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Reviewed by:
  • Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence
  • Nancy Gates-Madsen
Payne, Leigh A. Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2008. 374 pp.

In a religious context, confession serves to settle accounts with God and one's fellow man. Yet as Leigh A. Payne compellingly demonstrates in Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence, perpetrator confessions of atrocities tend to unsettle rather than resolve accounts with the past. Payne's volume explores perpetrator confessions in four countries reckoning with a violent past: Argentina, Brazil, Chile and South Africa. Drawing on interviews, media accounts, and texts written by perpetrators, Payne argues that rather than achieve any type of harmony or consensus, confessions serve to catalyze debate regarding past violence, and such "contentious coexistence" helps to promote democratic practices such as political participation and healthy contestation of political ideas. [End Page 161]

The volume is well organized both thematically and geographically. The introductory essay outlines the concept of contentious coexistence, while chapter one addresses confession as performance, an act that both says and does something. Analyzing perpetrators as societal actors, the chapter explores confessional scripts (how perpetrators use narrative to recast their past actions), staging (the effect of media portrayals of confessions), timing, and public reaction to confessions. The discussion of the public effects of confession in particular recognizes the complexities involved when the disclosure of atrocities does not necessarily lead to the prosecution of perpetrators. Payne ultimately advocates for increased exposure of past violence, despite the potential psychological cost to victims when the requisite justice proves elusive, yet her thoughtful discussion of the tricky relationship between truth and justice convincingly presents the benefits of debate, in spite of psychological or political risks.

The remaining eight chapters each examine one particular category of confessional performance, with two chapters dedicated to each country: Remorse, Heroic Confessions (Argentina), Sadism, Denial (Chile), Silence, Fiction and Lies (Brazil), Amnesia, and Betrayal (South Africa). Each chapter begins with a case study from a particular country, followed by a comparative look at the particular type of confession in the other political contexts, thus providing a comprehensive exploration of each category of confessional performance. The model of individual case study followed by comparative perspective makes for a very readable text and allows both a breadth and depth of analysis that makes the text excellent for specialist and non-specialist alike, while the nuanced discussion of each theme does justice to both the complexity of the material and the sensitivity of the topic.

While Argentina, Chile and South Africa yield rich confessional material, Brazil stands out for its lack of public confessions. The shortest chapter in the volume, "Silence" explores the entrenched culture of silence surrounding the Brazilian dictatorship and how the military's silence can be seen as a "performance of power" (173). The chapter explains how silence has protected the military from prosecution and prevented any significant debate regarding the past, yet Payne notes how such silence has also opened a space for contesting viewpoints to exist unchallenged. Particularly useful in this chapter is the cyclical relationship Payne observes between silence and societal mobilization, not only how the military silence may prevent groups from mobilizing, but also how the absence of mobilization in turn allows the military to remain silent. The chapter provides some examples of how human rights groups have attempted to mobilize around military silence, but ultimately the Brazilian context proves the effectiveness of a consensus of silence among perpetrators. The comparative perspective on silence yields interesting meditations on how attempts to silence the past may paradoxically lead to more attention and debate, but also how failed silencing in other countries serves to highlight the relative lack of debate in Brazil. [End Page 162]

The following chapter, "Fiction and Lies" explores the effect of Brazilian Air Force officer Pedro Corrêa Cabral's confessional novel, Xambioá: Guerrilha no Araguaia. A fictionalized account of the infamous Araguaia massacre, Cabral's text highlights the role fiction can play to catalyze memory and debate about an event that had been effectively silenced. Yet Payne notes the paradox of fictional confessions...

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