Discourse and Human Rights Violations

Front Cover
Christine Anthonissen, Jan Blommaert
John Benjamins Publishing, Apr 6, 2007 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 142 pages
First published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Language and Politics 5:1 (2006), this collection of papers focuses, from a number of different disciplinary perspectives, on aspects of language and communication in official processes of dealing with traumatic pasts. It is a text that belongs to the genre of talking about pain, about state violence, about uncovering suppressed truths. Linguists and a number of other social scientists investigate discourses, mostly ones generated during hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), scrutinizing them for how trauma is articulated and sometimes overcome, for how confrontational discourses are publicly managed, for how, after gross human rights violations, reconciliation can be mediated. Language is viewed as an instrument of confronting a traumatic past, of negotiating conflict, and of initiating processes of healing for individuals as well as in communities.

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Contents

The language of remembering and forgetting
1
The debate on truth and reconciliation
13
Narrative inequality in the TRC hearings
33
Critical discourse analysis as an analytic tool in considering selected prominent features of TRC testimonies
65
South African Novelists and the Grand Narrative of Apartheid
89
Linguistic Bearings and Testimonial Practices
101
History in the makingThe making of history
115
The series Benjamins Current Topics
143
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