Post-Apartheid ‘Disgrace’: Language and Politics of Human Rights
Chinmaya Lal Thakur
Publication: Volume 2 Issue 3
Abstract
This paper enquires into the ethics and politics of formal mechanisms that are configured to address wrongs and violations of human rights committed against select groups of people in specific historical circumstances. It reads the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) established by the post-Apartheid government of South Africa as an attempt to deal with the violent and painful history of racial subjugation. It suggests that there are at least two ways in which the TRC’s own historical and affective mandate gets complicated: firstly, the Commission seems to have deliberately ignored the fact that the Apartheid was systematic violence perpetuated against communities of people, not individuals, and secondly, that the Commission’s preferred method of operation, that is an individual confessing his/her crimes in public, marked an uneasy cohabitation of the discourses of the legal or secular and the religious. In conclusion, it reads J.M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel Disgrace as presenting ethical configurations that suggest a movement beyond this mode of an individual’s confession being situated within a secular-religious binary.
Keywords: Post-Apartheid, Human rights, History, Confession, Secular, Ethics, J.M. Coetzee
Chinmaya Lal Thakur (tchinmayalal@gmail.com) is a research scholar at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. He has recently submitted his M.Phil. dissertation titled ‘The Novel and Epistemological Critique: Reading Franz Kafka.’ His areas of interest include novel theory, modernism, postcolonial studies, and Continental philosophy. Of late, he has been interested in studying contemporary Australian fiction in the light of global modernisms and world literature.