Once More, With Feeling: Sport, National Anthems, and the Collective Power of Affect

2020 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Mary G. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Studies ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Sporting Events ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
National Anthem ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Time Space ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So

In this paper I apply insights from Sport Studies, Indigenous Studies, Music Studies, and Feminist Cultural Studies to illuminate and theorize the cultural, material, and political affective salience of national anthems staged prior to sporting events. To do so I analyze two different cases: The Aboriginal musical trio Asani’s 2014 multi-lingual performance of “O Canada” prior to an Oilers hockey game which closed Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) events in Edmonton, Alberta; and the projection of hatred onto former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest of racism during the playing of the U.S. national anthem in 2016. Analysis suggests that these emotive, often visceral musical performances and responses are not contained within individual subjects but instead reflect contextually specific repetitive (dis)articulations across time, space, and a variety of bodies. Placed within broader colonial contexts, Asani’s version of the Canadian anthem is exemplary of the embodied sensory, but politically limited settler-oriented communitas of Canadian TRC inclusionary music as previously explicated by Robinson. Kaepernick’s anti-racist kneeling activism provides an additional case to theorize the relationship of national anthems in regards to movements for and against an imagined white nation as well as State-sanctioned colonization and hatreds.

The pressures of getting it right: Expertise and victims’ voices in the work of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC)

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 300-319
Author(s):  
Anne Menzel
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
Sierra Leone ◽  
Transitional Justice ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Staff Members ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Victim Participation ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract∞ This article contributes to scholarship on power, agency and ownership in professional transitional justice. It explores and details the relationship between ‘professional’ agency arising from recognized expertise and ‘unprofessional’ voices relaying lived experiences, concerns and needs. I approach this relationship via a microperspective on the work of the Sierra Leone Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2002-2004), specifically its work on women and sexual violence, which the commission was mandated to pay special attention to. Based on interviews and rich archival materials, I show how this work was driven by the notion that there was a right way of dealing with women and sexual violence. To avoid mistakes, commissioners and staff members demanded and relied on recognized expertise. This led to a marginalization of victims’ voices. I argue that, to some degree at least, such marginalization belongs to professional transitional justice and will persist despite improved victim participation.

scholarly journals The South African TRC as Neoliberal Reconciliation: Victim Subjectivities and the Synchronization of Affects

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josh Bowsher
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
South African ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Social Transformations ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Parallel Processes ◽  
The Social ◽  
Do So

This article brings new insights from critical neoliberalism studies into dialogue with recent critical human rights scholarship to develop a theoretically driven analysis of South Africa’s post-apartheid transition. With South Africa’s post-apartheid settlement becoming increasingly fragile, there is a growing need to revisit the purported miracle of transition. Recognizing this need, the article critically explores the relationships between the social transformations wrought by South Africa’s neoliberal transition and the parallel processes of the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Understanding neoliberalism as a modality of governing concerned with producing subjects as individualized enterprises, I analyse the TRC as a mechanism which supported this objective by ‘de-collectivising’ the social and making it more amenable to the demands of post-apartheid neoliberalism. To do so, I explore how the TRC’s use of public testimony and mass-media broadcasting displaced collective struggles against apartheid with a range of subjectivities organized around human rights victimhood. The overall effect of the TRC, I conclude, was to constitute post-apartheid society as a thin, individualized and ultimately fragile ‘community of emotion’ that comfortably sits within the limits of South African neoliberalism. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of this analysis for other transitional contexts.

scholarly journals What about men? Towards a critical interrogation of sexual violence against men in global politics

2019 ◽  
Vol 95 (6) ◽  
pp. 1271-1287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paula Drumond
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Violence ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract In recent years, debates around sexual violence against men (SVAM) started to gain momentum in policy and research. Yet, the conceptualization and empirical identification of SVAM became a matter of political contestation, with incidents often being depicted through de-sexualized labels such as ‘inhumane acts’ and ‘cruel treatment’. The fluidity of sexual meanings surrounding these episodes highlights the intricate relationship between ‘sex’ and ‘violence’: Do we always already know what sexual violence is? What does the language of sexual violence obscure, flatten and trivialize? This contribution draws on Marysia Zalewski's interventions to interrogate concepts and framings commonly used to ‘read’ episodes of sexual violence against men. In particular, it follows Zalewski and Runyan's efforts to ‘unthink’ what we ‘know’ and how we ‘know’ sexual violence against men in global politics, while interrogating the relationship between sex and violence in particular performances of bodily violence. The analysis draws on extensive archival research conducted in the files of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Surveyed documents include records and proceedings, such as trial transcripts and statements of victims and witnesses involved in incidents of violence against men during the conflicts in former Yugoslavia and Peru.

Using African Truth and Reconciliation Commission documentation for truth telling and reconciliation

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Proscovia Svärd
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Truth Telling ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commissions ◽  
Reconciliation Process

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) are established to document violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in post-conflict societies. The intent is to excavate the truth to avoid political speculations and create an understanding of the nature of the conflict. The documentation hence results in a common narrative which aims to facilitate reconciliation to avoid regression to conflict. TRCs therefore do a tremendous job and create compound documentation that includes written statements, interviews, live public testimonies of witnesses and they also publish final reports based on the accumulated materials. At the end of their mission, TRCs recommend the optimal use of their documentation since it is of paramount importance to the reconciliation process. Despite this ambition, the TRCs’ documentation is often politicized and out of reach for the victims and the post-conflict societies at large. The TRCs’ documentation is instead poorly diffused into the post conflict societies and their findings are not effectively disseminated and used.

The Triumph of Olemaun: Survivance, Empathic Unsettlement, and Restorying the History of Canadian Residential Schools

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 132-146
Author(s):  
Anah-Jayne Markland
Keyword(s):  
Residential Schools ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Aboriginal Peoples ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Reconciliation Commission ◽  
Mandatory Education ◽  
Truth And Reconciliation ◽  
Young Readers ◽  
History Of ◽  
Age Appropriate

The ignorance of many Canadians regarding residential schools and their traumatic legacy is emphasised in the reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a foundational obstacle to achieving reconciliation. Many of the TRC's calls to action involve education that dispels and corrects this ignorance, and the commission demands ‘age-appropriate curriculum on residential schools, Treaties, and Aboriginal peoples' historical and contemporary contributions to Canada’ to be made ‘a mandatory education requirement for Kindergarten to Grade Twelve students’ (Calls to Action 62.i). How to incorporate the history of residential schools in kindergarten and early elementary curricula has been much discussed, and one tool gaining traction is Indigenous-authored picturebooks about Canadian residential schools. This article conducts a close reading of Margaret Pokiak-Fenton and Christy Jordan-Fenton's picturebook When I Was Eight (2013). The picturebook gathers Indigenous and settler children together to contest master settler narratives regarding the history of residential schools. Using Gerald Vizenor's concept of ‘survivance’ and Dominick LaCapra's notion of ‘empathic unsettlement’, the article argues that picturebooks work to unsettle young readers empathetically as part of restorying settler myths about residential schools and implicating young readers in the work of reconciliation.

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