| Whether it is considered a "postmodern rhetorical democracy" (Salazar) or merely an "ordinary country" (Alexander), the 'new' South Africa has captured the imagination of those committed to social transformation and democratic praxis in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This dissertation examines the memory debates instigated by the public hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The TRC played a constitutive role in South Africa's transition from apartheid to democracy. It sought to produce an official memory of the human rights violations that occurred between 1960 and 1994. Many critics claim that the Commission's imbricated goals of nation-building and reconciliation curtailed the rhetoric of its public hearings for the victims and perpetrators of apartheid. I contend, in contrast, that the Commission's attempt to produce an official memory to foster these goals instead engendered on-going interpretive uptake of the past and its relevance to the present and future---what this dissertation calls "public memory." I argue that participants found ways to frame their memories in accordance with their values and priorities, and, in some instances, took advantage of the public forum of the hearings to critique the Commission's adoption of a human rights paradigm. The TRC, especially during its public hearings phase, was thus a "generative" failure, as it activated a culture of public memory. Rhetorical hermeneutics, which tracks paths of thought in the form of arguments and tropes, enables this dissertation's multi-media, trans-temporal, and transnational examination. I analyze select transcripts of the Commission's public hearings; two literary and one photographic representation of the Commission's process; and a non-governmental organization that promotes on-going memory work in South Africa and transnationally. My project coheres around a central rhetorical concern---the ways in which spoken, silent, visual and institutional symbolic actions shape South Africans' understanding of their past, and influence identity formation and deliberative practices both in the new South Africa and in sites influenced by the South African model of transitional justice. |
