Rancière, Rwanda and the Re-Distribution of the Sensible: Performances of Equality and Recognition in Post-Genocide Space

This thesis explores the interconnections between the politics of state reconstruction and the aesthetics of post-genocide performance in contemporary Rwanda. The 1994 Rwandan genocide was a defining ruptural moment in Rwanda which began a decade’s long national project to cultivate unity, equality and harmony between citizens and which has been instituted by the current RPF Rwandan government and its various national programmes, strategies and institutions. Tropes of genocide memory and re-development continue to be used by the Rwandan government to construct an image of the country that was once abandoned by the international community in 1994, but which, under a new government and leadership has since made successive strides in terms of its political and economic change; an image that continues to be projected nationally and internationally. I analyse the aesthetic role of Rwanda’s post-genocide politics and performance through the recent formulation of aesthetics by the political theorist Jacques Rancière whose aesthetic sensibility signals the inter-relations of perceptible-sensible life with the politics and production of state-craft. The aim of this study is to show in this sense that Rwanda’s post-genocide state reconstruction project of ‘Ndi Umunyarwanda’ meaning ‘I am Rwandan’ is fundamentally “aesthetic” in a Rancièrean sense, both in terms of its generation/ production, national deployment, as well as its subversion and resistance through artistic performance practice. I focus on Rancière because his account of aesthetics provides us with a vocabulary in which to account for the politicality of creative performance. This, I argue, can enable a more emancipatory spectatorial and participant experience in Rwanda in ways that cause the existing aesthetic social order to appear unsettled, arbitrary and/or subject to change