Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda

Dismembering and Remembering Traumatic History

By (author) Alexandre Dauge-Roth

Publication date:

27 April 2010

Length of book:

304 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

Dimensions:

240x163mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9780739112298

Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda: Dismembering and Remembering Traumatic History is an innovative work in Francophone and African studies that examines a wide range of responses to the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda. From survivor testimonies, to novels by African authors, to films such as Hotel Rwanda and Sometimes in April, the arts of witnessing are varied, comprehensive, and compelling. Alexandre Dauge-Roth compares the specific potential and the limits of each medium to craft unique responses to the genocide and instill in us its haunting legacy. In the wake of genocide, urgent questions arise: How do survivors both claim their shared humanity and speak the radically personal and violent experience of their past? How do authors and filmmakers make inconceivable trauma accessible to a society that will always remain foreign to their experience? How are we transformed by the genocide through these various modes of listening, viewing, and reading?

INTRODUCTION
1. Excess of Memory?
2. Historical Preamble to Set the Scene
3. Testimony, Literature, and Film as Vectors of Memory
PART ONE: The Testimonial Encounter
4. The Hospitality of Listening as Interruption
5. Staging the Ob-Scene
6. Becoming Heirs and Going on Haunted
PART TWO: Dismembering Remembering: "Rwanda: Writing as a Duty to Remember"
7. We Came, We Saw… We Listened
8. Belated Witnessing and Preemptive Positioning
9. Between Highlights and Shadows: Tadjo's Entries
10. Writing as Haunting Pollination: Lamko's Butterfly
11. Polyvocal Dismembering: Diop's Remembering of Murambi
PART THREE: Screening Memory and (Un)Framing Forgetting: Filming Genocide and its Aftermath in Rwanda
12. No Neutral Shooting
13. Close-up on some Recurrent Facts and Figures
14. A Pedagogy Against Forgetting that Sometimes Forgets Itself
15. Historical and Contextual Trompe-l'œil
16. Ob-Scene Off-Screened: A Genocide Off-Camera
17. The Heir or the Return of the Off-Screened
EPILOGUE: On Turning the Page
18. Testimony, Memory, and Reconciliation in the Era of Gacaca

Alexandre Dauge-Roth is ideally suited, by background and commitment, to pursuing some of the major ethical and aesthetic questions of testimony in modernity. He combines an impeccable knowledge of his fields of inquiry with an urgency to develop a genealogy of attentiveness to testimony. Focused on the narrative strategies and conditions of utterance at issue in communicating the Rwanda genocide, his book contributes in important ways to new interdisciplinary work in critical thought on human rightssss