French Cultural Studies

Cette étude vise l'analyse de récits narratifs sur le génocide des Tutsi, récits publiés dans le cadre du projet `Rwanda. Écrire par devoir de mémoire' en partant de l'hypothèse suivante: un texte littéraire se manifeste sous forme de double procès esthétique et axiologique dans lequel deux isotopies opèrent de manière solidaire. De type sémio-narratif, l'isotopie littéraire, qui engendre le procès esthétique, convoque les figures à connotation littéraire (genres, motifs, formes, etc.) et rattache le texte à un lieu discursif appelé `littérature' ou `art'. Un tel parcours isotope atteste de l'intentionnalité esthétique susceptible d'être analysée en quantité et en qualité. Parallèlement, une isotopie référentialiste et idéologique , qui articule le texte à un ancrage social et historique (onomastique, chronotopes, discours spécialisés, etc.), se met en place sous forme de procès axiologique et pose le rapport nécessaire entre un sujet écrivant et le monde représenté. Dans un premier temps, on analysera le procès esthétique du texte du roman en notant tous les procédés littéraires — intertextualité, symbole, thèmes et motifs stéréotypés, convocation des idéologies du discours social en amont du génocide — et dans un second temps, la dimension axiologique portera sur l'évaluation des narrateurs et des pratiques sociales dans une posture énonciative éthique. Jusqu'où peut-on dire que le texte littéraire, tout en parlant du social, ne saurait s'y réduire, puisque son intentionnalité est d'être d'abord littéraire?

Much of the photography and literature published in response to the Rwandan genocide focuses on catastrophic human damage and highly visual manifestations of suffering. This work, whilst essential to documenting the events and the aftermath of the killings, has been in danger of obscuring the individual person, a tendency which is exacerbated by international representations of `Africa' as a place of violence, illness and death. In Les Blessures du silence, a collection of photographs and testimonial interviews from Rwanda, Alain Kazinierakis and Yolande Mukagasana challenge this pervasive foregrounding of injury by focusing instead on the ongoing emotional suffering of the individual. This article will examine how Kazinierakis's photography interacts with Mukagasana's interviews to provide an unusual contribution to the literature memorialising genocide.

Africans, particularly women, rarely assume the travel writer's gaze. The traveller is generally assumed to be white, Western and male. In 1998, Ivorian author Véronique Tadjo travelled to Rwanda with a group of other African writers to reflect upon and write about the 1994 genocide. This article focuses on L'Ombre d'Imana: voyages jusqu'au bout du Rwanda (2000), the travel narrative she published as a result of this trip. It analyses the ways in which Tadjo positions herself and her reader as an ambiguous tourist in Rwanda and how, in doing so, she succeeds in challenging received ideas about the genocide.

For the survivors of the genocide of the Tutsis, testifying to their traumatic past must be envisioned in relation to the political and ideological tensions that define the representations of Rwanda's national history. Bearing witness represents the possibility `of' and the call `for' a dialogic space where survivors seek to redefine the present meaning derived from the experience of the genocide and its haunting resonance. In their attempt to re-envision and re-assert themselves through testimony, survivors move from a position of being subjected to political violence to a position that entails the promise of agency. In this regard, Mujawayo's dialogic and polyphonic art of witnessing is a unique resource. Her testimonies seek to generate a social space within which the survivors can negotiate, and eventually reclaim, the meaning of their survival and to assert the demands of the traumatic aftermath they face.

This article examines a small number of documentary films made since 2000 which focus on the post-genocide situation in Rwanda. It begins by tracing some of the debates about the contested versions of national unity and reconciliation produced by the RPF-led government, which seeks, at least at the level of its rhetoric, to transcend the politics of ethnicity and to end once and for all the culture of impunity which is seen as one of the root causes of the genocide. Acknowledging that the government has achieved a measure of peace and security in a relatively short space of time, critics argue that ethnicity is, however, still an issue in Rwanda and that there is an official RPF narrative — `we are all Rwandans now' — which many academics, journalists and NGO officials have bought into, while at the same time ignoring the elements of authoritarianism and the suppression of dissent which, it is claimed, mark the behaviour of the ruling, Tutsi-dominated elite. The documentary films are analysed in the context of these conflicting accounts of the complexities of the reconciliation process and are shown as cultural practices which reflect upon the contradictions and tensions manifested in the attempts to find top-down solutions to problems which require sensitive deployment of local knowledge, local resources and the experiences of everyday life in still predominantly rural Rwanda.

Eric Kabera is a Rwandan documentary and fiction filmmaker and producer. He collaborated on one of the first fictionalised films about the genocide, 100 Days (dir. Nick Hughes), and has participated in a variety of projects related to the process of memorialisation and commemoration of the events of 1994 and their aftermath. Kabera is also the founder of the Rwanda Cinema Centre and the Rwanda Film Festival, which aim to bring the moving image to the country's rural populations. This interview focuses on Kabera's documentary film The Keepers of Memory: Survivors' Accounts of the Rwandan Genocide (2005), which traces the individual trajectories of those affected by the genocide and gives them a platform to voice their experience. Special attention is paid to the relationship with physical surrounding, to image and to the internal and external experience of trauma and memory in their collective and individual forms. The theoretical assertions about memory recording are juxtaposed with pragmatic issues encountered by a filmmaker as practitioner. The interview was conducted on 30 March 2008 in Kigali, Rwanda.