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eBook details
- Title: Julie Mcgonegal. Imagining Justice: The Politics of Postcolonial Forgiveness and Reconciliation (Book Review)
- Author : English Studies in Canada
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 212 KB
Description
Julie McGonegal. Imagining Justice: The Politics of Postcolonial Forgiveness and Reconciliation. Montreal and Kingston, London, and Ithaca: McGill-Queen's UP, 2009. xiv + 234 pp. $75.00 cloth. Julie McGonegal positions her recent book, Imagining Justice: The Politics of Postcolonial Forgiveness and Reconciliation, as a response to critics on the left and right who have dismissed postcolonial reconciliation projects, such as that of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as naive, unproductive, and even harmful. The book offers a powerful argument that the continuing violence inherent in postcolonial cultural and economic dispossession, racism, sexism, and other social ills cannot be addressed without such reconciliatory efforts, which, at their best, seek a collective vision of restorative justice, a consensual commitment to the public acknowledgement of loss, and nation-level negotiations toward redress. McGonegal does not disregard the enormous difficulty of creating empathic social contexts in which forgiveness can take place, nor does she minimize the potential of reconciliatory efforts to be conscripted into the service of hegemonic national consolidation movements. She argues compellingly, however, for the view that working to enable public forgiveness and reconciliation offers potential social benefits that can accrue independently of, and prior to, any achieved outcome. Her claim, moreover, is that literary art--she focuses on fiction--is key to postcolonial reconciliation projects insofar as such literature can produce an experimental laboratory for revisiting history, a hermeneutical analog to the process of rapprochement, and a vital alternative to existing jurisprudential, bureaucratic, and journalistic discourses of forgiveness and reconciliation. By addressing the recent lineage of forgiveness in critical theory and postcolonial criticism, McGonegal is able to speak across a broad range of disciplines to scholars who might concern themselves with the politics of forgiveness and reconciliation, even as she introduces original and provocative readings of an array of literary texts in order to challenge prevailing critical thinking about the usefulness of social reconciliation projects.