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From Apartheid to Democracy. Katherine Elizabeth Mack
Читать онлайн.Название From Apartheid to Democracy
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780271066387
Автор произведения Katherine Elizabeth Mack
Жанр Учебная литература
Серия Rhetoric and Democratic Deliberation
Издательство Ingram
The remainder of this chapter offers insights into why some women would choose not to participate in the TRC process—that is, why they would choose to maintain silence. I argue that these women’s silences do not necessarily or always signify voicelessness or a lack of power. Silence poses a methodological challenge; by its very nature, it eludes analysis. One way to gauge the rhetorical power of silence is by attending to its effects—both institutional, as in the TRC’s Women’s Hearings, and literary, as in Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit, a novel that explores the complicated origins, evolution, and effects of the silences that the TRC sought to break. Lydia, the main female character in Bitter Fruit, refuses the TRC’s invitation to speak about her apartheid-era rape, and, in so doing, challenges its assumptions about the relationship between speech and selfhood while simultaneously resisting inscription into its nation-building project. This chapter on the topos of speech and silence aims to complicate both the TRC’s idealized notions of “free speech,” as well as its critics’ claims of total foreclosure, in addition to demonstrating the resonance of silence as a “specific rhetorical art” (Glenn 2).
I Speak, Therefore I Am: The TRC’s Theoretical Assumptions About Voice and Agency
The TRC’s heady rhetoric about the transformative potential of victims’ stories weaves together diverse discourses that nevertheless all hinge on the assumed relationship between speech and selfhood. From ancient times to the present, Western political theorists have linked speech to action and civilization. The rhetorical philosopher Isocrates (ca. fourth century B.C.E.) boldly asserted, “Of all human capabilities [speech] is responsible for the greatest goods. . . . If one must summarize the power of discourse, we will discover that nothing done prudently occurs without speech (logos), that speech is the leader of all thoughts and actions, and that the most intelligent people use it most of all” (Antidosis, §§ 251–57). Roughly two thousand years later, philosopher Hannah Arendt echoed Isocrates with her claim that speech enables human existence: “With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world” (156–57). In the Western tradition, speaking confirms one’s humanity, intelligence, and agency. Civilization itself, it would seem, requires humans who speak.
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