured public attention throughout the world, providing a model for subsequent truth commissions. The South African TRC has also constituted and still constitutes an intriguing source for writing. Literary Legacies of the South African TRC explores the capacities of fiction for providing the TRC and people’s testimonies with a productive afterlife, for challenging definitions of trauma, truth and reconciliation, for inviting readers to keep the dialogue about the past open, and to think actively about the strategies adopted in addressing that past and their implications in the present. It explores these capabilities as evidenced in the work of a wide range of writers, some known to international Anglophone readers, including J.M. Coetzee and Nadine Gordimer, some less well-known, including Afrikaans-language novelist Marlene van Niekerk, and others from a new generation including Marli Roode, Kopano Matlwa, and Thando Mgqolozana. The book aims to contribute to discourses of trauma, truth-telling, and reconciliation from a literary perspective, as well as placing emphasis on the profound interconnection between fiction, history, and trauma in conflict and post-conflict areas such as South Africa.

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was set up to deal with the human rights violations of apartheid. However, the TRC's restorative justice approach did not always serve the needs of communities at a local level. Based on extended anthropological fieldwork, this book illustrates the impact of the TRC in urban African communities in Johannesburg. It argues that the TRC had little effect on popular ideas of justice as retribution. This provocative study deepens our understanding of post-apartheid South Africa and the use of human rights discourse.

This volume is a research monograph analysing the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) from an ethnographic/linguistic point of view. The central proposition of this book is that the TRC can be regarded as a mechanism that leads to the hegemony of specific discourses, thus excercising power. The analysis illustrates how, through a certain type of reconciliation discourse constructed at the TRC hearings, a reconciliation-oriented reality took shape in post-TRC South Africa. Basically, the study points to the long-term implications a truth commission can exert on a traumatised post-conflict society. The book is unique on several levels: TRC discourse is explored in-depth on the basis of personal stories from TRC testifiers; a combination of Poststructuralist and Critical Discourse Analysis approaches form the theoretical foundations; and an extensive bibliography provides an impressive database of TRC publications.

Numerous studies concerning transitional justice exist. However, comparatively speaking, the effects actually achieved by measures for coming to terms with dictatorships have seldom been investigated. There is an even greater lack of transnational analyses. This volume contributes to closing this gap in research. To this end, it analyses processes of coming to terms with the past in seven countries with different experiences of violence and dictatorship. Experts have drawn up detailed studies on transitional justice in Albania, Argentina, Ethiopia, Chile, Rwanda, South Africa and Uruguay. Their analyses constitute the empirical material for a comparative study of the impact of measures introduced within the context of transitional justice. It becomes clear that there is no sure formula for dealing with dictatorships. Successes and deficits alike can be observed in relation to the individual instruments of transitional justice - from criminal prosecution to victim compensation. Nevertheless, the South American states perform much better than those on the African continent. This depends less on the instruments used than on political and social factors. Consequently, strategies of transitional justice should focus more closely on these contextual factors.

Mixed Race Stereotypes in South African and American Literature examines the popular literary stereotype, the tragic mulatto, from a transnational perspective. Mafe considers the ways in which specific South African and American writers have used this controversial literary character to challenge the logic of racial categorization.

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.

Originally published in 1971 by Lionel Abrahams' Renoster Books, thisbookquickly became a classic of South African literature, but has been unavailable for many years. This new edition carries a simultaneous isiZulu translation of the poems, and a new foreword by Nadine Gordimer."

Literary museums today must respond to new challenges; the traditional image of the author’s home museum as a sacred place of literary pilgrimage centered around a national hero has been questioned, and literary museums have begun to develop new strategies centered not only on biography, but also literary texts, imagined spaces, different readers, historical contexts, architectural concepts, and artistic interventions. As this volume shows, the changing of spaces asks how literary museums create new ways of interlinking real and literary spaces, texts, objects, readers, and tourists.