Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Faculty Publications Department of English 9-2014 Lament as Transitional Justice Michael Galchinsky Georgia State University,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_facpub Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Galchinsky, Michael, "Lament as Transitional Justice" (2014). English Faculty Publications. 22. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_facpub/22 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Michael Galchinsky Georgia State University
[email protected] Lament as Transitional Justice Abstract: Works of human rights literature help to ground the formal rights system in an informal rights ethos. Writers have developed four major modes of human rights literature: protest, testimony, lament, and laughter. Through interpretations of poetry in Carolyn Forché’s anthology, Against Forgetting, and novels from Rwanda, the United States, and Bosnia, I focus on the mode of lament, the literature of mourning. Lament is a social and ritualized form, the purposes of which are congruent with the aims of transitional justice institutions. Both laments and truth commissions employ grieving narratives to help survivors of human rights trauma bequeath to the ghosts of the past the justice of a monument while renewing the survivors’ capacity for rebuilding civil society in the future. Human rights scholars need a broader, extra-juridical meaning for “transitional justice” if we hope to capture its power.