Rwanda's Genocide Heritage

Between Justice and Sovereignty

Delia Duong Ba Wendel

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English

Duke University Press
04 November 2025

Museums & museology; Genocide & ethnic cleansing; Ethnic studies; War crimes

In Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage, Delia Duong Ba Wendel contends with the forms of justice and sovereignty enacted through sites of violent memory. Drawing from oral histories and a newly available visual archive of memory work after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she explores the human rights and government priorities that preserved killing sites and victims’ remains for public display. Rwanda’s genocide memorials exemplify a global phenomenon that Wendel terms “trauma heritage,” wherein hidden or unrecognized violence is spatialized—made visible in public space—to demand justice and recognition. She argues that trauma heritage innovates on the form histories take by “writing” them into landscapes, constituting a reparative historiography from the Global South. Among those sites, Rwanda’s genocide heritage comprises exceptionally visceral sites of truth-telling that highlight the politics of a past made present. Wendel demonstrates that such sites of memory require reckoning with the ethical and political dilemmas that arise from viewing violence as forms of repair and control.

By: Delia Duong Ba Wendel
Imprint: Duke University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 445g
ISBN: 9781478032472
ISBN 10: 1478032472
Pages: 464
Publication Date: 04 November 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , College/higher education , Undergraduate , Further / Higher Education
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Delia Duong Ba Wendel is Associate Professor of Urban Studies and International Development at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and coeditor of Spatializing Politics: Essays on Power and Place.

Reviews for Rwanda's Genocide Heritage: Between Justice and Sovereignty

""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--Arjun Appadurai, author of ""Fear of Small Numbers""