Staging Solidarity: Truth and Reconciliation in a New South Africa

Tanya Goodman · Ronald Eyerman · Jeffrey C. Alexander

nov 2015 · Routledge

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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, and by doing so created a new collective narrative of diversity and inclusion. The TRC relied primarily on testimonies from victims and perpetrators of apartheid violence who came forward to tell their stories in a public forum. Rather than simply serving as data for setting the historical record straight, this book shows that it was not only the content of these testimonies but also how these stories were told and what values were attached to them that became significant. Goodman argues that the performative nature of the TRC process effectively designated the past as profane and simultaneously imagined a sacred future community based on democratic idealism and universal solidarity.

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Tanya Goodman is an independent researcher who studies local and global transitional justice issues. She has taught at Yale Law School, worked with various human rights oriented NGOs in South Africa, and developed a multimedia project related to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission under a grant from the U.S. Institute for Peace. Jeffrey Alexander is a leading social theorist who helped create the contemporary field of cultural sociology. He has written and edited dozens of books, among them The Meanings of Social Life, Trauma: A Social Theory, Performance and Power, The Civil Sphere, The Dark Side of Modernity, and Obama Power (with Bernadette Jaworsky). His books and articles have won various national and international awards.