Imperialist Conditions of Genocide: On Positioning Postcolonial African Genocide within the Broader Field of Genocide Studies

This paper addresses the following question: How should we position specific examples of genocide within the broader field of genocide studies? In responding to this question, the paper reflects on the significance—particularly pedagogical significance—of “postcolonial” African genocides. I provide some provisional considerations about this significance based on my teaching of African genocides in a genocide and literature course at the University of Winnipeg, Canada. As I elaborate subsequently, the literary/cultural texts of postcolonial African genocide that I find valuable for my classes contextualize African and other genocides in historical and ongoing conditions of imperialism. By embedding occurrences of genocide in Africa within a broader violent history of imperialism, they mobilize a relational understanding of genocide by insisting on the traumatic linkages of genocides in Africa to genocides and mass atrocities elsewhere. These works consolidate thinking about genocides (especially since the dawn of Atlantic Slavery) less as disparate, separate events but instead as entangled in an expansive history of imperialism.