Contentious vulnerability: The case of Rwandan genocide memorials

IF 1.4 2区 心理学 Q1 CULTURAL STUDIES
Lucy Britt
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引用次数: 0

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.
有争议的脆弱性:卢旺达种族灭绝纪念馆案例
卢旺达 1994 年种族灭绝纪念馆罕见地使用了人体遗骸和暴力描绘。这些纪念馆受到了欧洲和北美学者的广泛批评,他们关注描绘身体脆弱性的危险性,认为这支持了政权的排斥政治。然而,这些批评家将卢旺达纪念馆中身体脆弱性美学框架的排斥性与美学本身混为一谈,完全抹杀了脆弱性,冒着殖民主义立场的风险,将卢旺达的背景还原为非政治性,将其纪念政治纳入情感与理性的虚假二分法。通过与朱迪斯-巴特勒(Judith Butler)和阿奇尔-姆本贝(Achille Mbembe)的脆弱性和人类理论的对话,我认为,如果以一种包容和批判的方式来构建脆弱性美学,就能提供一种将他人的身体视为非一次性的方式,并反对贬低形式的权力,从而带来希望。
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来源期刊
Memory Studies
Memory Studies Multiple-
CiteScore
2.30
自引率
18.20%
发文量
75
期刊介绍: Memory Studies is an international peer reviewed journal. Memory Studies affords recognition, form, and direction to work in this nascent field, and provides a critical forum for dialogue and debate on the theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues central to a collaborative understanding of memory today. Memory Studies examines the social, cultural, cognitive, political and technological shifts affecting how, what and why individuals, groups and societies remember, and forget. The journal responds to and seeks to shape public and academic discourse on the nature, manipulation, and contestation of memory in the contemporary era.
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