Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa

by Rita Kesselring

Overview

Bodies of Truth offers an intimate account of how apartheid victims deal with the long-term effects of violence, focusing on the intertwined themes of embodiment, injury, victimhood, and memory. In 2002, victims of apartheid-era violence filed suit against multinational corporations, accusing them of aiding and abetting the security forces of the apartheid regime. While the litigation made its way through the U.S. courts, thousands of victims of gross human rights violations have had to cope with painful memories of violence. They have also confronted an official discourse claiming that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the 1990s sufficiently addressed past injuries. This book shows victims' attempts to emancipate from their experiences by participating in legal actions, but also by creating new forms of sociality among themselves and in relation to broader South African society.

Rita Kesselring's ethnography draws on long-term research with members of the victim support group Khulumani and critical analysis of legal proceedings related to apartheid-era injury. Using juridical intervention as an entry point into the question of subjectivity, Kesselring asks how victimhood is experienced in the everyday for the women and men living on the periphery of Cape Town and in other parts of the country. She argues that the everyday practices of the survivors must be taken up by the state and broader society to allow for inclusive social change in a post-conflict setting.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780804799782
Publisher:	Stanford University Press
Publication date:	10/12/2016
Series:	Stanford Studies in Human Rights
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Rita Kesselring is Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Social Anthropology at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

Table of Contents

Foreword vii

Foreword from the Series Editor ix

Acknowledgments xi

List of Abbreviations xiii

Introduction 1

1 Apartheid Victimhood before the Courts 23

2 Reparation, Representation, and Class Actions 53

3 Embodied Memory and the Social 77

4 The Formation of the Political 117

5 Emancipation from Victimhood 133

6 Ethnographic Experience and Anthropological Knowledge 167

Conclusion: The Embodiment of Experiences of Violence as Seeds of New Forms of Sociality 187

Notes 209

Bibliography 229

Index 247

Editorial Reviews

"Bodies of Truth is essential reading for all those interested in the twenty-year aftermath of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Kesselring's innovative ethnography with victims seeking redress in the South African and U.S. Courts examines the limits of law and also makes a powerful case for the transformative potential of new forms of shared sociality. The imaginative combination of the anthropology of law and the body to understand the after-effects of violence in people's lives makes this a ground-breaking work."

author of The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa - Richard Ashby Wilson

"Deeply serious and imaginative, Bodies of Truth connects anthropology of law and anthropology of the body. Rita Kesselring reveals that even when much is achieved legally in the struggle for transitional justice, bodily experiences of victimhood continue to haunt the victims, and endemic, systematic violence continues to shape the political sphere long after it has ended. Kesselring presents readers with ways in which liberation from habitual victimhood might be achieved."

University of Cambridge - Paul Connerton

"In capturing the difficulty of understanding pain, Kesselring's subtle, challenging ethnography will make essential reading for any scholar trying to understand the challenges of coming to terms with victimhood and its aftermath and will be particularly important reading for scholars of apartheid and its wake."

Anthropological Quarterly - Nicholas Rush Smith

"Bodies of Truth is essential reading for all those interested in the twenty-year aftermath of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Kesselring's innovative ethnography with victims seeking redress in the South African and U.S. Courts examines the limits of law and also makes a powerful case for the transformative potential of new forms of shared sociality. The imaginative combination of the anthropology of law and the body to understand the after-effects of violence in people's lives makes this a ground-breaking work."—Richard Ashby Wilson, author of The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa


"Deeply serious and imaginative, Bodies of Truth connects anthropology of law and anthropology of the body. Rita Kesselring reveals that even when much is achieved legally in the struggle for transitional justice, bodily experiences of victimhood continue to haunt the victims, and endemic, systematic violence continues to shape the political sphere long after it has ended. Kesselring presents readers with ways in which liberation from habitual victimhood might be achieved."—Paul Connerton, University of Cambridge

From the Publisher