A special issue of Radical History Review, a very very dense read, but an unbelievably considered and well thought look at South Africa, Chile, Guatemala and the United States, examining truth commissions as machines for producing 'useful' historical narratives.

The issue is especially well considered on the tension between testimony, reconciliation and political structure. It looks at whose suffering becomes legible, what kinds of violence get excluded, and what happens when structural histories are reduced to encounters between individual victims and perpetrators.

Alejandro Castillejo-Cuéllar interrogates the language of forgiveness in post-apartheid South Africa; Brian Loveman and Elizabeth Lira trace Chilean traditions of reconciliation and impunity; Elizabeth Oglesby examines the teaching of war, genocide and human rights in postwar Guatemala. The collection ultimately asks whether “truth” can repair a political order without also laundering the conditions that produced violence in the first place. 

Duke University Press / Radical History Review, Durham, 2007. Winter 2007, No. 97. Special issue edited by Greg Grandin and Thomas Miller Klubock. Paperback. Light handling and shelf wear visible to covers; internally clean and well preserved. Very good condition.