Restorative Justice and the Global Imagination

"Restorative Justice and the Global Imagination" explores the history of the global Anglophone novel and its relationship with human rights law from the end of WWII to the early twenty-first century. It challenges the retributive aims of the criminal tribunal system and the remedial legal adage of "making whole" a victim, and argues for the prominence of imaginative literature in the critical conversation surrounding restorative justice. It is framed by the 1945 International Military Tribunal (IMT) for Nuremberg on one hand, and the establishment of the 1993 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the 1995 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) for South Africa on the other. Within this legal framework, the project engages the works of Arthur Koestler, Aleksandar Hemon, and Nadine Gordimer to explore new models of restorative justice in the wake of political violence. Literary reckonings with restorative justice occur not just within the bounds of particular novels, but through texts that have developed a literary dialogue across the decades. Those that speak to totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, for instance, have been answered by novels about the twentieth-century endemic violence in the Balkans and the reconciliatory possibilities in a South Africa still contending with its long history of state-sanctioned racism.