Upwards of one million people died during the Genocide, Civil War, and Refugee Crisis in Rwanda and surrounding nations, during one of the fastest Genocides to occur in modern history. Even though the United Nations and its member states had a legal mandate to intervene in cases of Genocide due to the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, the world chose not to. While there were a myriad of reasons for this the media played a part in this situation. Using the coverage of US print magazine articles, this thesis argues that the media missed the point and the signs of what was happening on the ground due to a fundamental lack of understanding of Rwanda, the African Great Lakes region, and Africa itself. Borrowing concepts of the creation of the “other,” lack of understanding of Africa, imperial language, and first world views of the third world from Edward Said and Curtis A. Keim this master’s thesis shows that there were intellectual disconnects happening within the American press that made intervention nearly impossible. Once the Genocide was nearly complete and a more prosaic refugee crisis started America jumped at the chance to aid the refugees, a large number of them perpetrators of the Genocide, and the media showed reinvigorated interest in Rwanda. What misconceptions about Rwanda caused the media to miss the point? Did the print media help perpetuate those misconceptions, knowingly or unknowingly? With a death toll from the Genocide alone of roughly 8,000 people per day and the vast majority of them dying within iii the first several weeks of the Genocide, many lives may have been saved if Rwanda was made a priority by the media. Instead, while the media reported stories about chthonic hatred, the world was more concerned about a much slower Genocide in Eastern Europe. While attention was focused on other global and national stories, a racist regime intent on exterminating the Tutsi was allowed to stay in power in Rwanda

The Rwandan Genocide occurred between April and July of 1994. Within those four months, approximately a million Tutsi were brutally murdered by the Hutu in an effort to cleanse the country of a Tutsi presence. The genocide was the culmination of decades of unrest between the two groups created from Western influence under colonialism and post-colonial relationships. The international response to the genocide was scarce. While international intervention waned, the international media kept the genocide relevant in its publications. This thesis examines print media sources from the United States, Britain, and France. This thesis argues that the reporting of the genocide exacerbated larger issues concerning the relationship between the West and Africa. The journalists perpetuated Western superiority over Africa by utilizing racism to preserve colonial ideologies and stereotypes of Africans. In turn, this inherent Western racism complicated the implementation of human rights legislation that would have helped save Tutsi lives. This thesis places the Rwandan genocide, through the reports of Western media, into the larger historiographic context of the Western African dichotomy.

Three main challenges often confront societies that have experienced mass atrocities and genocide: understanding genocide, narrating and representing genocide, and reconciling after genocide. While these challenges seem different, they are intertwined and often inseparable. This thesis takes on these questions in various degrees by focusing on the subjects of memory, representations of violence and the Anthropocene. By reading two novels and one graphic novel, I argue that a multi-representational and multi-perspectival analysis of the Rwandan genocide gives a perspective through one can think through the questions of narrative silence and erasures, gender and sexual violence, animality and the boundaries between victims and killers. Altogether, the texts represent a genocide testimony that aligns and at the same counters the official narrative of the Rwandan genocide circulated by the Rwandan government.

Incitement to genocide is a fairly recent and elusive concept in international law. First used at Nuremberg, the concept did not reappear for more than fifty years, when the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) used it to convict and sentence three media executives: Ferdinand Nahimana, Jean-Bosco Barayagwiza, and Hassan Ngeze. Using their trial as a case study, I use rhetorical analysis to help clarify both the concept of "incitement" and the role that morality, politics, and law play in genocide and its aftermath. This case study helps to explain some of the complexities that often accompany genocide. First, because incitement depends on one person's words and another's actions, the answer to the question of who is responsible for the final outcome is unclear. Second, because genocide affects, and is affected by, the decisions of both local and international communities, actions (not) taken by either affect one another in significant ways. Finally, in the aftermath of genocide, questions of culpability, punishment, and reconciliation complicate international law. Based on this case study, I suggest ways in which the international community might learn from what happened in Rwanda.

This project attempts to bridge conversations between the predominantly Western canon of animal studies and the frequently humanist approach to postcolonial African studies. Drawing on these sometimes incompatible fields, this thesis proposes two premises that emerge from close readings of African cultural texts. First, “Africa” as a discursive construct has long been associated with animals, animality, and the category of the nonhuman, evident in, to give some examples, the current touristic promotion across the globe of African wildlife as an essential part of its continental identity, local and global anxieties over zoonotic transmissions of disease, and the history of race science’s preoccupation with animalizing black and indigenous African bodies. My second premise suggests that in postcolonial and especially African contexts ostensibly “human” concerns are inextricably tied to both the categorical limitations imposed by imperial paradigms of animalization and the precarious existence of nonhuman animals themselves, concern for whom is often occluded in anthropocentric postcolonial discourse. In my dissertation, I examine the role that texts play in directing affective relations of concern locally and globally, reading fictional texts as well as news media, conservation literature, and tourist advertisements. Through these works I examine the complex and often cantankerous politics of cultivating interspecies concern in postcolonial contexts, ranging from the globalized commodification of African wildlife and the dubious international policies that ostensibly protect it, the geography of the North American safari park, the animalization of queer bodies by African state leaders, textual representations of interspecies intimacy, and accounts of the Rwandan genocide. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis responds to the question of how we show concern for animals in postcolonial, globalized, and postconflict worlds. Drawing on the example of multiple texts in African literature, film, and other media, it explores how Africa itself has long been construed in the global imagination as a zone associated with animality. This association appears in texts produced within the West and Africa whose accounts of the continent imagine it to be outside the realm of human ethical concern. Demonstrating how exclusive human ethical concern is for African lives, both human and animal, this thesis argues for an ethics of concern that does not revolve around exclusively the human in postcolonial African studies.

International criminal tribunals rely on international support. However, in the case of the ICTY and the ICTR, international support has been uneven. I argue that this uneven support is related to the post-atrocity status of the domestic governing authority. In cases where the governing authority retains the status of victim, as in Rwanda following the 1994 Tutsi genocide, the international community has been reluctant to back the ICTR in its attempts to prosecute all participants of the 1994 genocide. In cases where the governing authority retains the status of perpetrator, as in Serbia following the Bosnian genocide of the 1990s, the international community has been more supportive of the ICTY. In cases where the post-atrocity status is mixed, as in Croatia, the backing of the international community of the ICTY has been similarly mixed.

My critical discourse analysis (CDA) of the New York Times' front-page and editorial articles, within the framework of Herman and Chomsky's (1988) propaganda model, shows that the newspaper constructed the intervention in Rwanda as suicidal for the United States and beyond the capacity of the international community. On the other hand, U.S. and NATO intervention and military airstrikes against Serbia were represented as surgical and the only options available to save ethnic Albanian lives in Kosovo. My analysis finds that the New York Times' constructions of the two conflicts, conflict actors and victims of the conflicts heavily favored the official U.S. policy of nonintervention in Rwanda and intervention in Kosovo. In particular, the analysis of the Kosovo conflict discourse in the New York Times found strong support for the dichotomization hypothesis of the propaganda model. I further analyzed U.S. policy papers or the official propaganda discourses alongside news media discourses, and also reviewed my CDA findings alongside key historical episodes related to the two conflicts. My analysis shows, while the New York Times showcased and regurgitated arguments that were in favor of U.S. policy of intervention in Kosovo and nonintervention in Rwanda, the newspaper--deliberately or otherwise--omitted and distorted key details that could potentially and fundamentally reshape perceptions of the need or lack of need for U.S. interventions in each of the two conflicts. Lastly, my analysis finds that there was high degree of similarity between the official propaganda discourses and the discourses in the New York Times.

The graduation thesis describes some problems of Africa in last 50 years and it pays special attention to the case of Rwanda. It contains also a short history of the african continent as the roots of many conflits have originated hundreds of years ago. It concretely describes 6 african countries: Somalia, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Uganda and a special chapter is dedicated to the civil war and genocide in Rwanda.

The thesis deals with the issue of photographs taken during the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The ethnically motivated conflict, in which the Hutu majority tried to exterminate the Tutsi minority, claimed almost a million victims in a hundred days. The Rwandan genocide is notoriously associated with machetes and radio. Most of the victims were killed with primitive weapons, and the murders of neighbours and family members took place under the influence of a propaganda radio broadcast. The thesis describes how photojournalism in the 1990s reported on such a specific conflict as modern genocide. The thesis uses visual framing analysis, which is based on the theory of framing. After that it was possible to identify the recurring visual frames through which the Rwandan genocide is depicted in the images.

When authors write fiction about real, traumatic events, they face ethical challenges about how to portray trauma and its impacts. This dissertation employs methods of close reading and application of theory to investigate authorial choices. I argue that authors writing fiction about trauma often make aesthetic choices that blur the line between figurative and literal language in order to portray bodily experiences. This dissertation takes as its subject novels from sub-Saharan Africa that depict traumas caused directly and indirectly by colonialism. Authors including David Diop (1966-) and Birago Diop (1906-1989) have used these techniques to write about tirailleurs sénégalais, West African men conscripted to serve France’s military in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I bring these authors together with Boris Boubacar Diop (1946-) and Véronique Tadjo (1955-), who wrote books about the Rwandan genocide, because they also perform this translation for the body, asking readers to approach these works with a sensitivity to the ways the body endures trauma. The effect of these choices is a humanizing and integrated portrayal of trauma as a phenomenon that challenges the mind-body separation of cartesian influence and complicates human experience of time as linear. These works create space to think about trauma and recovery as individual as well as communal, to map similarities of human responses to trauma without pathologizing it. Ultimately, these works point to the conclusion that living through/with trauma is possible when the trauma can be incorporated into a new conception of the self.