Desiring Good(s) in the Face of Marginalized Subjects: South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission in a Global Context

This article explores elements of the interface between postcolonialism and the processes of globalization by focusing on the phenomenon of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). I outline a structural connection between demands for retributive justice and global capitalism's commodification of human rights in the name of "democracy." Further, I suggest that one of the central tasks of postcolonialism—to analyze and contest structures of oppression in a global, comparative framework—will need to proceed with an awareness of its own history. In particular, I outline some of the factors that can render certain forms of postcolonial criticism ineffective in analyzing the extratextual, economic dimensions of postapartheid South Africa. I proceed to rehearse the arguments that prominent critics of globalism have launched against postcolonialism. These critics tend to take into account the material realities frequently overlooked by postcolonialism; however, they tend in turn to ignore the importance of culture in their analyses of the effects of the processes of globalization.

In the cases of both postcolonialism and materialist critiques of globalism, a number of factors contribute to at best, a partial understanding, and at worst, a misunderstanding, of the phenomenon of South Africa's TRC. These factors include the waning of access to the local knowledges required to sustain reliable cross-cultural interchange, and a lack of imagination about forms of democracy that do not rest on familiar systems. Postcolonial critics need to reexamine the implications of the systems broadly assumed to be democratic by the majority of the institutions in which they teach. These systems, familiar to those countries dominant by "virtue" of their power in terms of the global economic order, are supported by largely unacknowledged investments in practices of law and order that are retributive in design and secular in praxis.

An examination of the effects of these investments can begin by acquiring knowledge about alternative institutions that support democracy, such as South Africa's TRC. The paradox suggested by the Western press's unwitting alignment with figures from the South African far right, such as P. W. Botha, in casting aspersions on the legitimacy and integrity of the TRC process provides a starting point for my argument. While the press's suspicion of the TRC may appear to serve the interests of those concerned that justice be served, it also reveals not only a belief in retributive justice, but also an investment in the individual, bourgeois, liberal subject of much democratic rhetoric. Both stances assume that the individual citizen's claim to equality before the law is actualized in practice, and that her or his capacity to conform to the law and to be served by it is equal to that of her or his fellow citizens. An allegiance to this concept of the subject can lead to a confusion of the right to personhood and citizenship with the right to accumulate wealth at the expense of others.

Finally, I suggest that we can analyze the rhetorical and structural connection between the conception of the liberal, bourgeois subject of such democratic rhetoric, and global capitalism's assumption of the equality, or potential equality, of nation-states to compete on an equal footing in the global marketplace. Global capitalism's construction of states as equal before the law—in this case, the law of supply and demand—mirrors that of the liberal subject. I suggest, then, that the commodification of human rights, undertaken in the name of ethics, but in actuality in service to business, speaks to the ways in which "democratic" and corporate citizenship have become aligned.

The TRC holds value as an institution that resists such commodification. Specifically, it sheds light on the ways in which our understanding of human value—even the understanding of those of us most concerned to...