Where Does the Blood Come From?: True Stories and Real Selves at the TRC Hearings

Abstract

While much of the academic work on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has been broadly constructionist in character, such work typically draws a line around the physical and historical reality of abuse. In this article we consider the key elements necessary to a thorough-going constructionist reading of TRC survivor narratives. Read from a top-down perspective, survivor narratives are the product of the legal, political, religious and media discourses that went into the making of the TRC. Read from a bottom-up perspective, survivor narratives involve the recursive construction of a self able to reflect on itself as the subject of a human rights abuse.