AMBIGUITIES OF WITNESSING, law and literature in the time of a truth commission
257pp., paperback, First South African Edition, Johannesburg, 2007.
Published in the USA in 2007.
Mark Sanders on the relationship between law and literature in testimony to crimes of apartheid before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
"Mark Sanders shows a brilliant capacity for theoretical sophistication, careful elucidation of literary and non-literary discourses, and subtle analysis of the rhetorics and faultlines of South Africa's languages. In Ambiguities of Witnessing, he persuasively demonstrates that literature and law, though seemingly opposed, are inextricably imbricated with one another. This book seals his reputation as a leading voice in Southern African studies and as an important contributor to discussions about the nature of the literary and its relation to the legal, the political, and the ethical." Derek Attridge, University of York
"This book is superbly written, treating a very serious and theoretically challenging topic with great care and circumspection. It is both solidly informed and innovative on all levels of scholarship." Werner Hamacher, Goethe University, Germany
Mark Sanders is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University, United States. He is the author of Complicities: the intellectual and apartheid (2002).