La transmission littéraire et cinématographique du génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda par Virginie Brinker (review)

Reviews 249 allowed Saint-Simon to increase his sphere of political influence until he became advisor to the Regent, Philippe d’Orléans. In this critical position, Saint-Simon tactically balanced his friendship with the Prince against the necessity of principled counsel. Saint-Simon steadily endeavored to block the Duke of Maine’s faction and succeeded in diminishing the rank of Louis XIV’s illegitimate children vis-à-vis dukes and peers—his greatest triumph was likely the lit de justice that he helped to convene in 1718. However, as this study shows in detail, Saint-Simon’s politics were also much more varied and subtle, blending idealism with extensive practical experience, realpolitik, and what Blanquie frequently calls Saint-Simon’s erudition, which included a comparative study of the role of grandees in Spain versus dukes and peers in France. The Mémoires reread as a political document deepen our understanding of SaintSimon . His close and often contentious work with financial reformer John Law, for example, attests to a technical understanding of the monarchy’s finances. With the death of Philippe d’Orléans in 1723, Saint-Simon lost his position at the center of power and saw the dissolution of government by councils along with the return of ministers. Far from being exiled and idle, however, Saint-Simon continually focused on his provincial governorships until his death in 1755. This study shows convincingly that Saint-Simon possessed not just strong convictions regarding the rank of dukes and peers, not just an unusual penchant for observation, but also a coherent and nuanced political vision based on concrete practice. University of Iowa Roland Racevskis Brinker, Virginie. La transmission littéraire et cinématographique du génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda. Paris: Garnier, 2014. ISBN 978-2-8124-3254-5. Pp. 481. 39 a. In 1998, four years after the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda during which the government army and local militias slaughtered approximately 800,000 people, a group of Francophone African writers travelled to the country. These writers participated in a project, “Écrire par devoir de mémoire,” organized by the literary festival Fest’Africa to create an African response to the genocide. One of the project’s goals was to correct widespread public misunderstandings of the events, which the media had represented as a “tribal war” rather than as a state-sponsored genocide. Brinker’s book focuses on the corpus of eight texts published under the aegis of the Fest’Africa project, but she also analyzes thirty or so thematically related novels, plays, essays, works of young adult fiction, graphic novels, fictional films, and documentaries. As Brinker writes, the theme of visual media and their capacity to convey or to mask the horror of the genocide pervades these works. The pervasiveness of television imagery about the genocide and its aftermath raises the question: In what sense is literature about mass violence able to compete with images, which “possède[nt] un redoutable pouvoir: celui de s’imprimer dans les esprits?”(429). Thus, for writers about Rwanda, media images are “la source de l’écriture et ce contre quoi elle s’insurge” (21). By framing the question in this way, Brinker not only identifies a central theme of many of the works, but also constructs a theoretical apparatus useful for analyzing other contemporary works about mass violence. Brinker roots her analysis in theoretical work on literature of the Holocaust, giving a useful and detailed summary of many themes that recur in texts about Rwanda: the notion of the unspeakable, the authority of survivor testimony, the role of the intermediary witness, the limitations of realism, and the morally questionable role of fiction. In the second part of the work, Brinker argues that, in an effort to create and transmit a collective memory of the genocide more accurate and complete than the one disseminated by the media, writers about Rwanda sought what she calls “un style iconique.” The characteristics of this literary style include the use of analogy (particularly to the Holocaust); figuration through monster-figures, hypotyposis, and metonymy (wherein images of machetes, roadblocks , or dogs stand in for the horror); and transfiguration of the events by allegory. The specificity of these...