Ambiguities of Witnessing - (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) by Mark Sanders (Hardcover)

About the Book

Ambiguities of Witnessing explores the complex relationship between law and literature in testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the body that investigated crimes of the apartheid era in South Africa.

Book Synopsis

Ambiguities of Witnessing explores the complex relationship between law and literature in testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the body that investigated crimes of the apartheid era in South Africa.

Review Quotes

"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

"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 "University of York"

"The book is a significant contribution not only to the study of the TRC and (post)apartheid culture, but also to the postcolonial critique of legal and literary practices in their deep interconnectedness."--Myriam Houssay-Holzschuch "H-Net Reviews"

About the Author

Mark Sanders is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. He is the author of Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (2002) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Live Theory(2006).