The Invisible Corner

The Invisible Corner offers a nuanced and profoundly
insightful understanding of the complicated afterlife
of apartheid state violence for its survivors in the
current times. It examines how the assassination of
seven young activists in Gugulethu, Cape Town in 1986
has been made into an event , rendered through
multiple regimes of discourse and performativity and
subject to the institutional framings
of truth and reconciliation . The author
disaggregates the event, as it is publicly
represented and memorialised, from the ways that the
killing continues to impact on the everyday life of
their families and political community. In this way,
he probes the limits of the sayable that
institutional forms of memorialisation impose on
survivors of state violence. Tracing the
fragile cracks of recent history in which hope,
despair, silence and the tenacious pursuit of dignity
in contemporary South Africa remain entangled in the
structural constraints of a negotiated regime change,
this book offers an unparalleled insight into the
ongoing challenges for justice, social repair and
historical accountability. Heidi Grunebaum,
University of Western Cape, South Africa.

Autorentext

Associate professor of anthropology at the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). He is head of the "International Committee for the Study of Violence, Subjectivity and Culture" and the "Africa and Latin America Exchange Initiative." He is co-founder of Encounters:an International Journal for the Study of Culture and Society (Dubai).

Klappentext

The Invisible Corner offers a nuanced and profoundly insightful understanding of the complicated afterlife of apartheid state violence for its survivors in the current times. It examines how the assassination of seven young activists in Gugulethu, Cape Town in 1986 has been made into an "event", rendered through multiple regimes of discourse and performativity and subject to the institutional framings of "truth" and "reconciliation". The author disaggregates the event, as it is publicly represented and memorialised, from the ways that the killing continues to impact on the everyday life of their families and political community. In this way, he probes the limits of the sayable that institutional forms of memorialisation impose on survivors of state violence. Tracing the fragile cracks of recent history in which hope, despair, silence and the tenacious pursuit of dignity in contemporary South Africa remain entangled in the structural constraints of a negotiated regime change, this book offers an unparalleled insight into the ongoing challenges for justice, social repair and historical accountability. Heidi Grunebaum, University of Western Cape, South Africa.