Rwanda's Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781478032472)

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 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.

Author: Delia Duong Ba Wendel
ISBN-10: 1478032472
ISBN-13: 9781478032472
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 11/04/2025
Pages: 456
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.65lbs
Size: 8.80h x 6.00w x 1.10d