Publication Title

Memory Studies

Document Type

Article

Department or Program

Politics

Publication Date

6-1-2024

Keywords

Achille Mbembe, genocide, Judith Butler, memorials, Rwanda, vulnerability

Abstract

The memorials commemorating Rwanda’s 1994 genocide are rare in their use of human remains and depictions of violence. These memorials have been widely criticized by European and North American scholars, who focus on the danger of depicting bodily vulnerability, arguing that it supports the regime’s politics of exclusion. However, by conflating what is exclusionary about the framing of the aesthetic of bodily vulnerability at Rwandan memorials with the aesthetic itself, these critics write off vulnerability altogether, risking a colonialist stance that reduces the Rwandan context to the non-political by fitting its commemorative politics into a false dichotomy of emotion and reason. In conversation with theories of vulnerability and the human by Judith Butler and Achille Mbembe, I argue that the aesthetic of vulnerability, when framed in an inclusive and critical way, can provide hope by supplying a way to see others’ bodies as non-disposable and oppose debasing forms of power.

Comments

Original version is available from the publisher at: https://doi.org/10.1177/17506980241255073

Copyright Note

This is the author's version of the work. This publication appears in Bates College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution.

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