The South African TRC as Neoliberal Reconciliation: Victim Subjectivities and the Synchronization of Affects

Abstract

This article brings new insights from critical neoliberalism studies into dialogue with recent critical human rights scholarship to develop a theoretically driven analysis of South Africa’s post-apartheid transition. With South Africa’s post-apartheid settlement becoming increasingly fragile, there is a growing need to revisit the purported miracle of transition. Recognizing this need, the article critically explores the relationships between the social transformations wrought by South Africa’s neoliberal transition and the parallel processes of the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Understanding neoliberalism as a modality of governing concerned with producing subjects as individualized enterprises, I analyse the TRC as a mechanism which supported this objective by ‘de-collectivising’ the social and making it more amenable to the demands of post-apartheid neoliberalism. To do so, I explore how the TRC’s use of public testimony and mass-media broadcasting displaced collective struggles against apartheid with a range of subjectivities organized around human rights victimhood. The overall effect of the TRC, I conclude, was to constitute post-apartheid society as a thin, individualized and ultimately fragile ‘community of emotion’ that comfortably sits within the limits of South African neoliberalism. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of this analysis for other transitional contexts.