Description: The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) is a modern social drama that enabled the nation's apartheid past to be constructed as a cultural trauma. This book argues that the performative nature of the TRC effectively designated the past as profane and put a sacred community based on democratic idealism and universal solidarity.
Review Quotes:
Tanya Goodman brings to this study of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission an impressive set of analytic skills as well as a deep sensitivity to the cultural climate of South Africa. The hearings of the Commission were political theater, ritual performance, judicial procedure, moral pageant, and public ceremony all at once. They played a vital role in the beginnings of what may well become a true national community, and Goodman has caught their character and their spirit wonderfully.
-Kai Erikson, Yale University