Abstract
In this chapter, “What You See Depends Where You Stand: Critical Anticolonial Perspectives on Genocide Education Addressing the 1994 Rwandan Genocide,” traces some of the key tensions and questions at stake in critical, anticolonial research into contemporary practices of genocide education regarding the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsis (shortened here to Rwandan genocide education or RGE) in Canadian schools. The discussion emerges from a long series of conversations among and between Rwandese-Canadian community activists/educators, NGO- and local school-based educators, and university-based researchers concerning the politics of knowledge production and representation within institutional initiatives to commemorate and learn from the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In sketching out the central concerns of our collaborative inquiry, this chapter traces a conversation in three voices among Marie-Jolie Rwigema and Sollange Sauter Umwali—two community-based researchers and educators—and Lisa Taylor—a university-based researcher and teacher educator.
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Notes
- 1.
We are offering primacy to the designation “the Rwandan genocide against Tutsi” in recognition of the reality of discourses of denial and revisionism (i.e., the propagation of theories of “double genocide” and outright denials that the 1994 genocide was primarily aimed at decimating the Tutsi population of Rwanda). Nonetheless, we recognize that those targeted for massacre extended beyond ethnic lines to include those identified as sympathizers, traitors, or internal threats. We will use a range of terms including “1994 Rwandan genocide” and “Rwandan genocide.”
- 2.
Feminist and critical race scholars have developed critical analyses of which bodies come to gain institutional acceptance in claiming authority and academic capital. The imperial, classed, and racialized politics mediating the construction of a “global citizen” have, for example, been critiqued by a growing body of postcolonial scholarship. See the discussion below.
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- 4.
These concerns are not held by us alone. In proposing its groundbreaking grade 11 history course CHG38 “Genocide and Crimes against Humanity”, the Toronto District School Board states the following: “Many students within the Toronto District School Board and their families have experienced bias, stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination from dominant groups within society due to their perceived difference and inferiority both in their home countries and here in Canada. Our community includes refugee students, as well as the children and grandchildren of people who have experienced genocidal acts and extreme human rights abuses. Given the specific multi-cultural and multi-ethnic diversity within Toronto, we feel it is essential that students born within and outside Canada have the opportunity to explore in depth the causes and consequences of genocide and the lived realities of the aggressors, targets, bystanders, and resisters to these horrific acts of violence. A study of these experiences will help foster a sense of empathy for the targets of these violent acts and hopefully encourage students to understand the connections they have to their fellow human beings” (TDSB 2008, p. 1).
- 5.
This echoes one of the most radical and substantive critiques of contemporary globalization theorizing made by the African historian Frederick Cooper (2001, pp. 192–193) who argues that, among the three predominant framings of globalization—the “Banker’s Boast,” the “Social Democrat’s Lament,” and the “Dance of Flows and the Fragments”—a common conceptual lacuna and gesture of renewed mastery is the “totalizing pretensions and their presentist periodization.”
- 6.
Critical race theory and whiteness studies both examine the ways racism constructs a flexible identity of whiteness through images of civilization, purity, honesty, worthiness, entitlement, moral authority, and universal neutrality which naturalize white ethnicity and European knowledge traditions as a neutral vantage point and invisible or “unmarked” norm (Carr and Lund 2007; Fine et al. 1997; Frankenberg 1993; Levine-Rasky 2002; Roediger 1991). “White” is understood not as an absolute identity but a socially constructed, contextually specific position of power and status in relation to other groups.
This understanding is crucial to our use of this term within the context of genocide education addressing the 1994 genocide. The field of genocide studies and education is the legacy of the courageous work that has and continues to be conducted by Jewish scholars, human rights advocates, and the broader Jewish community along with their allies. At the same time, Jewish-Rwandan relationships cannot be considered outside the context of what Mignolo (2000) has termed the “colonial difference” that delineates the racialized and colonial power relations between European-descended First World citizens and Africans.
Reflecting this complex understanding, we will alternately use the terms “white” and “white-identified” in this chapter with the implicit recognition of the ontological, sociopolitical, historical, and epistemic distinctions between Jewish and non-Jewish scholars and educators working in this field.
- 7.
This point is underlined in the simple fact that this chapter was written between our other jobs, in one author’s case without the benefit of a personal computer.
- 8.
“The impetus to speak must be carefully analyzed and, in many cases (certainly for academics!), fought against” (Alcoff 1995).
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Taylor, L.K., Rwigema, MJ., Umwali, S.S. (2012). What You See Depends Where You Stand: Critical Anticolonial Perspectives on Genocide Education Addressing the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. In: Trifonas, P., Wright, B. (eds) Critical Peace Education. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-3945-3_8
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