Going off-script and reframing the frame: The dialogic intertwining of the centripetal and centrifugal voices in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings

After the end of apartheid, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was established to uncover the truth and, most importantly, unite a deeply divided nation. This overarching goal of reconciliation not only framed the TRC’s work, but also shaped each hearing so that it followed a somewhat predictable script. In this article, bringing together Goffman’s framing and Bakhtin’s dialogicality, I analyze two selected hearings to show how the testifiers and the TRC commissioners go off-script and thereby reframe participants’ relationships in terms of power and solidarity, the hearing as a social situation, and understandings of the past and the truth. Suggesting that the TRC officials represent centripetal (official) voices and the testifiers represent centrifugal (marginal) voices, I show how going off-script works to not only reframe and laminate frames in a highly organized institutional encounter, but also is a way of intertwining the centripetal and centrifugal voices, thus creating dialogicality.