Abstract
Wosińska offers a critical reflection on the uses of Holocaust representations in non-European contexts. Focusing on memorial sites established after the Rwandan genocide of 1994, this chapter draws and discusses the politics behind the borrowing of Shoah commemoration by Paul Kagame’s ruling party in the process of creating official commemorative practices and sites, exemplified here by the Kigali Memorial Centre. Drawing on anthropological fieldwork, Wosińska confronts those official Rwandan representations of the Tutsi Genocide with local, grassroots memorial sites, exemplified by the Murambi Memorial Site. In exposing unburied and unidentified dead bodies beyond ethnic and national attributions, such local counter-memorials, instead of borrowing from post-Holocaust identity, construct emancipatory narratives. The chapter concludes with a psychoanalytical reflection on the meaning of autonomy in the processes of mourning.
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Wosińska, M. (2017). Murambi is Not Auschwitz: The Holocaust in Representations of the Rwandan Genocide. In: Gabowitsch, M. (eds) Replicating Atonement . Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65027-2_8
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