Navigating Cultural Memory

Navigating Cultural Memory examines how a master narrative of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi evolved into a hegemonic narrative both in Rwanda and globally. Identifying key actors who shaped and responded to the evolution and enforcement of the master narrative in the first two decades after the genocide and civil war ended, it engages with important questions about collective memory, trauma, and power following violent and divisive events.With chapters analyzing interviews the author collected, as well as other secondary sources, Mwambari charts how Rwandans from different backgrounds--who he identifies as Champions, Antagonists, and Fatalistsof the master narrative--have responded to this event through language, physical symbols of memory, art, and traditional and new media. Mwambari argues that a relational approach to dignity can help transform polarizing narratives away from sources of competition, exclusion, and silence, and towards healing. Conversations about the politics around the master narrative and about the collective presentation of violent histories are not only important for contemporary politics but the key toRwanda's present and future peace. By exploring these contradictions in memories between actors in Rwanda and abroad, Navigating Cultural Memory offers crucial insights into the complexities surroundingindividual and collective memory in societies recovering from violent conflict, mass atrocities, and genocide.

David Mwambari offers a powerful revisionary account of the memory of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda. His book works simultaneously on two levels: it illuminates and challenges what he calls the hegemonic master narrative of the genocide memory while offering an account of the plurality of memories of multiple violence in Rwanda's history; and it models how the study of collective remembrance can take inspiration from decolonial methodologies and move beyond its Eurocentric origins. This is an important contribution to a variety of fields, including genocide studies, African studies, and memory studies. Highly recommended!"-Michael Rothberg, author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators.
David Mwambari's nuanced study explores the lived experiences of the 1994 genocide and its commemoration, over twenty years, recentring a wide range of Rwandan voices, and examining the powerful dominant narrative of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide Against the Tutsi. Mwambari has a unique positionality as one of the few Rwandan international scholars to carry out such complex scholarly work. This is a scholarly journey which is both restorative and productive, and one in which the humanity of the author is fully engaged."-Molly Andrews, Honorary Professor of Political Psychology, University College London
This innovative study explores how Rwanda's master narrative about the 1994 genocide became hegemonic through a process spanning several years and involving multiple actors. Particularly noteworthy are profiles of how three Rwandan artists contributed to commemoration events-yet the celebrated musician Kizito Mihigo was punished when he dared diverge from the dominant narrative; several years later he died in police custody. Despite its extensive research, the cautious tone of Mwambari's book will likely stimulate spirited debates on a central political issue today-that of creating a hegemonic ideology in the wake of massive social violence."-Catharine Newbury, Professor of Government, Smith College
This book has evolved both as a biographical excavation and intellectual inquiry into what memory and memorialization can do for societies disrupted by genocide. In focusing on memory and how remembering is the subject of ever-changing dynamics, this study advances our understanding of knowledge, of how we know and what we know. This is the reason the intellectual contribution of this book is urgent and valuable. The book reminds us that lived experiences, coded in memory, give intellectual work authenticity. In daring to write this book, and in doing it so well, David Mwambari has taken memory studies a notch higher and invited us to accept the fluidity of memory without denying its very value in society. The book is an indispensable contribution to a growing interdisciplinary field of memory studies."-Godwin R. Murunga, CODESRIA Executive Secretary
This research on the memory politics of Rwanda is so extensive and thorough that it should prove valuable to many scholars who focus on the process of political socialization elsewhere. Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty. Choice

David Mwambari is an Associate Professor at the faculty of social sciences at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven in Belgium and the Principal Investigator for TMSS project funded by European Research Council (ERC). He is a board member at the Oxford Consortium on Human Rights, University of Oxford. He was an assistant professor at Kings College London (UK), United States International University (Kenya) and was a fellow at the University ofCambridge and CODESRIA in Senegal. His research has appeared in international academic journals, including African Affairs, Qualitative Research, Memory Studies, and Africa Development.

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