‘More than just a genocide country’ : recuperating Rwanda in the writings of Scholastique Mukasonga
Abstract
How can we write fiction about 21st-century Rwanda? This article analyses the writing trajectory of the most successful Rwandan writer, Scholastique Mukasonga. Through close analysis of her published works, it traces a literary passage from mourning to recuperation. It also examines the interaction between Mukasonga’s most recent fictional texts (a second novel and a second collection of short stories) and the series of digitized artefacts presented on her website. Combining a postcolonial framework with insights from clinical and political psychology, the article shows how Mukasonga’s most recent writing encourages us to think about Rwanda differently, and suggests a new way of reading literary responses to the 1994 genocide.
Citation
Hitchcott , N 2017 , ' ‘More than just a genocide country’ : recuperating Rwanda in the writings of Scholastique Mukasonga ' , Journal of Romance Studies , vol. 17 , no. 2 , pp. 127-149 . https://doi.org/10.3828/jrs.2017.14
Publication
Journal of Romance Studies
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1473-3536Type
Journal article
Rights
© Institute of Modern Languages Research 2017. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created accepted version manuscript following peer review and as such may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at: https://doi.org/10.3828/jrs.2017.14
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