Music and the politics of the past

Kizito Mihigo and music in the commemoration of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12905728
AutoresDavid Mwambari (0000-0002-9126-6538, Ghent University Hospital, autor de correspondencia)
Año2019
Volumen13
Número6
Páginas1321-1336
Fecha de publicación2019-02-06
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaMemory Studies (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1750-6980 • E-ISSN: 1750-6999
EditorialSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/1750698018823233
OpenAlexW2914277567
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas21
Referencias citadas27

After the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the post-genocide government spearheaded the creation of genocide commemorations. Over the past two decades, political elites and survivors’ organizations have gone to great lengths to institutionalize the memorialization, including creating laws to protect the memory of the genocide from denialism. Ordinary Rwandans have responded to the annual commemorations using creative means of support for and disagreement with the government’s interpretation of their shared violent past. Music has been used as citizen-driven tool to both spread and criticize genocide memorialization nationally and beyond. While scholars have explored the politicization of state-organized mechanisms such as memorials, citizen-driven creative means remain largely unexplored. Addressing this gap in Rwandan memory scholarship, I examine how Kizito Mihigo, a famous post-genocide musician, used his individual memory of surviving the genocide against the Tutsi through music to contribute and respond to the annual commemorations of the genocide. I argue that Mihigo’s story and commemoration songs were politicized from the start but were intensified when he used his music to go beyond promoting genocide commemorations to questioning the events and when he pleaded guilty to terrorism charges

Collective memory · Criminology · Genocide · Media studies · Memorialization · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · State (computer science · Terrorism · The Holocaust · Cambodian History and Society · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts