eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
What are the stakes of cultural production in a time of war? How is artistic expression prone to manipulation by the state and international humanitarian organizations? In the charged political terrain of post-genocide Rwanda, post-civil war Uganda, and recent violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Laura Edmondson explores performance through the lens of empire. Instead of celebrating theatre productions as expression of cultural agency and resilience, Edmondson traces their humanitarian imperatives to a place where global narratives of violence take precedence over local traditions and audiences. Working at the intersection of performance and trauma, Edmondson reveals how artists and cultural workers manipulate narratives in the shadow of empire and how empire, in turn, infiltrates creative capacities.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253035516 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/26/2018 |
| Series: | African Expressive Cultures |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 366 |
| File size: | 9 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Laura Edmondson is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Theater at Dartmouth College, where she is also affiliated with African and African American Studies. She is author of Performance and Politics in Tanzania: The Nation on Stage (IUP).
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
COMPETITIVE MEMORY IN THE GREAT LAKES
Touring Genocide
According to TripAdvisor, the number one thing to do in Kigali is to visit the Kigali Memorial Centre. The center, which opened in 2004 at a cost of approximately $2.5 million, was designed and curated by the UK-based organization Aegis Trust in partnership with the Kigali City Council. What was originally a cluster of five mass graves has expanded to include historical exhibits, memorial gardens, an amphitheatre, archives, and a café; the graves, which have increased to fourteen, hold the remains of an estimated 250,000 victims. Rwanda's "official house of pain" has become an obligatory stop for foreign diplomats and other VIPs passing through Kigali. "Nobody who comes to this memorial site is ever the same when they leave," US ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power said tearfully to journalists when she visited the center as part of a delegation in 2013. "Take tissues," advises a TripAdvisor reviewer.
The curators use a range of representational strategies in a determined effort to capture the horror of those three months. From the facticity of video-taped testimonies and photographs to the abstractness of sculpture and stained-glass windows, the museum seeks to capture the immensity of genocide through a variety of techniques. Visitors who move past the mass graves encounter a memorial garden complex, in which a waterfall signifies the country's descent into genocide, and roses invoke the individuality of the victims. Those looking for a more gut-wrenching experience can visit the Children's Room in the museum, which contains a display of enlarged back-lit photographs of fourteen children who were killed in the genocide. Viewers learn painfully short snippets of information about each child's favorite food, personality, final words, and means of death; the truncated bullet points underscore the brutal absence of testimony. A subtler gesture to the vastness of mourning can be found in a room lined with hundreds of photographs of victims, all donated by the victims' families. The photographs are clipped onto wire and thus achieve a sense of immediacy and familiarity. More photographs are regularly added to the collection as a reminder of the open-ended nature of loss.
The TripAdvisor reviewers are especially complimentary of the museum's historical exhibit, which provides a detailed explanation of the genocide through a series of panels that intermingle images, video, and text. The exhibit is divided into three broad sections: "Before," "During the Genocide," and "After." The first few panels present precolonial Rwanda as a utopia in which Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa lived together harmoniously under the reign of a Tutsi monarchy. The next section, "The Colonial Period," describes how the colonial powers of Belgium and Germany destroyed this sense of harmony through policies of favoritism toward the Tutsi, whom they perceived as a race superior to that of the Hutu. "We had lived in peace for many centuries," a panel explains, "but now the divide between us had begun." Ethnic tension intensified through a series of events — as in 1959, for example, when the majority Hutu rose up against the monarchy, triggering the flight of several thousand Tutsi to neighboring countries, and in 1990, when the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), formed by Tutsi refugees living in exile in Uganda, invaded northern Rwanda and sparked a civil war. The genocide began almost immediately after President Juvenal Habyarimana's plane was shot down on April 6, 1994: "Rwanda had turned into a nation of brutal, sadistic merciless killers and of innocent victims, overnight." Only the RPF, which had been battling its way through the country while the genocide raged, was able to restore order when it overthrew the genocidal Hutu regime in early July, three months after the genocide had begun. As told in the section "After the Genocide," the RPF's dedication to equal rights and the rule of law ushered in a period of reconciliation; its establishment of the community-based system of justice called gacaca "played a significant role in laying the foundations of peace and reconciliation in Rwanda." Other panels contain a scathing exposé of the reprehensible behavior of the international community in its refusal to intervene in the killing, as well as an acknowledgment of General Roméo Dallaire's fruitless attempts to persuade the United Nations to send more troops in support of the UN Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR).
As Amy Sodaro observes, the Kigali Memorial Centre is "well-curated, compelling, and sophisticated." She and other commentators have noted, however, that a singular historical narrative imposes order and coherence on the museum's layers of emotional complexity. The tale of precolonial harmony, colonial division, the 1994 genocide, and the reestablishment of harmony is reiterated throughout the memorial. The historical narrative of the museum exhibit — "Before," "During," and "After" — is repeated in more artistically in the memorial garden, in which the "river of time" takes visitors from the garden of unity (symbolized by a circular fountain) to the garden of division, in which the circular structure is broken into a kind of pentagram to signify an explosion. The circle is reestablished at the garden of reconciliation, where an elephant with a cell phone seeks to share the good news of Rwanda's triumph with the world. Even the "room of sculptures," filled with evocative and gorgeous abstract figures created by the artist Laurent Hategekimana, repeats the tale of precolonial harmony, the emergence of violence, the genocide, and the aftermath, as explained through a series of captions and in the audio tour. Throughout the museum, the concept of the genocide as the defining moment of Rwandan identity is repeatedly and insistently driven home.
Kenneth W. Harrow terms this narrative one of exceptionalism. He borrows from Giorgio Agamben's State of Exception to argue that the genocide is consistently depicted as an exceptional event, with "an inexorable history, with an inevitable path": "All this reads like Greek tragedy, and is entitled tragedy, unfortunately, time and time again. And it leads, always, inevitably, inexorably, to that moment of anagnorisis, of genocide, that culminating, defining moment, ontologically separate from, albeit explained by, that which went before it." Agamben famously argues that the so-called state of exception serves merely as rhetorical justification for governments to enact increasingly authoritarian legislation, thus regularizing and normalizing the exception. In a similar vein, Harrow suggests that the rhetoric of exceptionalism works to conceal the regularity of mass killing in the Great Lakes region. In addition, Harrow's use of the term "tragedy" to describe the narration of the Rwandan genocide underscores the instrumentalizing of the Rwandan genocide on a global scale. Narrating the events of 1994 as tragedy allows the western spectator to experience a sense of catharsis, a term used by Aristotle to describe the purging of negative emotions that occurs as an effect of tragedy. Through this vicarious experience of Rwandan trauma, the spectator experiences a moment of cleansing that ultimately erases the specificity of the genocide. Genocide is thus appropriated as a means of emotional healing. Take tissues.
The Rwandan genocide of 1994, in which an estimated 800,000 Rwandans, most of whom were Tutsi, were systematically exterminated in approximately three months, plays a crucial role in the region's maelstrom of violence. Those three months serve as a watershed moment in the history, politics, and identity making of East and Central Africa, and the legacy and rhetoric of that genocide infiltrate the region. But scratching the surface of historical context reveals a staggering number of genocides and massacres that cannot be understood in isolation, as suggested by the title of René Lemarchand's essay "Genocide in the Great Lakes: Which Genocide? Whose Genocide?" The violence in the eastern DRC, northern Uganda, and 1994 Rwanda are intricately intertwined. Teasing out these regional intersections works against the simplification and domestication of a linear tragic narrative.
Although I retain a degree of linearity in the interests of coherence, I trace a more expansive narrative in which I emphasize the roots and routes of these multifaceted conflicts. "Roots and routes" is a common catchphrase in discussions of transnationality and transnationalism because it not only calls attention to localized causes and players but also situates them in a globalizing world. In Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict, for example, Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon address representations of violence embodied within the nation (the "roots") and the spectacular commodification of violence in the media (the "routes"), as well as the "co-implication" of these two terms. But roots and routes are not just coimplicated in the Great Lakes region — they are fused. Attempts to trace the roots of violence reveal a labyrinth of routes in which colonial histories, political alliances, ethnic and regional affiliations, land disputes, and the flights of refugees converge.
I also track how the rhetoric of genocide punctuates this history. Charges of genocide proliferate in the Great Lakes in order to articulate grievances and attempt to gain political traction. This discourse resonates with what Dylan Rodríguez terms "the institutionalized rhetorics of genocide," which "suggest a discrete but identifiably common historical modality of modern suffering within which an otherwise discrepant totality of human experiences can be rationalized, remediated, and potentially repaired — or at least universally acknowledged." Genocide is positioned as exceptional in order to forestall the understanding that "such devastation is, finally, not exceptional, abnormal, or historically episodic when accounting for the historical continuums of racial and racial-colonial dominance." Genocide scholars and activists who insist on a restrictive use of the term might unwittingly perpetuate the notion of exceptionalism by detaching the act of genocide from "the forms of constitutive dehumanization that precede, constitute, and overwhelm the very thing(s) that genocide intends to apprehend and, ultimately, definitively name." With Rodríguez's warning in mind, my aim is to consider how genocide has become what historian W. B. Gallie calls "an essentially contested concept." How is the term used both "aggressively and defensively" in the political and historical discourse of the region, and how is the shadow of Rwanda 1994 extended or dissipated in the process? How might these contestations sustain the dynamics of competitive memory, in which groups, governments, and individuals vie for the status of victimhood? I also revisit Harrow's use of anagnorisis to describe the 1994 genocide as that "culminating, defining moment" in Rwandan tragedy. Given that anagnorisis is an Aristotelian term that refers to the protagonist's moment of discovery and recognition, how might the events of 1994 facilitate a recognition of the mutuality of Ugandan, Congolese, and Rwandan suffering and the unexceptionalism of genocide?
Narratives of Colonial and Postcolonial Violence
The following historical sketch emphasizes the role of colonialism in exacerbating ethnic tensions as a source of regional violence. The very concept of the Great Lakes is a colonial invention; the term was coined by nineteenth-century European (mostly English) explorers obsessed with locating the source of the Nile. In their quest, they "discovered" several centralized kingdoms that dominated the interlacustrine region. German, Belgian, and British colonizers would come to favor the monarchical societies, such as the Buganda and Rwanda kingdoms, as superior to the small-scale political communities typical of northern Uganda; they generally perceived these monarchies as conforming to European models of governance and thus oversimplified subtle and diverse interpretations of centralized authority. Starting in the early eighteenth century, political centralization that cohered around ritual kingship emerged through an intersection of dynamic personal mobility, changing social identities, and forms of ritual power. Court intrigues and civil strife had generated an often turbulent political landscape by the time of European colonization in the late nineteenth century. Local elites were often adroit at using colonial policies and structures to facilitate their extension and consolidation of power.
By the late nineteenth century, the Nyiginya dynasty of Rwanda stood out for its degree of hierarchy, centralization, and highly stratified social structure compared with other regional kingdoms, such as Burundi to the south or the Shi, located west of Lake Kivu in the present-day eastern DRC. In contrast to the Kigali Memorial Centre's exhibit that depicts precolonial Rwanda as a unified, peaceful kingdom in which Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa lived harmoniously under the benevolent rule of a Tutsi king, the Rwandan kingdom was characterized by the "persistence of profound internal conflict." From the mid-eighteenth century to the late nineteenth century, the consolidation of court power in Rwanda was accompanied by intense, if sporadic, conflict at two levels: conflict among competing factions within the court and conflict between court army regiments (ngabo) and local populations (especially in the north and west). These recurring conflicts not only created havoc within Rwanda but also sowed the seeds for later strife through a series of refugee movements, some of which reached the mountainous plateaus west of Lake Kivu in areas that would become part of the DRC. Despite their diverse origins, these autonomous layers of Rwanda-speaking migrants and refugees would, by the late twentieth century, be grouped together as "Banyarwanda," or "those who come from Rwanda." An understanding of the local dynamics that generated these multiple and discrete waves of migration complicates and even contradicts the memorial's portrayal of precolonial Rwanda as harmonious and static.
The historical exhibit in the Kigali memorial goes on to explain that the German and Belgian colonial administrations shattered Rwanda's precolonial harmony through the introduction of fixed and hierarchical tribal identities. This narrative adheres to official Rwandan historiography, which traces the beginning of genocide ideology to the imposition of colonial rule. As Kagame phrased it in his speech at the twentieth-anniversary commemoration of the genocide in 2014, "The most devastating legacy of European control of Rwanda was the transformation of social distinctions into so-called 'races.' We were classified and dissected, and whatever differences existed were magnified according to a framework invented elsewhere. ... This was the beginning of the genocide against the Tutsi." Kagame's comment about "the transformation of social distinctions into so-called 'races'" is a reference to the notorious Hamitic hypothesis conceived and promoted by European anthropologists and explorers. In an attempt to account for the highly centralized political formations found in this region, Europeans, unable to comprehend that this model of governance could emerge from the Africans themselves, developed the theory that a "Hamitic-Semitic" pastoralist people who originated in western Asia had invaded the region from Ethiopia and founded these kingdoms. Colonial administrators in Rwanda and Burundi thus divided dynamic allegiances of kinship, clan, and ethnicity into a stark dichotomy of the "Hamitic" Tutsi pastoralists versus the "indigenous" Hutu farmers. Moreover, the Hamitic hypothesis privileged the Tutsi as a "race of lords" and the Hutu as "the class of serfs," as quoted from a 1948 Belgian account; as Jean-Pierre Chrétien puts it more bluntly, the complexities of Rwandan ethnicity became polarized as "Oriental Masters versus Aunt Jemima Negroes." This notion played out with particular perniciousness among Belgian colonizers in the area of Ruanda-Urundi, which was originally a relatively neglected part of German East Africa before it was handed over to Belgium as part of the spoils of World War I. Belgium's enthusiasm for the Hamitic narrative would earn its colonial practices a particularly harsh assessment among historians. Catharine Newbury, for example, argues that "the Belgian administration in Rwanda, even more than in most colonial systems, sought to structure social order, to rationalize and standardize heterogeneous social relations, and to reinforce the powers of the 'natural rulers.'" Belgian racist ideology translated into administrative practice through the introduction of ethnic identity cards in the 1930s that firmly demarcated Rwandan subjects as Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa — a practice that was not instituted, for example, in British Uganda.
But colonial polarization worked in tandem with local forces. The harsh practices of Kigeri Rwabugiri, who reigned from 1865 to 1895 in what Jan Vansina calls "an unrelenting rise of a tide of terror," were also to blame for the hardening of ethnic identities. One of the king's most divisive practices included a system of forced labor (ubureetwa) that was imposed only on the Hutu. As a result, former designations of Hutu and Tutsi as markers of cultural difference became "increasingly stratified and rigidified," and "Hutu identity came to be associated with and eventually defined by inferior status." Empirical historical research indicates that German and Belgian colonialism exacerbated rather than instigated ethnic tensions and stratification. To return to Kagame's statement, the "devastating legacy" of European colonialism is undeniable — as will be discussed, the Hamitic hypothesis was to play out with shocking brutality in a series of massacres starting in 1963. But to focus only on the colonial impact to the exclusion of other historical legacies that preceded European arrival precludes a serious, in-depth contextualization of what would unfold in the postcolonial era.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Performing Trauma in Central Adrica"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Laura Edmondson.
Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Acronyms
Introduction
1. Competitive Memory in the Great Lakes: Touring Genocide
2. Marketing Trauma and the Theatre of War in Northern Uganda
3. Trauma, Inc. in Postgenocide Rwanda
4. Repetition, Rupture, and Ruined: Narratives from the Congo
5. Gifted by Trauma: The Branding of Post-Conflict Northern Uganda
6. Confessions of a Failed Theatre Activist
Afterword: Faustin Linyekula and the Labors of Hope
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
"Laura Edmondson's theorization of the "empire of trauma" provides alternative insights into the interweaving of political paradigms from international development to conflict studies to performance studies. She also reflects on her own susceptibility to be engulfed into the empire's charms."
Laura Edmondson's theorization of the "empire of trauma" provides alternative insights into the interweaving of political paradigms from international development to conflict studies to performance studies. She also reflects on her own susceptibility to be engulfed into the empire's charms.
An intimately engaged, critical investigation into the complicated use of trauma by local, national, and international groups, toward both neoliberal and resistant aims, in the post-genocidal Great Lakes region of Africa. Laura Edmondson has collected a compelling set of case studies that speak not only to performance studies, but also to those working in theater activism, politics, and NGOs.
Passionate and brilliantly argued, Performing Trauma in Central Africa illuminates the complicities, paradoxes, and problematics at the intersection of humanitarian activism and the performance of trauma. While performance studies has at times succumbed to a naïve faith in the transformative power of performance in zones of conflict, Edmondson illuminates how the affective labor of such endeavors can be so potently marshaled for such problematic ends.