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  • Global Humanitarianism, Race, and the Spectacle of the African Corpse in Current Western Representations of the Rwandan Genocide
  • Heike Härting (bio)

The Rwandan Genocide, Racialized Humanitarianism, and Necropoeia

As material and rhetorical practice, the written and visual narrativization of racialized violence constitutes a significant aspect of the cultural politics of affect that has given rise to a growing planetary and humanitarianist consciousness. While a planetary sense of the world originates in imperial ways of narrating and mapping global space, it is also premised on the pseudo-empirical taxonomy of bodies into, as Barnor Hesse puts it, "pathologized 'non-European'" and "European bodies."1 This essay argues that it is the spectacle of the dead African body that serves as a historically and rhetorically continuous signifier through which the West mounts a revisionary practice of cultural introspection and self-reinvention.2 I specifically examine how different media represent the 1994 Rwandan genocide both to shape the popular imagination about the political conditions of the African continent as a whole and to generate key images that have become the defining yet dehistoricized moments of this genocide. What motivates my readings is the striking discrepancy between the output of Western cultural representations of the Rwandan genocide through film and literary and nonliterary fiction and the decreasing international commitment to putting a stop to genocidal violence in Africa and to supporting the surviving, specifically female, victims of the Rwandan genocide.3 [End Page 61]

Such a discrepancy raises questions as to how and to what end the Rwandan genocide wields political and cultural capital. Generally, Western news reports of the genocide represented it either in terms of an archaic rhetoric of premodern tribalism or as an event that traumatized the United Nations (UN) peacekeepers and white civilians left in the country.4 Entrenched in received practices of mediatizing and stereotyping Africa, these representations narrate the genocide as a human catastrophe, which, while happening in Africa, emphasizes the UN's political paralysis and legitimizes the restructuring of global security measures and military spending, frequently articulated in the UN's new and controversial politics of global responsibility and humanitarian intervention.5 As Tony Vaux observes with hindsight, the Rwandan genocide has become the "defining event of twentieth century humanitarianism."6 Indeed, the failure of the international community to intervene to stop a preventable genocide reflects the enormous degree to which humanitarian interventions are politicized and "a cultural phenomenon" (245). "Biased towards a few situations that interest the most powerful Western politicians," they tend to ignore "the specifics of each conflict" in favor of projecting a generic dependent recipient located in the global South and are deeply racialized (245, 249). In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, however, the transformation of a political failure into a new Red Cross Code of Conduct (1994) and the Sphere Charter (2004) has hardly influenced how particular narratives of violence condition the modes of perception that govern the legitimizing practices of humanitarian interventions. Indeed, as Jacques Derrida observes, we still do "not count the dead in the same way from one corner of the globe to the other."7 What remains repressed is the legacy of the imperial and racialized structures of perception that historically underlay the representation of civilizational missions in Africa and are likely to govern today's humanitarian projects.

In this essay, the term humanitarianist refers primarily to the cultural and narrative production of affect as a form of global capital. Along with Pheng Cheah's reading of contemporary human rights discourses, I suggest that the notion of humanitarianism, epistemologically and historically encumbered, as it is, in ideologies of national sovereignty, contributes to the workings of global capital through the production and management of structures of affect designed to give "a human face to globalization" and to export the moralist "normativity" of human rights in the name of an ethical response or even resistance to the effects of globalization.8 As a "postcolonial civilizing mission" able to covertly "legitimize the predatory expansion of global capital," humanitarianism ambiguously operates through the production of affect and global missions of compassionate rescue and intervention, which, nevertheless, remain vital to sustaining the military-industrial complex of the West and its allies...

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