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Seeing the Genocide against the Tutsi through someone else's eyes : prosthetic memory and Hotel Rwanda

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Date
01/10/2021
Author
Hitchcott, Nicki
Keywords
Prosthetic memory
Rwanda
Genocide against the Tutsi
Hotal Rwanda
Testimony
Paul Rusesabagina
Alison Landsberg
BF Psychology
N Visual arts (General) For photography, see TR
T-NDAS
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Abstract
Alison Landsberg’s theory of ‘prosthetic memory’ suggests that memories are not ‘owned’, that is they do not depend on lived experience, but rather they can occur as a result of an individual’s engagement with a mediated representation (e.g. a film, a museum, a TV series, a novel). One of the best-known mass cultural responses to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda is Terry George’s 2004 feature film, Hotel Rwanda. While the film was a huge commercial success, Rwandan survivor testimonies paint a very different picture of what happened in the real ‘Hotel Rwanda’ (the Hôtel des Mille Collines in the Rwandan capital of Kigali). This article discusses the different versions of the ‘Hotel Rwanda’ story through the lens of prosthetic memory and considers the usefulness of Landsberg’s theory for analysing memory narratives from or about Rwanda. While Landsberg promotes prosthetic memories as ‘in the best cases’ capable of generating empathy and political alliances, I show that, when mass-mediated representations create revisionist false ‘memories’, this can have harmful consequences for survivors of trauma. After focusing on the ethical implications of what Landsberg describes as ‘seeing through someone else’s eyes’, I conclude that prosthetic memory is a concept that should be treated with caution.
Citation
Hitchcott , N 2021 , ' Seeing the Genocide against the Tutsi through someone else's eyes : prosthetic memory and Hotel Rwanda ' , Memory Studies , vol. 14 , no. 5 , pp. 935-948 . https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698020959811
Publication
Memory Studies
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698020959811
ISSN
1750-6980
Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © The Author(s) 2020. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Collections
  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/20711

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