Spectres of Reparation in South Africa: Re-encountering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Join us for a seminar with Professor Jaco Barnard-Naudé who will talk about his recently published book Spectres of Reparation in South Africa: Re-encountering the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Jaco Barnard-Naudé’s book argues that South Africa is haunted by the spectre of reparation. The failure of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to secure adequate reparation for the victims of colonisation and apartheid continues to drastically undermine the commission’s processes and legacy.

Investigating the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s key processes of amnesty, archiving and forgiveness in turn, the book demonstrates that each process is fundamentally thwarted by the terminal lack of reparation. These multiple forms of the spectre of reparation haunt post-apartheid society in deeply traumatogenic ways.

The book proposes a new ethic of ‘reparative citizenship’ as a means of encountering the spectres of reparation in a productive and transformative manner, generating hope even in the face of the irreparable.

About the speaker

Jaco Barnard-Naudé is Professor of Jurisprudence and Co-Director of the Centre for Rhetoric Studies (CRhS) at the Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town, South Africa.

 

More information

This seminar is co-hosted by the Centre for Cultural Studies in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies and Critical Life in the School of English.

It is free to attend and all are welcome.

Please register here if you would like to attend.

For more details and to book your place, please email Ross Truscott at R.Truscott@leeds.ac.uk.

Image

Jaco Barnard. Photo by Retha Ferguson.