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During uprisings, revolutions and times of conflict, women always walk a very thin tightrope between empowerment and disempowerment, they are forced into positions of responsibility that only the day before were unthinkable, they take up leading roles to guarantee social survival and the future, but this does not guarantee that once the 'revolution' is over, their new power will be acknowledged. Times of upheaval can be times of hope, but also of death, destruction and mourning, in which rights are suspended, old rules are broken. These times are in all senses 'exceptional' times. When they eventually come to an end and some sort of new 'order' is established, women's participation in bringing about that newness tend to be overlooked, to be seen as 'exceptional' as the times that produced it, as extra-ordinary, anomalous. From there, the step to the restoration of old roles for women and to dis-empowerment is very short. And so women need to start re-negotiating again, to denounce the complicity between the post-conflict present and the status quo, re-organize a vindication of rights and status. The paper focuses on the meaning of this tightrope, this crucial empowerment/disempowerment dialectics in historical moments of political transition for women, during and after uprisings and wars, by referring to one historical experience: the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of the late 1990s.

The Editorial explains the choices and interests at the basis of issue 3 of the journal *From the European South*. FES 3 places language, literature,and the humanities at the centre of contemporary affairs and intervenes in the debate about how to produce new forms of understanding, conviviality and citizenship in a world ravaged by poverty, discrimination, racism, the (re)emergence of populism, and environmental dead ends. It opens with three contributions devoted to the question of migration and refugees, all discussing ways in which European political and cultural institutions react to the predicament of migrants, and ways in which the lenses of the humanities may contribute to reading reality differently, in search of spaces of understanding and survival.

Homi Bhabha visited the University of Padua on 6 June, 2018 and delivered a public lecture entitled "Migrations, Human Rights, Survival: The Role of the Humanities,"of which an excerptappearsin the present issue ofFES.On that same occasion, Professor Bhabhawas kind enough to accept an interview with my PhD and MA students in contemporary literatures and postcolonial studies. We all sat around thespectacularGio Ponti table in the dining room of the Rectorate at Palazzo Bo, the University headquarters, and started an earnest, wide-ranging conversation, which juggled a series of ideas and comments we decided to sharewith our readers. What follows is a transcription of our dialogue. With deep gratitude for our guest's generosity and thanks to all involved.

The article reflects on the ways in which it is still possible to engage with the iconic figure of Nelson Mandela, following his death in 2013 and the apparently definitive hagiographic profiles published by himself, by his biographers and a number of cultural historians. The aim is to inquire whether there are still stories that may be told about Mandela that we have not heard before, or that may be retold from alternative angles, and to intercept signs of his undergoing interventions of historical, biographical or political revision. The article argues that literature and the arts are producing new ways of 'reading' and 'seeing' Mandela, and it analyzes his appearance in a recent documentary by Rehad Desai, Miners Shot Down (Uhuru Productions, 2014), which is about the massacre that took place at the Lonmin platinum mine in Marikana, South Africa, on 16th August 2012. Besides being a precious record of history in the making, the film is a unique exploration of the collusion of local and global economic and political interests governing South Africa in the current phase. The film pits the Marikana story against the rainbow nation's 'democratic' narrative, and goes a long way towards deconstructing the monumental historical frame which has Mandela at its core, thus initiating a process of revision of the myth, if not yet of the man. Miners Shot Down substantiates what Mark Gevisser observed at the turn of the last decade, that in contemporary South Africa there exists a widespread awareness that "the Mandela years had been the era of the dream", the following presidency of Thabo Mbeki were the years "of the dream deferred", and the present is "a time beyond dreams" (Gevisser 2009: 320). The film registers the betrayal of the dream in this time beyond dreams, where something like Marikana could happen, and joins hands with a great tradition of South African films – such as Chris Curling and Pascoe Macfarlane's Last Grave at Dimbaza (1974), Betty Wolpert's Awake from Mourning (1981) and Lindy Wilson's Last Supper at Horstley Street (1983) and Gugulethu Seven (2000) – which successfully combine social observation, historical research, and political commentary.