How should the relevant facts about the Rwandan Government's construction of their narrative ofthe Rwandan genocide be established? A frequent point of emphasis by scholars is that an official narrative usually is put forward by the dominant or ruling group to serve their interests: the contents and features oftheir narrative are capable of legitimating their claims to dominance. Different groups within that society might espouse alternative narratives of events. Neither the narratives of the dominant or ruling group, nor the challenging narratives are necessarily the most widely believed or influential account of a particular set of events. The most widely believed and influential narrative is usually referred to as a "master narrative". But official and challenging narratives compete to be the "master narrative". The 'Shoah' [the Hebrew term for "catastrophe"] as the narrative of the genocide of the ]ews of Europe is widely considered to represent the definitive master narrative of genocide and perhaps the twentieth century [LaCapra 1994 and 1998, Lipstadt 1986 and Maier 2000]. The discussion contained herein requires identification of a framework of issues relevant to official narratives: the construction of such a framework will be based on an analysis of [a] narratives of genocide and [b] three of the more prominent cases of official genocide- narratives. The chosen narratives are the Holocaust or Shoah, the Armenian Genocide and the Herero Genocide. Once constructed, this framework of analysis will then be applied to the official narrative of the RPF. The research design is thus a theoretical case study of sorts, with the theory distilled from scholarly literature on [a] and [b]. The case studies have been chosen because they represent the spectrum of narratives employed in the context of genocide: the Shoah as the master narrative of genocide; the Armenian genocide as a contested genocide narrative; and the Herero genocide as a 'silenced' genocide narrative.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/22080 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Jeremy, Edward |
| Contributors | Seegers, Annette, Du Toit, André |
| Publisher | University of Cape Town, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Political Studies |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Master Thesis, Masters, MPhil |
| Format | application/pdf |
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