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Periodical article | Leiden University catalogue | WorldCat |
Title: | Confessing the Truth: Shaping Silences through the Amnesty Process |
Author: | Harris, Brent |
Year: | 2000 |
Periodical: | Kronos: Journal of Cape History |
Issue: | 26 |
Pages: | 76-88 |
Language: | English |
Geographic term: | South Africa |
Subjects: | offences against human rights amnesty commissions of inquiry Ethnic and Race Relations Law, Human Rights and Violence Politics and Government History and Exploration |
External link: | https://www.jstor.org/stable/41056411 |
Abstract: | The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's Amnesty Committee (AC) was a crucial site for the packaging of South Africa's history, for its display and its emission. However, as a space of display, the AC was characterized by contestation as history was rendered through the perspectives of the perpetrator/s, the victim/s and their legal representatives. In this space, the past was not presented to make it familiar but to manifest its strangeness. This process of estranging the past was a crucial mechanism in defining the 'new nation' and, as such, it was crucial to the production of silences in a new official history. This essay is concerned with how silences are produced rather than with approaching silences as oversights or blind spots. It argues that the mechanisms employed by the TRC in respect of its amnesty hearings, and the ways in which the amnesty process played itself out, engendered silences, particularly of the accountability of the apartheid State. In this respect, silences were produced structurally. The essay focuses on the structural silences that first emerged at the TRC's hearings in Cape Town. Notes, ref. |