Deep Humanness
The Foreigner's Knowledge of the Rwandan Genocide: A Literary Analysis of Boubacar Boris Diop's Novel, Murambi, The Book of Bones View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Beverley Pratt
I discuss the novel, Murambi, The Book of Bones, by playwright, Boubacar Boris Drop. The novel is set four years after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The objective of this paper is to argue the need for consistent telling and re-telling of the events of this particularly mass atrocity in order to define a sensitive and refined understanding of mass killing. As digital and social media increasingly show new atrocities in real time, I argue that we need to return to the detail of past genocides or part thereof, to develop a fuller and nuanced understanding of writing about mass atrocity. The method of presentation is a literary textual analysis of Diop's novel. My theoretical framework hinges on Bachelard's theory of space and David Simpson's discussion of the stranger. In this paper, a portion of my dissertation, I focus on the foreigner and his inside and outside role in narrative fiction as a literary tool to further develop a theme for understanding and writing about mass atrocity. Crucially, and this is a finding in this paper, an appraisal of this particular novel is important to understanding both the theory of the novel and the theory of theatre so that we continue to sensitively interpret and write about unspeakable human atrocity in a creative and truthful manner. This novel is also a fine example of the successful interplay of historical and fiction genres. The site of this interplay is where our understanding of genocide develops most profoundly.
Fabrication - the Marginal Diseased Body in Tibet View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Yi He
Grounded on the works of theorists such as Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag, I investigate in which ways the Chinese author Ma Yuan narrates the diseased bodies of marginal groups and their specific metaphors in the novella Fabrication. Moreover, I explore why Ma Yuan chose to represent the existential crisis and personal identity of Maqu villagers in Tibet and the link between this narrative and particular cultural fields in post-Mao China. Initially, I analyze the narrative strategies adopted in Fabrication and consider the narrative of this story as a form of orientalizing gaze. Then, I focus on both the physical body and social body of Maqu lepers from aspects of social interaction and private space within the framework of body politics. Furthermore, I explore the bodily experience of the characters to denote the seeking for identity (both historical and individual) within the collective historical trauma and dominant social ideology. Finally, I connect the novella with the cultural background of China in the 1980s to explore what embodied experiences of Chinese people in the post-Mao era are expressed.
