Framing "Rwandanness": Studying Rwanda in the Twenty-First Century

When we first set out to write this review essay, motivated by the boom of recent publications on Rwanda, we thought these four books from a variety of disciplines seemed to share a common feature that haunts much of the literature on Rwanda: the "before" and the "after." Yet in these four studies the genocide, often previously (and still by some) seen as a moment of profound historical rupture, is decentered. These studies all reflect emphatically contemporary perspectives, interested in continuities and the permutations of the "before" while firmly rooted in the "after." This focus allows for rich interdisciplinary work from a new generation of scholars and perhaps suggests that we are far enough away in time from the genocide to frame a more defined and creative field of Rwandan studies.

What becomes striking in reading these texts together is the particularism with which each author treats the subject of "Rwandanness" or "Rwandicity," ranging from the politics of historical production (Jessee) to transitional justice practices, both formal and informal (Ingelaere and Doughty), and the role of the state in unity-building projects (Purdeková). All four take pains to situate their studies within the rural peasant experience, bypassing urban and more mobile populations almost entirely and going to great lengths to validate their own embeddedness in what they locate as the "true" Rwanda. With Paul Kagame's reelection with 98 percent of the vote in August 2017, these scholars provide timely critical insights into the workings of the state and the impacts of its postgenocide reconciliation projects on the everyday lived experiences of Rwandans.

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Despite this presentist turn in Rwandan studies, history remains a contentious field in which Rwandans negotiate their identities and relationship to the state. In her immersive study Negotiating Genocide in Rwanda: The Politics of History, Erin Jessee, an oral historian, seeks to answer a complex question: how do Rwandans interpret history in order to make sense of the genocide? Drawing on a thoughtful and self-reflective methodology, Jessee argues that the official government narrative works only for a minority of Rwandans. After 1994 the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) propagated a simplified history of precolonial unity disrupted by colonial powers who enforced racial divides that developed into an exclusive and violent Hutu nationalism in the postcolonial era and culminated in the genocide. Jessee argues that this narrative has created controversy over nearly every aspect of Rwanda's past, and she predicts that "if left unchecked, [these tensions] could threaten the long-term political stability of the nation" (26).

Taking the narratives of individual Rwandans as her primary unit of analysis, Jessee focuses on life histories, organized into categories similar to what Kristin Conner Doughty (in Remediation in Rwanda, reviewed below) terms "genocide citizenship"—that is, public identities defined by how they relate to the genocide. Jessee begins with national memorial employees, whom she refers to as "professional survivors," who not only assist in disseminating the government's narrative, but who also must navigate a complex web of social relations and their own personal histories. Jessee then examines the life histories of survivors outside of official settings, a limited category as only a small portion of the population is permitted to identify as "survivor" (118). Jessee's interviewees, many of them elders who claim descent from royal lineages, provide a periodization of Rwandan history that proceeds from precolonial richness and social harmony to...