Dear Colleagues,
I just wanted to draw your attention to the following event on Wednesday 10th April 2013 (13:00-14:30) at Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Campus (George Eliot Building GEE219). Although it will be focused (mainly) on South Africa, it may be of interest to those working on comparative Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung. Apologies for cross-posting.
Everyone welcome.
Best wishes
Bill Niven
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Panel discussion “Coming to terms with South Africa’s Past”
Participants:
Cilliers van den Berg (Cilliers van den Berg is a senior lecturer in German literature at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. He is currently on sabbatical as visiting scholar in the department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University in the US, where he is working on a project comparing German and Afrikaans literature with regard to coming to terms with the past).
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela (Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is a Senior Research Professor at the University of the Free State. A clinical psychologist by profession, she served on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as convenor of the Human Rights Violations Committee and victims’ public hearings in Cape Town. Since her work on the TRC, her research has focused on the reparative elements of victims’ forgiveness and perpetrators’ remorse in the aftermath of mass trauma and violence. Besides her scholarly articles, her books include "A Human Being Died that Night: A Story of Forgiveness", for which she won the Alan Paton Award in South Africa).
Johann Rossouw (Johann Rossouw studied philosophy at various South African, French and Australian universities. He has published translations from French into Afrikaans, hundreds of newspaper articles and columns in various South African and foreign newspapers, a number of academic articles, and a second Afrikaans novel will appear in 2014. Rossouw’s areas of interest include political theology, tradition and modernity, the politics of community, language and Afrikaner post-nationalist thinking).
Moderator: Bill Niven (NTU)
The panel discussion is being organised as part of the BA-financed project "Contemporary German and Afrikaner Cultural Responses to Issues of Trauma, Reconciliation and Reparation". This project will initiate research collaboration between researchers in the UK and South Africa working on trauma, reconciliation and reparation. We start from the premise that German Nazism and Afrikaner nationalism set in train political projects that were informed by the desire to set right perceived historical injustices against their respective communities, as well as by an overdetermined race consciousness. Although the outcomes of these projects were very different in scale and degree, both resulted in widespread discrimination and injustice. In order to restore their futures, Germans and Afrikaners had to come to terms with their political failures, and seek reconciliation with their victims and take decisive steps towards a post-racial identity based on mutual recognition of the former perpetrators and victims. Against this background, our project explores points of contact, and contrast, between the ways the 'perpetrator past' is being dealt with in contemporary German and Afrikaner culture.
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