Lexington Books
Pages: 304
•
Trim: 6½ x 9½
978-0-7391-1229-8 • Hardback • April 2010 • $142.00 • (£109.00)
978-0-7391-7282-7 • Paperback • December 2011 • $57.99 • (£45.00)
978-0-7391-4762-7 • eBook • April 2010 • $55.00 • (£42.00)
Alexandre Dauge-Roth is associate professor of French at Bates College.
Introduction
Chapter 1. Excess of Memory?
Chapter 2. Historical Preamble to Set the Scene
Chapter 3. Testimony, Literature, and Film as Vectors of Memory
PART ONE: The Testimonial Encounter
Chapter 4. The Hospitality of Listening as Interruption
Chapter 5. Staging the Ob-Scene
Chapter 6. Becoming Heirs and Going on Haunted
PART TWO: Dismembering Remembering: "Rwanda: Writing as a Duty to Remember"
Chapter 7. We Came, We Saw… We Listened
Chapter 8. Belated Witnessing and Preemptive Positioning
Chapter 9. Between Highlights and Shadows: Tadjo's Entries
Chapter 10. Writing as Haunting Pollination: Lamko's Butterfly
Chapter 11. Polyvocal Dismembering: Diop's Remembering of Murambi
PART THREE: Screening Memory and (Un)Framing Forgetting: Filming Genocide and its Aftermath in Rwanda
Chapter 12. No Neutral Shooting
Chapter 13. Close-up on some Recurrent Facts and Figures
Chapter 14. A Pedagogy Against Forgetting that Sometimes Forgets Itself
Chapter 15. Historical and Contextual Trompe-l'œil
Chapter 16. Ob-Scene Off-Screened: A Genocide Off-Camera
Chapter 17. The Heir or the Return of the Off-Screened
Epilogue: On Turning the Page
Chapter 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 rights.
— Mária Minich Brewer, University of Minnesota
Alexandre Dauge-Roth masterfully reconstructs the complex web of historical events concerning the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. He explains its history, the myths surrounding it, and the official responses (and obfuscations) from Rwanda, France, and the United States. Most importantly, Dauge-Roth brings into clear focus the way artists and witnesses have given voice to the victims and have answered the call to a 'duty to remember' in the present. Dauge-Roth's work draws on the critical writings of Derrida and Bourdieu, on Holocaust studies, and on theories of testimony, but without ever becoming a slave to abstract theory. This is critical analysis at its best.
— Leah Hewitt, Amherst College
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 rights.
— Mária Minich Brewer, University of Minnesota
Dauge-Roth (French, Bates College) considers the tension arising from 'personal, collective, and official processes' of remembering and the ethical questions inherent to testimonial, literary, and cinematic expression. He also questions the relevance of political and social impediments to survivors' therapeutic testimonies. In the first section, the author looks at testimonial narratives by Tutsi survivors, whose voices allow a glimpse of their traumas and those of the dead—e.g., Yolande Mukagasana's Les blessures du silence and the play Rwanda 94, to which Mukagasana contributed. Part 2 comprises discussions of Francophone texts born from project Rwanda (a writing project gathering memories of the genocide): Boubacar Boris Diop's Murambi, Véronique Tadjo's The Shadow of Imana, Koulsy Lamko's The Butterfly of the Hills. In the last section the author analyzes seven films, among them Terry George's Hotel Rwanda and Raoul Peck's Sometime in April. The book offers a wealth of both theory and testimonies....This book, with its rich bibliography, stands as an important resource on the genocide. Summing Up: Highly recommended.
— Choice Reviews
The importance of this study is twofold: first, to give a comprehensive account of the artistic production bearing witness of the Rwanda genocide and second, to remind us as readers of our duty to remember.
— Research in African Literatures
Alexandre Dauge-Roth's monograph is the first comprehensive study of both literary and filmic representations of the genocide…. An essential point of reference for any scholar seeking to enhance his or her understanding of the genocide and its representations…. In Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda Dauge-Roth effectively shows that these consensual narratives do not take into account the complex social, political, and historical factors that, over a number of decades, made the genocide possible. He calls, rather, for a 'self-reflective work of remembering' (p. 56), challenging accepted, harmonizing narratives of the genocide.
— Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies