Event

March 31, 2025 3:00 PM 315 Haskell Hall On Exile and Postcolonial Nationhood in Rwanda and Burundi Natacha Nsabimana The University of Chicago

ABSTRACT: This talk makes an argument about the relationship between political life and the familiarity and repetitiveness of exile in postcolonial Rwanda and Burundi. I argue first that the memory, recurrence, and anticipation of displacement are central aspects of postcolonial nationhood and life in both countries. With each cycle of forced expulsion, the boundaries of the nation are unmade and remade. Second, this rhythm of repeated collective exile makes for specific forms of political subjectivity and activism that, though tethered to the geography of the nation, also always exceed it, making exile a constitutive aspect of postcolonial nationhood.

BIOGRAPHY: Broadly construed, Natacha Nsabimana’s research and teaching interests include law and subjectivity, postcolonial critique, musical movements, and the cultural and political worlds of African peoples on the continent and the diaspora. Nsabimana’s current project focuses on the relationships of historico-political events of the past to the present and the anticipated future. Her book manuscript looks at the everyday aftermath of violence in post-genocide Rwanda, that is, the ways in which the 1994 genocide against Tutsi occupies the spatial memory of the country’s landscape and the kinds of individual and national narratives such memory allows and disavows.

Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Nsabimana’s talk.