Rita Kesselring, "Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa" (Stanford UP, 2017)
Rita Kesselring\u2019s important book Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory, and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa (Stanford University Press, 2017) seeks to understand the embodied and everyday effects of state-sponsored violence as well the limits of the law to produce social repair. Of particular interest in Kesselring\u2019s theorizing of the relationship between the body and the law as a mechanism to critique South Africa\u2019s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Dr. Kesselring\u2019s book is an innovative study of the TRC, with a focus on embodiment and the ways in which formal justice institutions do not consider the everyday violence of injustice. Her study illuminates this tension, of people craving justice from institutions that are not designed to deliver it, leading the women of the civil society organization Khulumani to file suit in the United States under alien tort laws.\nKesselring recommends three books to listeners keen to dive deeper into issues of reparation, law and justice after Apartheid in South Africa.\xa0They are Charles Abrahams\u2019 Class Action: In Pursuit of a Larger Life (Penguin South Africa, 2019); Fiona Ross\u2019 Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa (Pluto Press, 2002); and Georg Kries\u2019 Switzerland and South Africa 1948-1994 (Peter Lang Publishers, 2007).\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law