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"Memorialization Rwanda."
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Dignity in Death and Life: Negotiating \Agaciro\ for the Nation in Preservation Practice at Nyamata Genocide Memorial, Rwanda
The ideal of agaciro, or dignity, is foundational for the contemporary Rwandan nation-state. More than two decades after genocide, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) government seeks to make dignity a core characteristic of the new, post-conflict nation. At the same time, the state uses heritage sites, especially genocide memorials, to establish the nation's history and identity. Focusing on the intersection of the dignity imperative and the value of genocide heritage to nation-building, this article examines the mobilization of dignity through a study of a joint Rwandan-American preservation initiative at Nyamata Genocide Memorial. Such memorials are essential to the RPF's nation-building project, and according dignity to the remains of genocide victims is powerfully linked to re-establishing dignity for living Rwandans and the new nation. This article examines how dignity has historically shaped choices about the burial and display of the victims and artifacts of genocide, and how preservation work at Nyamata encounters new manifestations of these ongoing questions. Given dignity's importance to the state and the connection between genocide and the new nation's identity, the crucial but complex decisions about preservation are a key material engagement at the root of a key national characteristic. Tracing the practical transformations of a foundational abstraction for the post-genocide Rwandan state, this article shows that the state's commitment to dignity at the memorials is based in an agentic conception of genocide remains, an understanding with powerful implications. But despite this, and although the state insists on dignity's importance to the new nation, dignity is not only contested as a material practice but also remains uncertain as a basic principle for the new nation's engagement with its defining moment.
Journal Article
Exhibiting Atrocity
Through a global comparative approach, Amy Sodaro uses in-depth case studies of five exemplary memorial museums that commemorate a range of violent pasts and allow for a chronological and global examination of the form: the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC; the House of Terror in Budapest; the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda; the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile; and the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York. Together, these case studies illustrate the historical emergence and global spread of the memorial museum and show how this new cultural form of commemoration is intended to be used in contemporary societies around the world emerging from widely divergent forms of political violence.
eBook
Narrating atrocity
After a genocide, leaders compete to fill the postwar power vacuum and establish their preferred story of the past. Memorialisation, including through building memorials, provides a cornerstone of political power. The dominant public narrative determines the plotline; it labels victims and perpetrators, interprets history, assigns meaning to suffering, and sets the post-atrocity political agenda. Therefore, ownership of the past, in terms of the public account, is deeply contested. Although many factors affect the emergence of a dominant atrocity narrative, this article highlights the role of international interactions with genocide memorials, particularly how Western visitors, funders, and consultants influence the government’s narrative. Western consumption of memorials often reinforces aspects of dark tourism that dehumanise victims and discourage adequate context for the uninformed visitor. Funding and consultation provided by Western states and organisations – while offering distinct benefits – tends to encourage a homogenised atrocity narrative, which reflects the values of the global human rights regime and existing standards of memorial design rather than privileging the local particularities of the atrocity experience. As shown in the cases of Rwanda, Cambodia, and Bosnia, Western involvement in public memory projects often strengthens the power of government narratives, which control the present by controlling the past.
Journal Article
On the Side of Light: Performing Morality at Rwanda's Genocide Memorials
In Rwanda, numerous memorials have arisen to remember the 1994 genocide and its victims. This paper considers the effect of the national genocide memorials on Western tourist visitors, in the context of research on 'dark tourism' and Western attitudes toward death and the dead. It draws on the idea that, in a Western context, viewing the remains of violent death can be a kind of 'soft murder', and on the concept that the act of witnessing violence creates a community of witnesses implicated in that violence. Western visitors to Rwandan genocide memorials therefore form a community, and their responses are guided by a set of community rules regarding behaviour and experiences during and after the visit. These rules, this paper argues, are rooted in pressures to assert oneself as a properly moral individual through performing morality in a morally ambiguous setting.
Journal Article
Rwanda Transforming
This chapter turns upon the relation between trauma and memory in the context of post-genocide Rwanda. Paying special attention to the case of the Bisesero Memorial site, known as the “National Resistance Memorial,” it shows how the imperishable character of the vivacity of memory in psychical life is a return of nature that realizes a neutral time without proper destination. The politics of memorializing the genocide in Rwanda challenges us to think the self-transformative tendency of life, which overwhelms the assertion of the character of the postcolonial condition as the repetition of legacies of colonialism. With reference to Nietzsche’s idea of “active forgetting,” the chapter proposes the development of forgetting as a new conceptual habit that impacts upon and frustrates the idea of messianic.
Book Chapter