Performing South Africa's Truth Commission : stages of transition

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Title:

Author:

Cole, Catherine M.

ISBN:

9780253353900

9780253221452

Personal Author:

Cole, Catherine M.

Publication Information:

Bloomington : Indiana University Press, c2010.

Physical Description:

xxvii, 227 p. : ill. ; 25 cm.

Series:

African expressive cultures

African expressive cultures.

General Note:

Formerly CIP.

Contents:

Spectacles of legality: performance, transitional justice, and the law -- Justice in transition : political trials, 1956-1964 -- Witnessing and interpreting testimony : live, present, public, and speaking in many tongues -- Eyes and ears of the nation : television and the implicated witness -- Dragons in the living room : truth and reconciliation in repertoire, 2006 -- Conclusion -- Afterword : what "truth" meant to the TRC.

Corporate Subject:

South Africa. Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Subject Term:

Television broadcasting of news -- Social aspects -- South Africa.

Discourse analysis -- South Africa.

Reconciliation -- Social aspects -- South Africa -- History.

Apartheid -- South Africa.

Post-apartheid era -- South Africa.

Geographic Term:

South Africa -- Politics and government -- 1994-

Copies:

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Item Barcode	Shelf Number	Copy	Status
Searching... 1:IIEMSA	1:GEN-BOOK	33168025449170	968.06 C698P 2010	1	Searching... Unknown

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Summary

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.