Catherine M. Cole is Professor and Chair of the Department of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.. She is the author of Ghana's Concert Party Theatre (2001), which received a 2002 Honorable Mention for The Barnard Hewitt Award from the American Society for Theatre Research and was a finalist for the Herskovitz Prize in African Studies. She is editor of Theatre Survey, co-editor of Africa After Gender? (2007), and author of Performing South Africa's Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (2010). Her dance theater piece Five Foot Feat, created in collaboration with Christopher Pilafian, toured North America in 2002-2005. She has published articles in Africa, Critical Inquiry, Disability Studies Quarterly, Research in African Literatures, Theatre, Theatre Journal, and TDR, as well as numerous chapters in edited volumes. Cole's research has received funding from the National Humanities Center, National Endowment for the Humanities, Fund for U.S. Artists, American Association of University Women, ELA Foundation, and University of California Institute for Research in the Arts.Praise for PERFORMING SOUTH AFRICA'S TRUTH COMMISSION:"Cole's description of both the achievements and failures of the South African TRC is a substantial contribution to the debate as to what is justice. This is a book not only for lawyers and those involved in the dramatic arts and philosophers. The depth of Cole's research and clarity of the arguments advanced is a very useful contribution as to what ought to be done in our troubled world." --George Bizos, Senior Counsel, Legal Resources Center, South Africa"There are many ways of telling the story . . . . Catherine Cole looks at the functioning of the Truth Commission as a mode of story-telling in itself. Her empathetic and richly detailed recovery of information adds a new dimension: an objective and nuanced story of the passionate TRC story of the stories of pain." --Albie Sachs, Former Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa"An exceptionally cogent and substantial project by a leading scholar in theater and performance studies." --Joseph Roach, Yale University"Offers a powerful lens into the performance of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission." --Diana Taylor, New York University"Cole retrieves the commission from any narrow legal or quantitative assessment to uncover a promising literariness at its core that should be read and interpreted." --Ed Charlton, Research in African Literatures "Performing South Africa's Truth Commission is a must-read for anyone interested in the work of the Truth Commission." --Shane Graham, Safundi"I would submit that no comparable media studies analysis approaches the level of complex layering with which Cole, sensitive to mediumspecificity but also to the vagaries of performance as such, thinks of television itself as a polyvalent, indeed over-determined, kind of performer, juggling the work of Brechtian narrator, Greek chorus member, vaudevillian magician, and melodramatic star actor." --Nick Salvato, Contemporary Theatre Review"Cole takes us through new routes as she lays out a startlingly new mapping of the Truth Commission and its place in South African performative and cultural life. An original and meticulous study of one of the most important examples of transitional justice of our era. Compelling reading both for South Africans and international readers." --Liz Gunner, University of the Witwatersrand"In this beautifully constructed and densely argued volume, Cole attends to actors, scripts, and audiences, and also to the literary and artistic renderings that carried the TRC hearings to a nation and to the world." --David William Cohen, Interventions"Cole's study significantly enhances our understanding of the TRC. . . . [It] is to be welcomed as a true example of committed scholarship." --Geoffry Davis, Theatre Research International"[T]his multifaceted work on the TRC as a performed enactment of transition from apartheid to democracy offers a stimulating interpretation of the process by a scholar with a convincing interest in and profound understanding of the complexities of the South African process of transformation." --L'Homme"The five well-crafted chapters present instances of how the public or the nation experienced or witnessed the public proceedings of the commission either directly or mediated through the news media or art. Cole manages--and this is no small feat--in the first two chapters to position the performance perspective. She also recasts the related fields of transitional justice and political trials to reveal new dimensions of the constitutive fields of specific trials in South Africa and transitional justice." --Lars Burr, in Political and Legal Anthropology ReviewCole's book represents a valuable and unique addition to this body of writing [on the TRC] since her critique refuses to focus on the successes, limitations, and outright failures of the TRC. Instead, Cole approaches the TRC in all its complexity from a performative perspective, evaluating the commission's work as an ongoing process."--Marcia Blumberg, Theatre Survey"Cole's major contribution to the body of work around the TRC is to move the discourse beyond utilitarian and juridical questions about the TRC's efficacy and issues of culpability and redress toward a consideration of the ethics within the aesthetics of the commission considered as a performance. Focusing on the complexities of cultural memory, on the simultaneous confirmation and rejection of dominant narratives of the apartheid past and of the TRC's own mission, and on the subtle capacities of embodied expression, Cole attends to the performance dynamics of the TRC--an institution that, in her analysis, was part legal court, part Christian ritual of forgiveness and atonement, and part psychological talking-cure."--Megan Lewis, Theatre Journal