Disembodiments: Testimony, Narrative, and the Commoditization of Suffering

In the passage to the “new” South Africa, it has been the mediations of human rights violations testimonies to the TRC—a narrative genre that “gives voice” to “life experiences”—which reveal the complex interconnections of voice to democracy, ¹ of atrocity and memory to speech and narrative, and of listening and interpretation to silencing and historical erasure. Testimonies borne publicly to the TRC have been subsumed into broader public narratives about apartheid (though less into apartheid’s historical precedents in earlier colonial rule) and continue to inform an array of aesthetic, political and academic projects of historical representation and interpretation.