Cracked Vases and Untidy Seams: Narrative Structure and Closure in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and South African Fiction (original) (raw)
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Literary responses to the South African TRC: renegotiating ‘truth’, ‘trauma’ and ‘reconciliation’
2017
My thesis examines the intersections between trauma and narrative in the context of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was established in 1995 after the first democratic elections and aimed to assist the country in the transition from the apartheid regime to a democratic order. I investigate how literature responds to the reconciling project of the truth commission by exploring six exemplary post-apartheid novels: Nadine Gordimer’s The House Gun, Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother, J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit, Njabulo Ndebele’s The Cry of Winnie Mandela, and Zoe Wicomb’s Playing in the Light. I argue that these texts supplement the work initiated by the TRC by challenging two core assumptions of the truth commission, namely, that the truth about the past is fully recoverable, and, if recovered would provide effective healing of the South African nation. Through the analyses of the selected novels, I expose the inadequacy of t...
The proliferation of the moving image over the last hundred years has created a moment where film theory has become inseparable from sociological theory. Theories of visuality, labor, culture and political economy have coalesced around the realization that the moving image not only carries cultural codes, but also fundamentally impacts consciousness and structures thought. Critical to this understanding are observations about the relationship between technology and narrative storytelling to memory and time. But what happens when represented emotion is so great that it resists being managed in this way? The films REwind and In My Country, which both take the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of post-apartheid South Africa as their subject matter are examples of what happens when represented events are so traumatic that cinematic narrative fails to contain them. In this paper I argue that, when unresolved social trauma confronts cinematic representation, form is exposed, revealing underlying social aims and the function of cinematic mediation toward organizing emotional affect toward labor in the context of neoliberal capitalism. It is in grappling with this confrontation that filmmakers choose between hegemonic structures that attempt to maintain social order, but fail artistically, or counter hegemonic representations that fail commercially.
Narrating political reconciliation: truth and reconciliation in South Africa
This article enquires into the narration of reconciliation in South Africa and its political implications. It scrutinizes the subjects, objects and material practices that flow from the reconciliation story. The investigation turns on two crucial assumptions: (a) that discourse is an ideological system of meaning that constitutes and naturalizes the subjects and objects of political life, and (b) that narrative is a special discursive form, the structural features of which have specific political effects that are not illuminated by a more general discourse analytic approach. A narrative perspective is important because the TRC explicitly undertook the task of telling a story about South Africa’s transition from past violence to future reconciliation, and argued that storytelling was fundamental to catharsis, healing, and reconciliation on an individual and a national level. Narrative theory renders more specifically applicable some of the general claims of political discourse analysis; while the insights of political discourse analysis highlight the political contexts and effects of governing narratives to which most narrative theory, on its own, is blind. The combination of these two theoretical premises furnishes a powerful approach to understanding the story about reconciliation told by the TRC, and its political implications.