First Memories and Forms of Knowledge - Comparative Study on the Immediate Aftermath of Genocide and the First Memories, Documentation Projects, Memorial and Material Practices, and Forms of Knowledge in the Cases of the Shoah and the Genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda

• Applicant: Zuzanna Dziuban, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies ; African, American and Oceania Studies ; Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology ; Modern and Contemporary History ; Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 548649106

The First Memories and Forms of Knowledge (FIMEMO) project proposes to study the "first knowledges" produced by survivors and affected communities, including the diasporas, in the aftermath of genocide. It focuses on the first two decades following the Shoah (1944-1964) and the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda (1994-2014), and on the material and memorial practices emerging during that time. The ambition of the project is to explore the heuristic value of an approach that is both comparative and interdisciplinary. It puts into dialogue recent achievements in the evolving field of aftermath studies devoted to the Shoah and the corresponding, but still little explored, research on the immediate aftermath of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. The project engages first memories, forensic and documentation projects, and practices of knowledge production undertaken by survivors. It thereby challenges the long-established epistemic blindness in the fields of Holocaust and genocide studies to bottom-up, grassroots, vernacular, and activist constructions of memory and understandings of the genocide established by the affected communities vis-a-vis the states involved. The project seeks to reshape existing research and conceptualizations of genocide by centering its aftermath and to reevaluate immediate, positioned, embodied, and activist forms of memory and knowledge production through the notion of minority epistemologies. While acknowledging the major debates on the politics of comparison pertaining to the Holocaust and other modalities of genocidal violence, the FIMEMO project takes a different route by empirically connecting practices of survivors in two post-genocidal contexts, foregrounding their similarities and common traits, and thereby founding a comparative perspective on this focus on the genocidal aftermath. The innovative character of the FIMEMO project lies in its empirical and methodological orientation towards a clearly defined object of study as a test ground for interdisciplinary and comparative thinking. The joint analysis of memorial and material practices and processes of knowledge production in the aftermath of two genocides is not only meant to offer a new direction to the field of comparative genocide studies but also to lay an empirical foundation for a subfield of "comparative aftermath studies". By bringing together the German and French scholarly approaches to the Holocaust and the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and opening them up to research created in contexts where the genocide unfolded (Rwanda, Poland, and Eastern Europe more generally), the project aims to create a transnational research consortium on "comparative aftermath studies". The joint work of European and Rwandan researchers specializing in the two genocides and working jointly on a thus far largely under-researched case studies, would constitute one of the first research consortiums of this kind.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France, Rwanda
• Partner Organisation: Agence Nationale de la Recherche / The French National Research Agency
• Cooperation Partners: Dr. Philibert Gakwenzire; Dr. Aurelia Kalisky; Dr. Rémi Korman
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Anna-Maria Brandstetter