Racialising global relations: the Rwandan genocide and the ethics of representation

At a time when the historical experience of the Rwandan genocide continues to be invoked to imagine and affirm international responsibility for the suffering of others, this article examines one way in which this event has been made to mean. Through a critical reading of Hotel Rwanda (a feature film) and Shake Hands with the Devil (a memoir), the article examines how the Rwandan genocide has been framed as an event of ‘white’ Western racism towards ‘black’ African injury. Without disputing the veracity of this explanatory framework, this article interrogates its representational politics and ethics. I problematise its continued use of inherently discriminatory racial categories, demonstrate its Eurocentric nature and call for a mode of understanding the ethical significance of the Rwandan genocide that is not limited to an already existing global relation between suffering ‘black’ bodies and potential ‘white’ saviours. In critiquing these texts and this discursive framework, my aim is to enable ways of coming to terms with the genocide that can accommodate the complex connections that do and may exist between non-Rwandans and the 1994 Rwandan genocide.     

Putting the drum in conundrum: Guadeloupean gwoka,intangible cultural heritage and postnationalism

Since 2004, Felix Cotellon, the president of the centre for traditional music and dance on the island of Guadeloupe, has spearheaded a grass roots campaign to see gwoka inscribed on the UNESCO’s list of Representative Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanities. The move has been surprising, even controversial. Gwoka, a drum-based music and dance, has been used as a symbol of Guadeloupean cultural identity and resistance against French colonialism since the late 1960s. Moreover, Cotellon has had a long association with separatist activism. However, because Guadeloupe remains a French overseas department without a seat at the UN, the petition to add gwoka to the ICH list had to be sponsored by the French state. Following a successful bid, gwoka is now listed as representative of the culture of a French region. In this article, I draw from my ethnographic work as well as my own involvement in the committee that drafted Guadeloupe’s application to trace the complex network of individuals, who are shaping gwoka’s transformation from weapon of national resistance to symbol of humanity’s cultural diversity. I argue that these individuals shape and operate within a ‘zone of awkward engagement’ that allows for the emergence and expression of a postnationalist political subjectivity.     

Becoming Cleopatra: the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin

The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliations that shaped Lemkin’s concept of genocide. In this article, I show that Lemkin, far from being a Jewish Bundist, a Polish nationalist or an apolitical cosmopolitan, was an active member of the interwar Polish Zionist movement, from which he drew the ideas that inspired his idea of the crime of genocide. In the first part of this article, I use his published writings from the 1920s and 1930s in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to recover a rich Jewish political framework in which his concepts of barbarism and genocide first began to emerge. In the second section, I ask how this crucial dimension of Lemkin’s life and thought vanished from the historical record, and why it has yet to be recovered in spite of the boom in biographical scholarship. Finally, I suggest how the recovery of Lemkin’s Zionism helps to reframe the current political impasse in the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies.     

Illusions of revolution: François Furet's critique of Marx

In this article it will be argued that François Furet's attempt in Interpreting the French Revolution to provide a conceptual history of the French Revolution through a synthesis of Tocqueville and Cochin's historical and sociological accounts fails methodologically. It does so in two ways: Firstly, in its aim to distinguish between conceptual, explanatory history and empirical, narrative history, and secondly, in its distinction between revolution as process and revolution as act. Drawing on Claude Lefort and Paul Ricoeur's interventions in the historiographical debate, I demonstrate that these seemingly methodological concerns, conceal a deeper historical and political question concerning the nature of the ‘event’ of revolution. In response to Furet's oblique turn to Hegel in his later work, this article traces the nature of the ‘conceptual inversion’ Furet claims to find in Hegel and Marx's accounts of the French Revolution. In relation to Marx, it is argued that Furet's critique fails to capture the allegorical nature of the political in Marx's thought, and underplays the significance of revolution as the basis for both the separation of the social and the political and their attempted unity. The article ends with some remarks on the importance of language and culture in rethinking the relationship between Hegel and Marx.     

Intertextual geopolitics and La Carte et le territoire: a cautionary tale for UNESCO and the repas gastronomique des Français?

ABSTRACT

La Carte et le territoire features a France in decline, saved, entre autres, by attracting foreign tourists with ‘heritagised’ French food. Eight days after the novel won the 2010 Prix Goncourt, the repas gastronomique des Français was inscribed on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list (ICH). Considering Houellebecq’s use of tropes of culinary heritage alongside the French ICH bid reveals parallels in their manipulation of culinary heritage to create globally marketable products. Yet the motivations and ramifications of the ‘gastrodiplomacy’ in the novel and in the French state’s arguably neo-imperialist initiative differ tellingly. Houellebecq’s novel brings into cautionary focus how responding to perceived geopolitical imperatives by creating narratives of cultural heritage can instead eradicate the conditions of renewal upon which it depends and limit cultural diversity. The instrumentalisation of food heritage by a global corporation, national government and UNESCO—an ostensibly benign supranational institution—risks creating new conditions of global competition. However, comparing the novel and the narratives surrounding the repas gastronomique des Français nonetheless suggests that representations of food—like language—can exceed authorial intention, and the gastronomic miscegenation that is strategically missing from Houellebecq’s novel and elided in the ICH bid may yet continue to feed French food heritage.     

Terrorism and the banlieues: the Charlie Hebdo attacks in context

In January 2015, French society was shocked by a sequence of fatal attacks at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in Paris. In the wake of these tragic events, many social and political commentators interpreted the killings as an assault on freedom of expression and core French values of liberty, equality and laïcité. Prime Minister Manuel Valls described the perpetrators as disciples of Islamofascism. More than this, the terrorists were represented as the extreme manifestation of a deviant and nihilistic ‘other’—largely concentrated in France’s infamous banlieues—that rejected the Republic and embraced a form of ideological extremism that originated beyond France’s borders. Yet this interpretation fails to adequately consider the complexity of the situation. Drawing on the work on radicalisation by Wiktorowicz, and illustrated with lessons learned from research into the causes of the 2005 French riots, this article has two objectives: to highlight the importance of everyday exclusion in the web of causal factors that frames the path to violent extremism in France; and to offer an alternative view of the role and influence of the banlieues in this context.     

Carrying a heavy load: Mayan women’s understandings of reparation in the aftermath of genocide

ABSTRACT

Drawing on extensive testimony from Ixil women survivors of sexual violence, the 10 May 2013 verdict in the genocide trial of former de facto Guatemalan head of state and army general Efraín Ríos Montt highlighted the perpetration of sexual violence as an integral component in the attempt to destroy the Maya Ixil as an ethnic group and thus evidence of genocide. Acknowledging that sexual violence was a weapon of genocide in Guatemala contributes to a critical analysis of how the racialized violence targeted against the country’s indigenous peoples was gendered, and enables the women and men who are survivors of these crimes to seek redress. However, narrating sexual harm within justice-seeking processes is not without complication, and trials alone cannot respond to survivors’ demands for justice and social repair. This article examines how fifty-four Maya Q’eqchi’, Kaqchikel, Mam and Chuj women who are survivors of sexual violence make meaning of the everyday struggles to rethread their lives in the aftermath of genocide. The article uses data from a four-year participatory action research (PAR) project conducted by the authors with this group of Mayan women, including a series of workshops that used creative techniques—drawing, collage, dramatization and body sculptures—to elicit more complex and contestational stories than those emergent from a more linear narrative approach to understanding harm suffered and efforts for redress. Analysis of these data confirms that these Mayan women survivors have woven their understanding of reparation from three main threads: their experiences of loss and harm; their recognition of the Guatemalan state’s duplicity; and their protagonism in justice-seeking processes. The article concludes by arguing that women survivors' desire for repair requires attention to the deep-seated impoverishment that they highlight as the heavy load of gendered violence they carry with them.     

Beyond genocide and ethnic cleansing: demographic surgery as a new way to understand mass violence

This article argues that while ethnic cleansing and genocide are generally recognized as major features of modern history, pitfalls inherent in both concepts make them seriously deficient for purposes of historical understanding, especially because of the legal nature (and relevance) of the term genocide. Both terms carry the risk of accounting only for a part (albeit a major one) of a larger history of mass violence and, by over-emphasizing this part, of contributing to the phenomenon of a posteriori ‘ethnization of history’. The article thus proposes the recourse to the new concept of ‘demographic surgery’—one that is able to account for many different, and yet fundamentally similar, instances of category-based persecution of particular groups of people resulting in their massive displacement and/or killing. Episodes of category-based mass killing and displacements have happened along a number of different lines. In addition to ethnic or racial markers, religious, social and ideological ones—isolated or in combination—have all been politicized and used to identify categories of populations targeted by perpetrators of demographic surgery. Even if it is unlikely that terms like genocide or ethnic cleansing will be jettisoned by future writers on issues of mass violence, the concept of demographic surgery will be useful to scholars who need to group together similar events in order to better understand them.     

Las Casas and His Amerindian Nurse: Tropes of Lactation in the French Colonial Imaginary (c.1770–1815)

This article investigates Marmontel's reworking of the ancient legend of Pero and Cimone in his bestselling novel Les Incas (1777). According to an anecdote in Valerius Maximus's Memorable Doings and Sayings (c.30 CE), Pero saves her father, condemned to death by starvation, by breastfeeding him in prison. In Les Incas, it is Bartolomé de las Casas who is being cured from a fatal illness through the milk of an Amerindian princess. Jean‐Michel Moreau the Younger illustrated this lactation scene in the first edition of Marmontel's novel; his engraving inspired Louis Hersent to render the topic in oil three decades later. My article explores the ways in which French Enlightenment writers and artists employed lactation imagery to propose a utopian reform of colonial relations – the voluntary offering of America's riches to benevolent white patriarchs – at a time when the nature of government authority, paternity, maternity, race and kinship were being redefined. In 1808, Hersent's painting of ‘Las Casas Cured by Savages’ appears curiously anachronistic in the context of contemporary novels and paintings that portray colonial relationships as inundated by death and bloodshed. In Chateaubriand's Atala (1801), lactation imagery is employed to signify white men's necrophilic desire, genocide and loss.     

Grief as method: topographies of grief,care, and fieldwork from Northwest Arkansas to New York and the Marshall Islands

Abstract

When we grieve during fieldwork, our grief forms new geographies of knowledge production and emotion. In this article, I use autoethnography to theorize my grief during fieldwork following the death of my sister. I examine grief’s methodological implications using the concept of ‘grief as method,’ an emotionally-inflected practice that accounts for the vulnerability produced by grief. By centering vulnerability, ‘grief as method’ also urges researchers to consider the practices and politics of ‘caring with’ our research subjects and caring for ourselves, raising larger questions about the role of care in research. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how grief’s geographical features—its mobility, its emergence in new sites and landscapes, and its manifestation as both proximity and distance—shape ‘grief as method’ profoundly. I examine grief’s spatial implications by building on Katz’s ‘topography’ to theorize a ‘topography of grief’ that stitches together the emotional geographies of researchers, blurring both spatial divisions (‘the field’ vs. ‘the not-field’) and methodological ones (the ‘researcher-self’ vs. the ‘personal-self’). If we see grief as having a topography, then the relationships between places darkened by grief come into focus. Moreover, by approaching grief methodologically, we can better understand how field encounters—relationships between people—are forged through grief. ‘Grief as method,’ in offering a spatial analysis of grief’s impact on fieldwork, envisions a broader definition of what engaged research looks like and where it takes place.     

In visibilities: the Groupe du 6 novembre and the production of liberal lesbian identity in contemporary France

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the little-known contributions of a Paris-based activist group of self-identified lesbians of colour, the Groupe du 6 novembre, which formed in 1999. Their self-published anthology, entitled Warriors/Guerrières, contests the racism of French feminist and LGBT community and culture and examines sexual minority visibility through an intersectional lens. This anthology was unfortunately contested and all but censored by organisations that purportedly sought to promote lesbian culture and self-expression. The Groupe du 6 novembre’s erasure is symptomatic of the ways in which the seemingly laudable aim of combating lesbian invisibility—within both scholarship and activism—can actually serve to marginalise racialised lesbians. Through close readings of the Groupe’s poetry and prose and documentation of their history, this article will argue that dominant conceptions of lesbian sexual identity are imbued with liberal racism and Republican universalism. At a time of increasing concern that certain forms of feminist and LGBT politics are being co-opted by the State to racist ends, the Groupe du 6 novembre constitutes an essential chapter in French feminist history and literature.     

Genocide,masculinity and posttraumatic growth in Rwanda: reconstructing male identity through ndi umunyarwanda

While the experiences of Rwandan women during and after the 1994 genocide have been studied quite extensively, little attention has been paid to the lives of men. Through an analysis of their testimonies, this article explores how Tutsi men experienced the 1994 genocide and how it has affected their identities. The analysis identifies three time periods where different versions of masculinity are expressed: the early stages of the genocide, where a predominantly warrior/military identity persisted; later stages of the genocide, during which men became aware of their vulnerability and the extent of the genocide; and the post-genocide period, in which masculinity has been rebuilt through the ideology of ndi umunyarwanda, the notion of Rwandanness or Rwandicity. Post-genocide male identity draws heavily on precolonial military values such as patriotism, dignity, unity and the importance of a strong army; however, the idealism of warriorhood has been lost. The emphasis of masculinity post-1994 appears to be on a shared culture and language and collectively working for one's country, not fighting for it. Indeed, there appears to be a complete aversion to violence of any kind, which, it is argued, is a form of posttraumatic growth. Another positive aspect of the change in male identity is the rejection of former colonial influences and their ideas in exchange for more authentic cultural expression and self-acceptance. The form of ndi umunyarwanda adopted by the men in this study is distinct from the government's version of this ideology, however, as these men reject the idea of forced apologies and reconciliation. In light of these findings, the article discusses the practical implications for those engaged in social work with survivors, and also calls for a more nuanced discussion of post-genocide Rwanda and the concept of Rwandicity.     

The politics of disenchantment: Marcel Gauchet and the French struggle with secularization

ABSTRACT

This article looks at Marcel Gauchet’s major metahistorical statement, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (1985), and uses it to advance a series of claims about the place of secularization in debates within and about French politics, especially in relation to modern French history. The argument is put forward that Gauchet’s work is best understood as offering an alternative philosophy of history to Marxism that could serve to support a broadly republican realignment of French politics in the 1980s. Revisionist historiography concerning the French Revolution likewise played a role in this development, and served as a prerequisite of sorts to Gauchet’s broader historical project. The article also considers Gauchet’s work in light of postmodern skepticism of the utility of historical metanarratives.     

Who Sank the Battleship Bouvet on 18 March 1915? The Problems of Imported Historiography in Turkey*

This article traces how differing perspectives on the sinking of the French battleship Bouvet ultimately denied the Ottoman artillery credit for the success. The official British account would attribute the defeat to ‘floating mines’ and to the ‘luck’ of the Turks in March 1915 first, and later to the Nusret’s minefield when they published their official history in 1921. Following the Great War and the occupation of Istanbul, the Ottoman officers who participated in the naval operations revised their own accounts and imported the British official narrative of the event. In understanding this overlooked case using newly disclosed Ottoman and German accounts, we can analyse how the losers’ historiography is vulnerable to overt influence from the victors’ hegemonic official historiography.     

Between Fantasy and Philosophy: Saʿdi,Translator of Voltaire’s Zadig

Zadig ou la Destinée opens on a preface supposedly written by Sadi (sic), who seems to suggest he is the translator of the story which is to follow. The article will investigate the role played by Voltaire’s reference to Sa?di in Zadig as an Oriental prop for the narrative’s exotic setting, but also, more importantly, as participating in its philosophical content. Travelers’ accounts had brought growing interest in Persia, and Sa?di would not have been unfamiliar to an educated public; the Orient more generally became an experimental space for Enlightenment thought. Playing on the notion of the translator as cultural bridge, the article examines the uses Voltaire makes of Sa?di in Zadig and whether these correlate to the eighteenth-century French reader’s perceptions of the Iranian poet.     

Between parson and poet: a re-examination of the Latin Continuation of William of Tyre

Although historians of the crusades and the Latin East are familiar with the Old French translation and continuations of William of Tyre’s Historia, very little has ever been written about the narrative of the Third Crusade generally known as ‘the Latin Continuation of William of Tyre’. This article re-examines the probable date and sources of the Continuatio. Challenging long-standing assumptions about when the Continuatio was written and where the continuator drew his information from, it argues that the evidence points to an original date of composition in the early thirteenth century, not c.1194, as is commonly believed, and that the continuator used Roger of Howden’s Chronica, not his Gesta, as a principal written source. Furthermore, analysis of numerous parallels between the Continuatio and the vernacular Estoire de la guerre sainte attributed to the poet Ambroise reveals a possible relationship between the two texts that has hitherto gone largely unnoticed.     

A shameful debate? A critical reassessment of the ‘Torossian debate’

ABSTRACT

For years now, a debate has been going on concerning the memoirs of Sarkis Torossian, published in 1947, and republished in a commented Turkish version in 2012. This latter publication sparked a debate among a number of Turkish historians, divided over the reliability or not of Torossian’s account of his participation in the Ottoman war effort as an officer, and his subsequent desertion following the realization that most of his family had fallen victim to deportation and mass murder. Some challenged Torossian’s narrative and evidence, based on inconsistencies and errors, coming to the conclusion that his story was largely fictionalized and his documents forged. Others, on the contrary, took Torossian’s defence, trying to reject or to justify these inconsistencies, and suggesting that this criticism was likely to stem from a nationalist, or even denialist stand regarding the genocide of the Armenians. The debate has to a large extent remained contained within Turkey, and its rare international repercussions, including an article by Taner Akçam in the Journal of Genocide Research, have more or less systematically sided with the ‘pro-Torossian’ side. The present article aims to set the record straight by showing that the criticism levelled against Torossian’s memoirs is extremely serious and solid, and that the debate has been corrupted by a gradual slipping of what should have remained a scholarly discussion into an uncontrolled conflict based on ad hominem attacks and political allegations. It is my contention that the authenticity or not of Torossian’s narrative and documents is of very secondary importance, compared to the much more problematic issue of the way in which ideological, political and moral concerns have ended up hijacking the debate. The ultimate relevance of the so-called Torossian debate may well be its capacity to reveal some crucial weaknesses of genocide research in a late Ottoman context.     

Donor‐Driven Justice and its Discontents: The Case of Rwanda

Never before was a process of doing justice driven so strongly from the outside as in post‐genocide Rwanda. Not only did the 1994 genocide lead to the founding of the International Tribunal, but it also induced intensive donor involvement in domestic attempts to ‘break the cycle of hatred’— from the work done by the national courts and the Unity Commission to the gacaca. In this sense, Rwanda became the forerunner of a much wider trend, towards a judicialization of international relations, for instance through an emphasis on international criminal law. However, the past decade of donor involvement in Rwanda in general, and the case of the gacaca in particular, show us how this specific — technocratic, de‐contextualized — emphasis on justice might seem innocuous at first glance, but carries dangers within it, particularly if it takes place in an increasingly autocratic and oppressive political environment like that of contemporary Rwanda.     

Understanding criminal mobility: the case of the Neapolitan Camorra

Italian mafias are now present and active abroad, and many national legal economies are undermined by their activities. The American government responded to this threat in 2011 by introducing an ‘executive order’ that blacklisted the Camorra's (the Neapolitan mafia) activities in the United States. Recently, there has been a growing debate on criminal mobility and, in particular, why, when and how Italian mafiosi move out of their territory of origin and expand into new foreign territories. Recent literature suggests that Italian mafias change their behaviour across territories and will succeed in ‘transplanting’ when there are emerging new markets. This article examines some brief case studies of camorristi in Europe to discuss these concepts of mafia mobility; and it concludes by suggesting that there is no ‘one size fits all’ analysis and that more attention should be paid to the interdependence of territories.     

Surviving in the margins of a genocide case in the making: recognizing the economy of testimony at stake in research on political violence

ABSTRACT

In this article, we aim to draw attention to the hopes, frustrations and disillusions that so-called ‘transitional justice’ projects produce in drastically poor, war-torn, historically marginalized but politicized Indigenous communities. Drawing on extensive ethnographic research we conducted separately between 1982 and 2010 in Guatemala and Mexico, we describe the ways in which the world came to know about Finca San Francisco’s massacre, committed by the Guatemalan army on 17 July 1982, as part of its scorched earth policy. We then look at the various forms of reparations its survivors have been the subject of. In so doing, we focus more specifically on how the Center for Human Rights Legal Action (CALDH), the non-governmental human rights organization that was behind the Ríos Montt genocide case, mobilized Finca San Francisco’s massacre survivors to become participants in the trial. After examining how the survivors of Finca San Francisco responded to CALDH’s mobilization efforts, we reflect on the kind of ‘gift’ these survivors expected in return for their stories of annihilation and destruction. Our goal is to bring to light the ‘economy of testimony’ that human rights activists, journalists or social scientists become entangled in once they ask genocide survivors to testify about the brutal deaths of their loved ones.