Culture of Dissenting Memory

"This volume deals with the manifold ways in which histories are debated and indeed historicity and historiography themselves are interrogated via the narrative modes of the truth commissions and the various medial responses (memoirs, fiction, poetry, film, art) which have emerged in the wake of the truth commissions. The 1990s and the 2000s saw a spate of so-called truth commissions across the Global South. From the inaugural Truth Commissions in post-juntas 1980s Latin America, to the ones in South Africa, Rwanda and Indigenous Australia, various truth commissions have sought to lay bare human rights abuses. The essays in the volume explore how truth commissions crystallised a long tradition of contestatory and resisting cultures of memorialization in the public sphere across the Global South and provided a significant template for contemporary attempts to work through episodes of violence and oppression across the region. Drawing on studies from Latin America, Africa, Asia and Australia, this book illuminates the modes in which societies remember and negotiate with traumatic pasts. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of human rights, popular culture, literature and history"--