Skip to main content
Have a personal or library account? Click to login
Disability, Trauma and Genocide: Narrative and Metaphor in Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi, the Book of Bones (2006) and Véronique Tadjo’s the Shadow of Imana (2002) Cover

Disability, Trauma and Genocide: Narrative and Metaphor in Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi, the Book of Bones (2006) and Véronique Tadjo’s the Shadow of Imana (2002)

By:   
Open Access
|Sep 2026

References

  1. Adorno, Theodor W. 2003. “The Meaning of Working through the Past”. In Theodor W. Adorno: Can One Live after Auschwitz? A philosophical Reader, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, 318. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
  2. Aljamal, Yousef M. 2024. “Facing Genocide While Disabled: Palestinians with Disabilities in Gaza Have Experienced Immense Suffering Due to Displacement and the Collapse of the Healthcare System.” Al Jazeera, November 19. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/11/19/facing-genocide-while-disabled.
  3. Arendt, Hannah. 1976. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
  4. Arendt, Hannah. [1963] 2002. “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.” In Genocide: An Anthropological Reader, edited by Alexander Hinton, 91109. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell.
  5. Baer, Ulrich. 2000. “Einleitung”. In Niemand Zeugt für den Zeugen: Erinnerungskultur Und Historische Verantwortung Nach Der Shoah, Erstausg., 3. Aufl., edited by Ulrich Baer, 731. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
  6. Boubacar, B. D. 2006. Murambi: The Book of Bones, trans. Fiona McLaughlin. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  7. Bro, Brickelle. 2021. “Destroying Disability: Expanding Application of the Genocide Convention.” International and Comparative Law Review 21(1): 124152. DOI: 10.2478/iclr-2021-0005
  8. Caruth, Cathy. 1991. “Unclaimed Experience. Trauma and the Possibility of History.” Yale French Studies 79: 181192. DOI: 10.2307/2930251
  9. Davis, Lennard J. 2002. “The End of IdentityPolitics and the Beginning of Dismodernism”. In Bending over Backwards: Essays on Disability and the Body, edited by Davis, Lennard J., and Michael Bérubé, 2141. New York: New York University Press.
  10. Felman, Shoshana. 2000. “Im Zeitalter der Zeugenschaft. Claude Lanzmanns Shoah” In Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen, edited by Ulrich Baer, 173193. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
  11. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 2017. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. Twentieth anniversary edition. New York: Columbia University Press.
  12. Gilson, Stephen French, and Elizabeth DePoy. 2002. “Theoretical Approaches to Disability Content in Social Work Education.” Journal of Social Work Education 38(1): 153165. DOI: 10.1080/10437797.2002.10779088
  13. Kacandes, Irene. 1999. “Narrative Witnessing as Memory Work: Reading Gertrud Kolmar’s ‘A Jewish Mother’”. In Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer, Leo, 5571. Hanover & London: University Press of New England.
  14. Laub, Dori. 1992. “An Event without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and Survival”. In Testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history, edited by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, 7592. New York & London: Routledge.
  15. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2001. “A Brief History of Genocide.” Transition 87: 2647. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3137437.
  16. Mamdani, Mahmood. 2001. When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism and the Genocide in Rwanda. Oxford: James Currey. DOI: 10.1515/9780691193830
  17. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. 2000. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. DOI: 10.3998/mpub.11523
  18. Mostert, Mark P. 2002. “Useless Eaters: Disability as Genocidal Marker in Nazi Germany.” The Journal of Special Education 36(3): 157170. DOI: 10.1177/00224669020360030601
  19. Pons, William I., Janet E. Lord, and Michael Ashley Stein. 2023. “Addressing the Accountability Void: War Crimes against Persons with Disabilities.” International Review of the Red Cross 105(922): 465483. DOI: 10.1017/S1816383122000972
  20. Quayson, Ato. 2007. Aesthetic Nervousness: Disability and the Crisis of Representation. New York: Columbia University Press.
  21. Silvestri, Erika. 2019. “Lebensunwertes Leben: Roots and Memory of Aktion T4.” Conatus – Journal of Philosophy 4(2): 65. DOI: 10.12681/cjp.21075
  22. Small, Audrey. 2007. “The Duty of Memory: A Solidarity of Voices after the Rwandan Genocide.” Paragraph 30(1): 85100. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43152701.
  23. Tadjo, Véronique. 2002. The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda. Translated by Véronique Wakerley. Oxford: Heinemann.
  24. Van Alphen, Ernst. 1999. “Symptoms of Discursivity: Experience, Memory, and Trauma”. In Acts of Memory:Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer, 2438. Hanover and London: University Press of New England.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.16993/sjdr.1366 | Journal eISSN: 1745-3011
Language: English
Page range: 456 - 464
Submitted on: Sep 10, 2025
Accepted on: Jul 31, 2026
Published on: Sep 17, 2026
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services

© 2026 Meja Ikobwa, published by Stockholm University Press
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.