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Genres of “Yet An Other Genocide” Cinematic Representations of Rwanda madelaine hron Seventeen years ex post facto, “Rwanda,” or the misnomer “the Rwandan genocide,” had become a catch-all phrase to signal the failure of Western interventionism and international human rights discourse.1 The horrific events of 1994, when, in one hundred days, more than 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were slaughtered as the world stood by and did nothing to stop it, irrevocably transformed celebratory fifty-year-old declarations of “never again” into the cynical current caveat of “yet again”—with regards to Darfur, the Congo, or future genocides.2 At the same time, Rwanda became a “hot commodity” in Western popular culture, with the mass production of scholarly studies, novels, testimonials, films, and documentaries. In particular, in the wake of the ten-year commemoration of the atrocities in 2004, there was an explosion of cinematic representations of the events, with the wide release of such feature films as Hotel Rwanda, Shooting Dogs, and A Sunday in Kigali and the production of numerous documentaries, such as Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire, Mothers Courage, and Rwanda: Living Forgiveness. This attention is incongruously ironic when we consider the Western media coverage of the 1994 events or its commemoration ten years later. At the height of the killings in April 1994, the Big Three TV networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) together allotted Rwanda only 32 minutes, or 1.5 percent, of news time.3 Despite profuse apologies in the wake of the genocide, only one Western leader attended the ten-year commemorative ceremonies in Kigali.4 As a Rwandan observer noted during those commemorative ceremonies, “We’ve come to expect nothing of the world. So far, the world has not disappointed us.”5 133 7 How then do Western cultural products represent the terror and atrocities of the genocide in Rwanda? How do they address the lingering trauma or living conditions of survivors in post-genocide Rwanda? How do they reconcile the failures of the West, both during the genocide and post-genocide? These are some of the questions explored in this chapter, which examines recent films and documentaries about Rwanda, a cinematic corpus that has been, as of yet, largely overlooked. This chapter investigates how these Western cultural representations shape popular understandings of the Tutsi genocide and its aftermath, while also deliberating their effects in social discourse. The importance of cinematic representations about Rwanda cannot be underestimated . Because of their wide distribution in the West, films and documentaries have largely informed, in their most generic terms, Western perceptions about itsembabwoko—the Rwandan term for the 1994 Tutsi extermination campaign— as well as, more broadly, popular understandings of genocide and post-genocide.6 Furthermore, these films effectively reaffirm Western discourse about non-Western others. Generic tropes drawn from feature films about Rwanda now often resurface in recent Hollywood films about Africa. For instance, the depiction of Hutu killers— as a crazed mob dressed in colorful clothing, who sing and yell as they wield their murderous weapons—has since been replicated in Blood Diamond, The Last King of Scotland, and Casino Royale, as recognizable, brutally barbaric, yet exotically carnivalesque “African bad guy” figures. Moreover, the effects of these films are not only apparent in cinema, but also in the public forum. Activism about Darfur often refers back to films about Rwanda; most prominently, actor Don Cheadle from Hotel Rwanda and activist Adam Sterling have in fact initiated a widely publicized campaign called “Hotel Darfur,” which was later changed to the better known campaign “Darfur Now.” This chapter therefore outlines some of the generic conventions of films about Rwanda. Unquestionably, the greatest challenge facing filmmakers wishing to portray the Tutsi genocide is the issue of genre. Until 2004, there was no established film genre associated with this “other” genocide, just as there is, as of yet, no explicitly definitive genre of the human rights narrative. As Kay Schaeffer and Sidonie Smith have noted in Human Rights and Narrated Lives, what may be termed “the human rights narrative” draws on tropes and models from a variety of genres, such as Holocaust literature, the Latin American testimonio, contemporary life narratives, and postcolonial novels.7 In Human Rights Inc., Joseph Slaughter draws particular attention to the bildungsroman in shaping both historical human rights legislation and our popular discourse about human rights today. In like manner, this chapter will show that films about Rwanda draw on conventions from a variety...

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