20–23 Jun 2023
Europe/London timezone

Producing Truth and Reconciliation: Embodying Accounts of Atrocity in Sierra Leone

21 Jun 2023, 15:00

Description

Witness to Truth: The Final Report of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission is a harrowing account of a civil war which has become synonymous with atrocity in the Western imaginary. The stories of violence recounted by survivors and witnesses show the individual and social trauma sustained, and cause a visceral affective response in the reader. While several studies have interrogated how particular forms of violence came to be in the conflict (see notably Mitton, 2015), the agency of the body of the sufferer has been markedly under-theorised in relation to Sierra Leone and more broadly. Drawing primarily on psychoanalytic theory, this paper interrogates relations between the body, the speaking subject, and Truth and Reconciliation as both a social process and textual artefact. Particularly, I analyse processes of materialisation (Butler, 1993) and (re/dis)embodiment (Purnell, 2021) to show how the body produces certain truth effects which cross temporal boundaries to enable the (re)construction of the fantasy of society over the trauma of conflict. I argue that, through its affective potential, the wounded body comes to embody the veracity, necessity, and efficacy of the Truth and Reconciliation process – indeed, that the body of the sufferer itself becomes the Witness to Truth.

Speakers

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.