Sing the Rage: Listening to Anger after Mass Violence

by Sonali Chakravarti

What is the relationship between anger and justice, especially when so much of our moral education has taught us to value the impartial spectator, the cold distance of reason? In Sing the Rage, Sonali Chakravarti wrestles with this question through a careful look at the emotionally charged South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which from 1996 to 1998 saw, day after day, individuals taking the stand to speak - to cry, scream, and wail - about the atrocities of apartheid. Uncomfortable and surprising, these public emotional displays, she argues, proved to be of immense value, vital to the success of transitional justice and future political possibilities. Chakravarti takes up the issue from Adam Smith and Hannah Arendt, who famously understood both the dangers of anger in politics and the costs of its exclusion. Building on their perspectives, she argues that the expression and reception of anger reveal truths otherwise unavailable to us about the emerging political order, t

232 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Sonali Chakravarti is assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University. She received her B.A. from Swarthmore College and her Ph.D in political theory from Yale University. In 2012-2013 she was a Laurance S. Rockefeller fellow at the Center for Human Values at Princeton University.

Her new book "Sing the Rage: Listening to Anger after Mass Violence" (Chicago, 2014) argues for increased engagement with anger in the context of truth commissions because of the ways in which anger reveals information necessary for civic trust. Her work on the emotions, transitional justice, and the law has appeared in Constellations, Theory & Event, and Law, Culture, and Humanities, and in edited volumes. She is currently working on projects about the jury system and about new models for thinking about whistleblowing and civil disobedience.