Lynn Nottage's Theatre of Genocide: Ruined, Rape, and Afropessimism

Lynn Nottage's award-winning play Ruined (2007) dialectically dramatizes how the genocide in the Democratic Republic of Congo—the deadliest genocide since the Holocaust—must be understood within the context of global capitalism. However, as the play critically suggests, the dominant centers of global capitalism disavow their responsibility for this genocide by exclusively focusing upon and fetishizing sexual assault. This article explores how Ruined critiques Western discourses on African genocides, a critique animated by Afropessimism, a theory that challenges normative understandings of genocide. As Afropessimists argue and Ruined dramatizes, Black genocide is not a historically bounded event, but rather, a structure that enables the modern world.