Erik Doxtader

Erik Doxtader is a Professor of Rhetoric at the University of South Carolina and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in Cape Town.

From the intersection of rhetorical theory, critical social theory and political discourse, Doxtader's research is addressed to the ways in which oral and written expression holds and composes the potential for ethical life, a manifold form of power that offers recognition in excess of identity and which figures reconciliation not as an abstract promise of peace but as a critique of legal violence in which political subjectivation and the possibilities of human rights are reconstituted through a confrontation with the question of language as such. Drawing from classical and contemporary accounts of rhetoric and its limits, this line of inquiry is dedicated partly to understanding how best to bridge conceptual-theoretical and practical-activist interpretations of human rights discourse, particularly with respect to the demands of transitional justice in the wake of atrocity and deep division.

A past recipient of a MacArthur Foundation-Social Science Research Council Fellowship, Doxtader has authored, edited, and co-edited a number of books and essays on the history and dynamics of reconciliation in South Africa, including Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa - The Fundamental Documents (2008), and With Faith in the Works of Words: The Beginnings of Reconciliation in South Africa, 1985-1995 (2009). He is currently completing an extended study of rhetoric's "place" in human rights discourse and a book on South Africa's TRC. He lives in Columbia, South Carolina and Cape Town, South Africa.