This book recounts the personal life story of Claver Irakoze who survived the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi as a child. Now a parent of young children, the narrative focuses on issues surrounding childhood, parenting and the transmission of memories between generations.

Based on fieldwork and comparative historical analysis of Rwanda, this book questions the conventional wisdom that education builds peace.

In Remembering Genocide an international group of scholars draw on current research from a range of disciplines to explore how communities throughout the world remember genocide. Whether coming to terms with atrocities committed in Namibia and Rwanda, Australia, Canada, the Punjab, Armenia, Cambodia and during the Holocaust, those seeking to remember genocide are confronted with numerous challenges. Survivors grapple with the possibility, or even the desirability, of recalling painful memories. Societies where genocide has been perpetrated find it difficult to engage with an uncomfortable historical legacy. Still, to forget genocide, as this volume edited by Nigel Eltringham and Pam Maclean shows, is not an option. To do so reinforces the vulnerability of groups whose very existence remains in jeopardy and denies them the possibility of bringing perpetrators to justice. Contributors discuss how genocide is represented in media including literature, memorial books, film and audiovisual testimony. Debates surrounding the role museums and monuments play in constructing and transmitting memory are highlighted. Finally, authors engage with controversies arising from attempts to mobilise and manipulate memory in the service of reconciliation, compensation and transitional justice.

How wounds from a previous generation may weigh on children and grandchildren contain much of interest. Yet if we unpack the ghostly, the eerie, and the spectral in transgenerational hauntings, if we allow for the suffering or the disturbed to forge social links, such contacts may enable breaking into reconnections and afterlives. … One only needs to think of the near epidemic of rape in South Africa to sense violent hypermasculinity erupting as madness, mediated by a history of brutal, racialised reduction. But it is also important to move beyond the brutalities and madness, to consider the individual and collective refigurations surfacing out of layers of catastrophe. Nancy Rose Hunt: Conference Keynote Address, “Beyond Trauma? Notes on a Word, a Frame, and a Diagnostic Category.” Historical Trauma and Memory: Living with the Haunting Power of the Past is based on essays presented at a conference with the same name which was held in Kigali, Rwanda in April 2019. The book gives readers front row seats as an interdisciplinary group of scholars from law, psychology, history, the arts, anthropology, theology, and philosophy address the complex matrix of the emotional legacies of historical trauma, cultural legacies, people interacting with their social and political environment, and the interplay of these factors in different post-conflict societies.

For those who study memory, there is a nagging concern that memory studies are inherently backward-looking, and that memory itself hinders efforts to move forward. Unhinging memory from the past, this book brings together an interdisciplinary group of prominent scholars who bring the future into the study of memory.

This volume explores the shifting tides of how political violence is memorialized in today's decentralized, digital era. The book enhances our understanding of how the digital turn is changing the ways that we remember, interpret, and memorialize the past. It also raises practical and ethical questions of how we should utilize these tools and study their impacts. Cases covered include memorialization efforts related to the genocides in Rwanda, Cambodia, Europe (the Holocaust), and Armenia; to non-genocidal violence in Haiti, and the Portuguese Colonial War on the African Continent; and of the September 11 attacks on the United States.

In the aftermath of the genocide, the Rwandan government has attempted to use the education system in order to sustain peace and shape a new generation of Rwandans. Their hope is to create a generation focused on a unified and patriotic future rather than the ethnically divisive past. Yet, the government’s efforts to manipulate global models around citizenship, human rights, and reconciliation to serve its national goals have had mixed results, with new tensions emerging across social groups. Becoming Rwandan argues that although the Rwandan government utilizes global discourses in national policy documents, the way in which teachers and students engage with these global models distorts the intention of the government, resulting in unintended consequences and undermining a sustainable peace.

Mediating Historical Responsibility brings together leading scholars and new voices in the interdisciplinary fields of memory studies, history, and cultural studies to explore the ways culture, and cultural representations, have been at the forefront of bringing the memory of past injustices to the attention of audiences for many years. Engaging with the darkest pages of twentieth-century European history, dealing with the legacy of colonialism, war crimes, genocides, dictatorships, and racism, the authors of this collection of critical essays address Europe’s ‘difficult pasts’ through the study of cultural products, examining historical narratives, literary texts, films, documentaries, theatre, poetry, graphic novels, visual artworks, material heritage, and the cultural and political reception of official government reports. Adopting an intermedial approach to the study of European history, the book probes the relationship between memory and responsibility, investigating what it means to take responsibility for the past and showing how cultural products are fundamentally entangled in this process.

Spectrality disrupts and fissures our conceptions of time, unmaking and complicating binaries such as life and death, presence and absence, the visible and the invisible, and literality and metaphor. A contribution to current conversations in memory studies and spectrality studies, Mind the Ghost is an experiment in reading ghosts otherwise. It explores, through contemporary fiction in French, sites of textual haunting that take the form of names, lists, objects, photographs, and stains. The book turns to Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous to rethink what constitutes and functions as a ghost, proposing that this figure solicits readers’ investment in mnemonic practices. Considering the memories and legacies of violence that have marked the greater part of the twentieth-century – in Algeria, Bosnia, Croatia, France, and Rwanda – this book traces absences, disappearances and reappearances, textual omissions and untimely irruptions to posit literature’s power to both remember and communicate beyond the bounds of chronological time. Through close readings of recent fiction by Kaouther Adimi, Jakuta Alikavazovic, Gaël Faye, Jérôme Ferrari, Patrick Modiano, Lydie Salvayre, Leïla Sebbar, and Cécile Wajsbrot, Mind the Ghost articulates the mechanisms through which readers themselves become haunted.

Capitalizing on the current movement in history education to nurture a set of shared methodologies and perspectives, this text looks to break down some of the obstacles to transnational understanding in history, focusing on pedagogy to embed democratic principles of inclusion, inquiry, multiple interpretations and freedom of expression. Four themes which are influencing the broadening of history education to a globalized community of practice run throughout Teaching History and the Changing Nation State: · pedagogy, democracy and dialogue · the nation – politics and transnational dimensions · landmarks with questions · shared histories, shared commemorations and re-evaluating past denials The contributors use the same pedagogical language in a global debate about history teaching and learning to break down barriers to search for shared histories and mutual understanding. They explore contemporary topics, including The Gallipoli Campaign in World War I, transformative approaches to a school history curriculum and the nature of federation.