Hinton ’85 Co-Edits Book on Genocide

Alexander Laban Hinton ’85 and Kevin Lewis O’Neill have co-edited Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation (Duke University Press), a book of essays in which leading anthropologists consider questions about the relationship of genocide, truth, memory and representation in the Balkans, East Timor, Germany, Guatemala, Indonesia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sudan and other locales.

These specialists draw on ethnographic research to provide analyses of communities in the wake of mass brutality. They examine how mass violence is described or remembered, and how those representations are altered by the attempts of others, from NGOs to governments, to assert “the truth” about outbreaks of violence.

One contributor questions the neutrality of an international group monitoring violence in Sudan. Another investigates the consequences of how events, victims, and perpetrators are portrayed by the Rwandan government during the annual commemoration of that country’s 1994 genocide. Other writers consider issues of political identity and legitimacy, coping, the media, and ethnic cleansing.

Contributors include Pamela Ballinger, Jennie E. Burnet, Conerly Casey, Elizabeth Drexler, Leslie Dwyer, Alexander Laban Hinton, Sharon E. Hutchinson, Uli Linke, Kevin Lewis O’Neill, Antonius C. G. M. Robben, Debra Rodman, and Victoria Sanford.

Hinton is director of the Center for the Study of Genocide and Human Rights and associate professor of anthropology and global affairs at Rutgers University, Newark. He also is the author of Why Did They Kill? Cambodia in the Shadow of Genocide and editor of Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide.