Hope Azeda's Echoes of a Thousand Hills. Photo: Mariah Coley
Friday April 8th 4:30-6pm Barker 100 followed by reception
The representation of the 1994 Rwandan genocide is an act fraught with tension
given the charged politics of the Great Lakes region in East Africa. This
lecture focuses on the work of Hope Azeda, a leading figure in the Rwandan
theatre scene, and how she negotiates Rwandan and Western understandings of the
genocide in light of her transnational background as a Rwandan Tutsi who grew
up in neighboring Uganda. The talk places Wendy Brown's theory of "wounded
attachments" in dialogue with Michael Taussig's concept of the "public secret"
to theorize the tensions and silences that permeate her work.
Laura Edmondson is an Associate Professor of theatre studies at Dartmouth
College. Her publications on East African theatre and performance include
Performance and Politics in Tanzania: The Nation on Stage (Indiana UP, 2007).
She is currently working on a book on transnational narratives of violence in
Uganda, Rwanda, and the DRC.
