Audrey Small  (University of Sheffield)
Responses to the Rwandan genocide: literature and literary criticism at the limits of the postcolonial

The postcolonial field has always - by definition - dealt with problems of international and transnational interference, power and responsibility, negotiating the spaces where "¬national" could be read more accurately and productively as "¬cultural" and developing theoretical positions and critical approaches which deal with some of the most difficult political questions of the late 20th- early 21st century world. This paper argues that postcolonialism must continue to be able to respond to new challenges and interact productively with other, newer theoretical models - and indeed is very well placed to do so.

To illustrate and problematise this, and perhaps expose some of the "limits and boundaries of postcolonialism", an extreme example is taken: that of the Rwandan genocide of 1994. The responses to the genocide, in only ten years, have run from clumsy political rhetoric to scholarly analyses to the publication of more than a dozen literary texts and their attendant criticism. In these responses, it is interesting to trace how various "specialists" have tended ¬ with some notable exceptions ¬ to remain within the boundaries of their own disciplines and thus at a rather 'safe' remove from the realities of the genocide: literary critics particularly display this tendency. This paper will examine these 'prises de position' and look for ways in which postcolonialism, through engagements with these positions and those proposed by, for example, trauma theory and globalisation theory, may allow tentative moves towards a more holistic reading of an impossibly singular event.