Truth as Spectacle, and Spectacle as the Inversion of Life Suffering Women, Prisoners to the Dream of Romance and Reconciliation

Abstract

Blurring the boundaries between ethnography, fiction, and literature, this essay explores the crisis of representation through literary works of post-Apartheid South Africa: Antjie Krog’s (1998) ‘Country Of My Skull’, and Njabulo S. Ndebele’s (2006) ‘The Cry Of Winnie Mandela’. Each text aims to provide a platform for testimony, record experiences of oppression, suffering, and injustice, and destabilize power imbalances; tasks which are frequently relevant to ethnographies. The authorial voice and form of their delivery, however, risks instantiating other power hierarchies and the rhetorical mechanisms that continually cast the symbolic image of suffering women as victims absent of agency. This analysis strives to highlight important hazards and power dynamics inherent to the representation of suffering and violence to offer critical insights for anthropological accounts.