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ABSTRACTS Jill Capstick (Leeds University, UK) Inscribing Genocide: Trauma, Memory and Writing in Rwandan Francophone Testimony Testimony has become the narrative genre of contemporary history, the ‘new literature’ as Elie Wiesel describes it, an expression of the ethical concerns of modern generations who continually bear witness to atrocity and violence towards others. Whilst much has been written on the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, the life-testimonies of those who survived the genocide in Rwanda have received almost no attention. Moreover, literary criticism of Holocaust testimony has tended to be dominated by poststructuralist theoretical perspectives which take little, if any, account of the textual and contextual differences between French and Francophone writing. Focusing on the testimony of Yolande Mukagasana, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, this paper sets out to explore the extent to which Rwandan Francophone testimony fits comfortably within the dominant post-Freudian paradigm, most closely associated with the work of theorists such as Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub and Cathy Caruth, or whether Mukagasana’s narrative points to a different conception of the relationships between trauma and writing, memory and history. As such, this paper forms part of preliminary work towards a new research project which will offer a comparative study of French and Francophone testimony and aims to problematize the dominant critical perspective in this field through an exploration of testimonies by survivors of the Holocaust, the Algerian War and the Rwandan genocide.

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