Imagining Justice

Discourses of forgiveness and reconciliation have emerged as powerful scripts for interracial negotiations in states struggling with the legacies of colonialism. While such discourses can obscure or even perpetuate existing power relations, they can also encourage remembrance, reformulate notions of justice, and ultimately bring about social transformation. Drawing on critical and theoretical material by thinkers as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Frantz Fanon, Mahatma Ghandi, and Julia Kristeva, Julie McGonegal supplements indigenous models and approaches with those produced within Euro American discourse. In the process, she develops an understanding of forgiveness and reconciliation based on the interventive power of literature. Through insightful readings of four novels, McGonegal demonstrates the ways in which literature can create the conditions that make processes of postcolonial reconciliation possible. The first book to approach the political demands for reconciliation from the perspective of postcolonial literary criticism and theory, "Imagining Justice" demonstrates that reading can have potentially radical social and political effects. While the primary focus is on literary texts, the issues at stake are germane to historians, political scientists, theologians, and sociologists.