Performing South Africa's Truth Commission Stages of Transition [Paperback]

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.

An exceptionally cogent and substantial project by a leading scholar in theater and performance studies.Cole's study significantly enhances our understanding of the TRC. . . . [It] is to be welcomed as a true example of committed scholarship.

Catherine M. Cole is Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is author of Ghana's Concert Party Theatre (IUP, 2001) and editor (with Takyiwaa Manuh and Stephan F. Miescher) of Africa After Gender? (IUP, 2006).

In this important book, Catherine Cole wisely observes that commissions still 'grapple with the ultimate failure of traditional jurisprudence in the face of contending demands for justice, reparation, acknowledgement, mourning, healing, reconciliation, and the promulgation of public memory' (x). Truth commissions can only attempt to write the future of the past.[However, as the author], 'This book has made you a secondary witness'.Fall 2012Offers a powerful lens into the performance of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.The book stands apart from the mostly academic literature that uses the testimonieslC*