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Considered in terms of a struggle over definitions of trauma and recovery, the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the criticisms levelled against it, and the literary response it has evoked shed an interesting light on the debate currently being waged by scholars in the field of trauma studies over the perceived monocultural bias of trauma theory in its ‘classical’, mid-1990s formulation and the fraught relationship between such tendencies and the commitment to social justice on which the field prides itself. In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominick LaCapra reflects that the TRC ‘was in its own way a trauma recovery center’. 1 The TRC attempted to uncover the truth about the gross human rights violations committed during apartheid and to promote national unity and reconciliation through a collective process of working through the past. I will demonstrate that, insofar as the TRC …