Full Description
In Rwanda's Genocide Heritage, Delia Duong Ba Wendel contends with the forms of justice and sovereignty enacted through sites of violent memory. Drawing from oral histories and a newly available visual archive of memory work after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she explores the human rights and government priorities that preserved killing sites and victims' remains for public display. Rwanda's genocide memorials exemplify a global phenomenon that Wendel terms "trauma heritage," wherein hidden or unrecognized violence is spatialized—made visible in public space—to demand justice and recognition. She argues that trauma heritage innovates on the form histories take by "writing" them into landscapes, constituting a reparative historiography from the Global South. Among those sites, Rwanda's genocide heritage comprises exceptionally visceral sites of truth-telling that highlight the politics of a past made present. Wendel demonstrates that such sites of memory require reckoning with the ethical and political dilemmas that arise from viewing violence as forms of repair and control.
Contents
Abbreviations
Prologue: A Rock Among Many
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Trauma Heritage as Repair
1. El Olor y El Dolor (The Smell and the Pain): The Practice of Reparative History
2. Beyond State Control: Global Dialogues and Local Experiences
3. Witnessing Nyarubuye: The Uneven Afterlives of Genocide Heritage
4. Memory Work: Murambi's Conservation
5. Exhumation, Display, Reburial: Ordering the Future of the Past
6. Memory and Empowerment: Inzibutso Zigaragara, Inzibusto Zitagaragara
Conclusion: Memory Justice in an Era of Trauma Heritage
Appendix 1: Atlas of Trauma Heritage Sites, 1875-2020
Appendix 2: Trauma Heritage Site Establishment, 1875-2020
Appendix 3: Chronology of Trauma Heritage Site Establishment, 1875-2020
Notes
Bibliography
Index
