Inaugural Professorial Lecture Series: Prof Ananda Breed
The Lincoln Institute for Advanced Studies is pleased to announce the first inaugural lecture event of the 2018/19 programme.
On Wednesday 17th October, Professor Ananda Breed from the School of Fine and Performing arts deliver her lecture on Kubabarira (Shared Suffering), Justice and Grassroots Performance Associations in Rwanda
Following the 1994 Rwandan Genocide against the Tutsi, the country was in a state of ruin. An indigenous form of mediation known as gacaca was reinvented to try the perpetrators of the genocide. In an effort to establish justice and reconciliation, perpetrators were mandated to declare their guilt and to request forgiveness during the national implementation of the courts between 2004-2012.
Breed explores the differences between concepts of “forgiveness” and kubabarira, the Rwandan notion of “shared suffering,” considering the justice and reconciliation process both through the formal gacaca courts and performances staged by grassroots associations. She will discuss the negotiations of the gacaca courts to address the espoused goals of justice and reconciliation alongside kubabarira.
Her talk will also ask how gacaca has been used as a national performance to stage the power of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, to address the collective guilt of the Hutu population, and to memorialize and commemorate the genocide through a weekly ritual of testimony, justice and reconciliation, excavating memories of the genocide as a traumatic point of departure from which history is rewritten and Rwandanicity is enacted, iterated, and performed.
She will close with an introduction to her current project entitled Mobile Arts for Peace (MAP) as part of her larger AHRC Changing the story project to illustrate how interdisciplinary art forms can be used with young people to negotiate painful pasts in post-genocide Rwanda.
Event Details
Registration opens at 5.30 pm with the lecture commencing at 6.00 pm and a networking drinks reception at 7.00 pm.
This event is free but booking is highly recommended, please visit https://lncn.eu/afipq to register.
Prof. Dr. Ananda Breed is author of Performing the Nation: Genocide, Justice, Reconciliation (Seagull Books, 2014) and co-editor of Performance and Civic Engagement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) in addition to several publications that address transitional systems of governance and the arts.
She has worked as a consultant for IREX and UNICEF in Kyrgyzstan on issues concerning conflict prevention and conducted applied arts workshops in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Indonesia, Japan, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Palestine, Rwanda and Turkey.
Breed was Founder and Co-director of the Centre for Performing Arts Development (CPAD) at the University of East London and former research fellow at the International Research Centre Interweaving Performance Cultures at Freie University 2013-2014). She is currently Co-Investigator of the AHRC Changing the Story project working with young people and civil society organisations in Rwanda:
https://changingthestory.leeds.ac.uk.
https://lias.lincoln.ac.uk/