This book is superbly written, treating a very serious and theoretically challenging topic with great care and circumspection. It is both solidly informed and innovative on all levels of scholarship.

—Werner Hamacher, Goethe University, Germany

The first book to explore the complex relationship between law and literature in crimes of apartheid brought  before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Ambiguities of Witnessing analyses key individual testimonies. Whereas most existing books on this and other truth commissions are weighed down by abstract legal and philosophical discussion, this book does justice to witnesses’ public testimony in a fascinating and theoretically sophisticated investigation of questions of human rights, mourning, forgiveness and reparation. Framed by the personal, Ambiguities of Witnessing also meditates on what it means for the writer to respond to this epochal event in the history of post-apartheid South Africa.

Mark Sanders is Associate Professor of Comparative Literatur­e at New York University, United States.