This course will be offered during the northern hemisphere summer starting in 2006.
This course deals with the aftermath of political conflict and mass trauma. It employs an interdisciplinary perspective by bringing together the wisdom of psychology, literature, and history to examine narratives of trauma and how individuals and societies try to make meaning of their traumatic experience after massive violent conflict. It is highly relevant for students interested in topics like truth commissions, transitional justice, restorative justice, reconciliation and forgiveness in societies emerging from a violent past.
The first part of the course will be taught by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, author of the award-winning book A Human Being Died That Night. In this section, we will draw data from the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to examine South Africa’s process of national healing and reconciliation in the aftermath of mass trauma. We will discuss the political dimensions of this process and focus mainly on what unfolds when space is created within political transition for victims to confront perpetrators of gross human rights abuses not in the adversarial context of a courtroom, but using a process that seeks redress through public acknowledgment and accountability, a public process that seeks engagement and dialogue rather than vengeful violence. The psychologically restorative elements of encounters between victims and perpetrators will be examined. We will address the questions: what is a healthy response to past inter-group conflict and mass terror; what strategies can be employed in order to break the cycles of violence that so often repeat themselves historically, in order to ensure that yesterday’s victims do not become tomorrow’s perpetrators. We will examine public accounts of the past using the framework of witnessing; (i) the victim witnessing her/his own narrative of trauma both through the testimony and through the acknowledgement of the perpetrator, (ii) the perpetrator witnessing his shameful past in public; and (iii) witnessing by audience in the public space where truth is told from different perspectives.
In the second part of the course, Chris van der Merwe, editor of the books De Helende Kracht van Literatuur ("The Healing Power of Literature") and Telling Wounds: Working Through the South African Armed Conflict of the 20th Century, introduces the study of South African literary texts from the perspective of individual and collective trauma. The rupture that occurs in traumatic experience can be described as a "loss of plot," a gap in one's life story. Therefore, literature that features trauma is a way of re-imagining the plot of a trauma victim's life. We will examine narratives of trauma, the differential impact they have on victims and perpetrators, and how they are part of the search for language for "reordering" victims' perception of what happened to them. Themes from the first part of the course will be incorporated into the literature we analyse in the second part of the course. Topics include "Making meaning of trauma" (Victor Frankl); "Life as a narrative" (Paul Ricoeur); "The narrative of trauma" (Charlotte Delbot) and "The value of narrative" (Richard Kearney). The ideas expressed by these authors will be applied in an analysis of Disgrace, the most famous novel of the Nobel Prize winner J M Coetzee.
In the third part of the course, Sean Field, Director of the Centre for Popular Memory, will discuss narrative and trauma from the viewpoint of the oral historian.
You may contact Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela at pgobodo@humanities.uct.ac.za or Chris van der Merwe at cnvdm@humanities.uct.ac.za for further information.