Rwanda's genocide heritage : between justice and sovereignty /
"The events of April 1994 in Rwanda, when as many as one million people (mostly members of the Tutsi ethnic group) were murdered are well-documented. In the years since the genocide, a neat narrative about its causes and effects, how to remember it and how to talk about it, has taken hold in Rw...
| Main Author: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Durham :
Duke University Press,
2025.
|
| Subjects: |
| Summary: | "The events of April 1994 in Rwanda, when as many as one million people (mostly members of the Tutsi ethnic group) were murdered are well-documented. In the years since the genocide, a neat narrative about its causes and effects, how to remember it and how to talk about it, has taken hold in Rwanda as the result of centralized government initiatives. Grisly memorials across the country, featuring defleshed corpses, especially skulls, and mummified bodies of many thousands of the genocide's victims, have become sites where the nation's collective memory is clarified and filtered, sites of memory that locate material evidence of the crimes and regulate social norms for witnessing and commemoration. Bringing together history and ethnography, Rwanda's Genocide Heritage reconstructs the first decisions, institutions, and practices to preserve bodies in sites of killing as memorials, including oral histories with the international team that led early memorial curation from 1994-1998. Delia Duong Ba Wendel follows the afterlives of these sites of violence through the memories and experiences of rural communities on the eve of the Twentieth Commemoration of the genocide, showing how they contested the state's control over forms of genocide commemoration. Throughout, Wendel considers international influences on local institutions to "maintain memory" both for Rwanda and as proxy for mass violence elsewhere, considering the importance of the Rwandan case for exploring the affective experience of atrocity heritage and the symbolic, sociopolitical, and historiographic nature of architecture and landscapes vis a vis violence, remembrance, justice, and erasure"-- |
|---|---|
| Physical Description: | 464 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9781478029106 9781478032472 1478032472 1478029102 |