Drawing the Line: Toward an Aesthetics of Transitional Justice by Carrol Clarkson

Abstract

Carrol Clarkson. Drawing the Line: Toward Aesthetics of Transitional Justice. New York: Fordham UP, 2014. Pp. xi, 204. US$24 (paper); US$90 (cloth). In this timely and trenchantly argued book, Carrol Clarkson makes a case for the significance of aesthetic enquiry in advancing projects of social transformation and highlights the limitations of attending exclusively to the political and legal dimensions of such initiatives. She explores her central trope of drawing the in its multivalent registers: as artistic gesture, as legal dictum, as territorial imperative, as ultimatum, as moral limit, and as the plotting of conceptual parameters. She opens with the assertion that [a] line drawn reconfigures space and enumerates ways--albeit arbitrary--that delimit inclusions and exclusions, trace pathways and connections, and foreground juxtapositions or oppositions: All of these could have been drawn somewhere else (Clarkson 1). Rather than posit aesthetics as a function of taste and the artwork as a bounded and self-contained representation ' (80; emphasis in original), Clarkson defines the aesthetic act as an incident that brings about a different perception of one's standing in relation to others (2) and the artwork as historically inflected that sends out lines of to a range of differently situated potential audiences (80). She contends that [i]t is in the understanding of the artwork as appeal that it becomes possible to speak about art's encounters' (80; emphasis in original). Accordingly, the book is structured around a range of such encounters, each precipitated by South Africa's transition from apartheid rule to liberal democracy. The case studies on which she focuses encompass a selection of literary texts, including Phaswane Mpe's Welcome to Our Hillbrow, Marlene van Niekerk's Triomf, Ivan Vladislavic's The Restless Supermarket, and J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and The Lives of Animals-, art installations by Willem Boshoff; meanderings through Johannesburg's shifting urban spaces; interactions with street vendors at Cape Town's traffic lights; and iterations of Nelson Mandela's Rivonia trial speech, both as it was delivered in his statement from the dock in 1964 and as it was re-invoked in his speech in Cape Town following his release from prison on 11 February 1990. In each instance, Clarkson demonstrates that meticulous attention to aesthetic enquiry facilitates the drawing, crossing, and redrawing of that determine how social relations are imagined, legal directives constituted, and justice conceived and enacted. In her readings of each signifying act or event, she pursues and traces connections between the following questions: In what ways and under what conditions do these aesthetic acts lead to a different way of perceiving the relation between the actual and the possible, say, or to a radically different appreciation of what counts as perceptible, or intelligible, or legitimate in a social order? ... To what extent does aesthetic act have the ethical potency to redraw the lines, altering the margins of exposure of one to the other thereby recalibrating the terms of cultural, political and legal interactions? (3) Such questions are pertinent in contexts far beyond the study's immediate purview of South Africa's ongoing processes of transition. Particularly fascinating is Clarkson's reading, via Jacques Derrida's essays Force of Signification (1978) and Force of Law (2002), of three of Boshoff's installation pieces in which conventional, if often unacknowledged, spatial and linguistic hierarchies that are the legacies of colonial and apartheid rule are inverted via the modes of address through which different audiences are hailed and, even more significantly, through which these differently positioned audience members are invited to encounter one another. …