First published as a Special Issue of the Journal of Language and Politics 5:1 (2006), this collection of papers focuses, from a number of different disciplinary perspectives, on aspects of language and communication in official processes of dealing with traumatic pasts. It is a text that belongs to the genre of talking about pain, about state violence, about uncovering suppressed truths. Linguists and a number of other social scientists investigate discourses, mostly ones generated during hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), scrutinizing them for how trauma is articulated and sometimes overcome, for how confrontational discourses are publicly managed, for how, after gross human rights violations, reconciliation can be mediated. Language is viewed as an instrument of confronting a traumatic past, of negotiating conflict, and of initiating processes of healing for individuals as well as in communities.

Contents:
The language of remembering and forgetting
Christine Anthonissen
The debate on truth and reconciliation: A survey of literature on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Annelies Verdoolaege
Narrative inequality in the TRC hearings: On the hearability of hidden transcripts
Jan Blommaert, Mary Bock and Kay McCormick
Critical discourse analysis as an analytic tool in considering selected, prominent features of TRC testimonies
Christine Anthonissen
South African Novelists and the Grand Narrative of Apartheid
Annie Gagiano
Linguistic Bearings and Testimonial Practices
Fiona Ross
History in the making/The making of history: The ‘German Wehrmacht’ in collective and individual memories in Austria
Ruth Wodak