How bodies challenge disciplinary binaries: re-examining law and the arts inside the Marikana Commission of Inquiry

Abstract

The field of transitional justice exemplifies the ‘law and … ’ approach to interdisciplinarity, in the way it has welcomed the arts as a critical counterpoint to legal form. This article challenges conventional notions of interdisciplinarity in this field, claiming that the maintenance of rigid disciplinary boundaries between the law and the arts results in pigeon-holing creativity as a critical foil for the law; and ignoring law’s internal capacity for practices and processes of critique. This reductive perspective denies the potential of both disciplines to offer complicity and critique. Using the Marikana Commission of Inquiry as a transitional justice case study, this article argues that an affective and corporeal perspective reflects the possibility of fluidity between complicity and critique inside both the law and the art of truth-seeking after atrocity. Turning away from binaristic analysis, this case study offers an alternative reading of corporeal agency inside both the law and the arts of truth recovery, discovering a dynamic and co-generative space that highlights the constraints and possibilities of each discipline.