Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
The first book to explore the complex relationship between law and literature in testimony to crimes of apartheid before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Ambiguities of Witnessing closely analyzes key individual testimonies. Whereas most existing books on this and other truth commissions are weighed down by abstract legal and philosophical discussion, this book does justice to witnesses' public testimony in a fascinating and theoretically sophisticated investigation of questions of human rights, mourning, forgiveness, and reparation. Framed by the personal, Ambiguities of Witnessing also meditates on what it means for the writer to respond to this epochal event in the history of post-apartheid South Africa.
— Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch
"Mark Sanders shows a brilliant capacity for theoretical sophistication, careful elucidation of literary and non-literary discourses, and subtle analysis of the rhetorics and faultlines of South Africa's languages. In Ambiguities of Witnessing, he persuasively demonstrates that literature and law, though seemingly opposed, are inextricably imbricated with one another. This book seals his reputation as a leading voice in Southern African studies and as an important contributor to discussions about the nature of the literary and its relation to the legal, the political, and the ethical."
— Derek Attridge
"Ambiguities of Witnessing is an important publication in the post-apartheid South African literary scene—and well beyond it too."
— Safundi: Journal of South African and American Studies