South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commissions helped to end apartheid by providing a forum that exposed the nation's gross human rights abuses, provided amnesty and reparations to selected individuals, and eventually promoted national unity and healing. The success or failure of these commissions has been widely debated, but this is the first book to view the truth commission as public ritual and national theater. Catherine M. Cole brings an ethnographer's ear, a stage director's eye, and a historian's judgment to understand the vocabulary and practices of theater that mattered to the South Africans who participated in the reconciliation process. Cole looks closely at the record of the commissions, and sees their tortured expressiveness as a medium for performing evidence and truth to legitimize a new South Africa. A substantial contribution to the debate as to what is justice. This is a book not only for lawyers and those involved in the dramatic arts and philosophers. The depth of Cole's research and clarity of the arguments advanced is a very useful contribution as to what ought to be done in our troubled world.—George Bizos Catherine Cole looks at the functioning of the Truth Commission as a mode of story-telling in itself. Her empathetic and richly detailed recovery of information adds a new dimension: an objective and nuanced story of the passionate TRC story of the stories of pain.—Albie Sachs An exceptionally cogent and substantial project by a leading scholar in theater and performance studies.—Joseph Roach In this beautifully constructed and densely argued volume, Cole attends to actors, scripts, and audiences, and also to the literary and artistic renderings that carried the TRC hearings to a nation and to the world.—David W. Cohen, Interventions An original and meticulous study of one of the most important examples of transitional justice of our era.—Liz Gunner, University of Witwatersrand The five well-crafted chapters present instances of how the public or the nation experienced or witnessed the public proceedings of the commission.—Lars Burr, PoLAR Cole retrieves the commission from any narrow legal or quantitative assessment to uncover a promising literariness at its core that should be read and interpreted.—Research in African Literatures A must-read for anyone interested in the work of the Truth Commission.—Safundi No comparable media studies analysis approaches the level of complex layering with which Cole…thinks of television itself as a polyvalent, indeed over-determined, kind of performer.—Contemporary Theatre Review By a scholar with a convincing interest in and profound understanding of the complexities of the South African process of transformation.—L'Homme Offers a powerful lens into the performance of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. -- Diana Taylor ― New York University Catherine M. Cole is Professor in the Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is author of Ghana's Concert Party Theatre (IUP, 2001) and editor (with Takyiwaa Manuh and Stephan F. Miescher) of Africa After Gender? (IUP, 2006). Used Book in Good Condition