Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire by Laura Edmondson (review)

In Performing Trauma in Central Africa, Laura Edmondson explores several intersecting lines of activism and analysis, politics and performance, humanitarian intervention from wealthy governments or nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and more subtle acts of deflecting or exploiting the symbolic and cash value of aid capital by survivors of violence as well as those who claim to represent them. Edmondson draws on investigations of the commodification of aid and suffering in Joseph Slaughter's Human Rights Inc., Jennifer Hyndman's Refugees and the Politics of Humanitarianism, and Ivan Kapoor's Celebrity Humanitarianism, among others. She goes beyond, or more accurately beneath, these investigations, however, when she probes the work of many a fervent or ambivalent or, in wry self-characterization, "failed theatre activist" (169), fueled by the mixture of confidence and guilt that comes with privilege, to attempt to change the lives of the those traumatized by violent assaults, sometimes from former neighbors, as well as displacement or exile. She challenges research-practitioners at the intersection of performance and trauma, such as Eric Ehn, who enacts hospitality between locals and guest to "mitigate estrangement" (283), to confront the contradictory entanglements among well-meaning but underprepared visitors (including Ehn, Edmondson, and others in the book) and the survivors of genocide in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa, which encompasses the huge if fragmented Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as well as smaller countries like Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda. Although grounded in the colonial and postcolonial legacy of violence in this highly contested region, this challenge addresses researchers and practitioners in other conflict zones and thus invites a wider readership for the book.

Edmondson enacts a delicate balance between the sociological analysis of humanitarian relief and its entanglement with aid capital and an "empire of trauma" (11) on the one hand; and her own ambivalent contribution as participant observer and critic of performing trauma that has made testimony a "currency" in the "humanitarian market" (13), but that also enables local action and repair on the other. The subtitle, "Shadows of Empire," marks the historical sweep of the book, noting that humanitarian rhetoric as well as the pursuit of lucrative resources fueled justifications of intervention since the "scramble for Africa" by European powers Belgium, France, Germany, and Great Britain in the 1880s. Although empire is a broad concept, Edmondson argues that it provides a theoretical framework elastic enough to encompass both the material exploitation of people and commodities that perpetuates the power of global capital, and the pervasiveness of humanitarian discourse that may reinforce this power even if its proponents strive to mitigate it. She critiques Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, whose notion of empire is too broad to account for Africa's simultaneous exploitation and marginalization by global capital (11), but Edmondson's personifications of empire as a voracious though "gullible" (15) monster sometimes mimic their "grand rhetoric," obscuring otherwise precise indictments.

Edmondson is most compelling when she anchors general claims about the harms and the hopes of testimony within particular contexts. To establish these contexts, she follows the introduction with an illuminating historical account of "competitive memory" (35)—narratives of violence and redress that compete for local and international attention in the Great Lakes region of Africa and of battles over material resources, coltan and other profitable minerals as well as humanitarian capital, and the ideological justification of the violent appropriation of resources in the region. This chapter shows that, despite national boundaries established by nineteenth-century conquest, the borders that officially separate Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, and the DRC have always been porous, and that these countries and her sites of investigation—especially Gulu in northern Uganda and Kigali and Kibeho in Rwanda—have longstanding connections and conflicts that inform as well as inflame competitive memory.

The following chapter turns to Edmondson's fieldwork at the Children of War Rehabilitation Center in Gulu in 2004, just as a United Nations investigation into havoc wreaked by the so-called Lord's Resistance Army...