City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

Performing South Africa's Truth Commission, stages of transition, Catherine M. Cole

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

government publication of a state province territory dependency etc

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Performing South Africa's Truth Commission

bibliography

Catherine M. Cole

African expressive cultures

stages of transition

"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." -- Back cover

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