Textualizing the visual and visualizing the text
Hotel Rwanda and An ordinary man: the true story behind “Hotel Rwanda”
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12943167 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Maurice Taonezvzi Vambe (University of South Africa, corresponding author), Urther Rwafa (University of South Africa) |
| Year | 2009 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 5-20 |
| Publication date | 2009-05-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Scrutiny2 (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1812-5441 • E-ISSN: 1753-5409 |
| Publisher | Taylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/18125440903151488 |
| OpenAlex | W1558205083 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 22 |
In the absence of the international coverage of the Rwandan genocide, most international audiences came to know the Rwandan tragedy through the film, Hotel Rwanda, which was directed by Terry George, and which came out in 2004 – ten years after the genocide of 1994. The film is a chilling visual account of how nearly one million Tutsis were massacred by Hutu extremists in the span of nearly 100 days. However, following on the “heels” of the production of Hotel Rwanda, Paul Rusesabagina and Tom Zoellner published An ordinary man: the true story behind “Hotel Rwanda” (2006) a book that claims to tell the “truth” behind the film. The question then is: How much of what happened in the Rwandan genocide in 1994 was Hotel Rwanda authorized to tell and not to tell? This article does not seek to confirm whether or not what the film depicts corresponds point for point with what is in the book. Rather, using Derrida's concept of “iteration”, this article explores the dynamics that exist when a subject or theme narrativized in one form is repeated in another. The article then links iteration, which produces différance in textual meanings to Bakhtin's idea of the “chronotope” as a place of encounter in genres of popular culture. The article argues that films construct meanings during moments of enunciation and that these meanings can significantly alter the narratives contained in a novel on the same theme. A novel can elaborate what film time may not achieve in a limited time-span, while a film can also offer transgressive meanings through its visual language that words on the page of a novel may not be able to animate
Aesthetics · Art · Construct (python library · Genocide · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Political science · Sociology · Subject (documents · Theme (computing · Tragedy (event · Computer Science · History · Law · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · South African History and Culture
The Dialogic Imagination
Surviving the Slaughter
When Victims Become Killers
Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics
Fictions of Autobiographical Representations
The Authority of Presence
The Place of Tears
The Failure to Prevent Genocide in Rwanda
Re-Imagining Rwanda
When Wounds and Corpses Fail to Speak
Global Humanitarianism, Race, and the Spectacle of the African Corpse in Current Western Representations of the Rwandan Genocide
Afterword
Colonial desire
The Political Economy of the Great Lakes Region in Africa
Colonial Desire
Un train peut en cacher un autre
Regarding the pain of others
The Media and the Rwanda Genocide
The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |