The Rwandan genocide: modernity and ambivalence

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article situates itself in the theoretical space between the field of genocide, and postcolonial studies, advocating for a closer relationship between the two, particularly in relation to the emerging field of postcolonial genocide. The Rwandan genocide is illustrative of this need, as a case which remains firmly rooted in identity categories that have been imposed on the native populations during the colonial era. The article traces the persistence of the colonial racial hierarchies in Rwanda and the role they played in the Rwandan genocide of 1994. It fosters a particularly significant focus on modernity as the symbolic line that divides the imagined racial categories in the colonial gaze, resulting in a crucial impact of nesting colonialisms in the genocidal rhetoric of the late twentieth century. The Rwandan genocidal project contains within it a desire to fulfil the promise of modernity by facilitating the emergence of an ethnically cleansed nation state, while simultaneously rejecting it as the heritage of violence ridden exploitation colonialism. This paradox of ambivalent modernity presents itself both as a crucial characteristic of the Rwandan genocide as well as a persistent rupture in the formation of contemporary Rwandan identities.