Rwanda′s Genocide Heritage

“This is a work of rare ethnographic honesty, in which Delia Wendel examines how the material traces of the brutal ethnocide in Rwanda in the early 1990’s are turned into trauma heritage. It confronts the intimate pain involved in conserving and curating the bodily remains of victims, and richly theorizes the tormenting project of memory justice.” - Arjun Appadurai, author of Fear of Small Numbers

“Wendel lays bare the ultimate paradox of how the very act of preserving genocide heritage both restores dignity and creates a dehumanising aesthetic of trauma. The extraordinary narratives of the “memory makers”—who with their hands, in acts of care and defiance, not only preserve the remains but also reclaim the victims’ humanity. Writing with exquisite detail, Wendel shows how their labor becomes a defiant insistence on visibility that transforms the act of cleaning into a form of truth-telling, making injustice materially and spatially undeniable.” - Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, Professor and Research Chair, Stellenbosch University

"Wendel’s volume is a compelling, original, and engaged contribution to scholarship on African and Global South politics, sociology, memory, urbanisation, and genocide studies, as well as for all those interested in understanding long-term mechanisms of reconstruction of collective identities in societies broken by mass violence episodes. By spatializing intimacy and positioning readers as secondary witnesses, Wendel honours the moral duty of documenting violence while illuminating the nuances and paradoxes between justice and sovereignty, empowerment and exclusion, objectification and education, which are present in today’s Rwanda." - Beatrice Morani, International Spectator