Books
Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage, Duke University Press (2025)
In Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage, Delia Duong Ba Wendel contends with the forms of justice and sovereignty enacted through sites of violent memory. Drawing from oral histories and a newly available visual archive of memory work after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she explores the human rights and government priorities that preserved killing sites and victims’ remains for public display. Rwanda’s genocide memorials exemplify a global phenomenon that Wendel terms “trauma heritage,” wherein hidden or unrecognized violence is spatialized—made visible in public space—to demand justice and recognition. She argues that trauma heritage innovates on the form histories take by “writing” them into landscapes, constituting a reparative historiography from the Global South. Among those sites, Rwanda’s genocide heritage comprises exceptionally visceral sites of truth-telling that highlight the politics of a past made present. Wendel demonstrates that such sites of memory require reckoning with the ethical and political dilemmas that arise from viewing violence as forms of repair and control.
Spatializing Politics: Essays on Power and Place, Harvard Design Studies (2015)
Spatializing Politics is an anthology of emerging scholarship that treats built and imagined spaces as critical to knowing political power. The essays in this collection illustrate how buildings and landscapes as disparate as Rust Belt railway stations and rural Rwandan hills become tools of political action and frameworks for political authority. By focusing on the architects and spaces of political empowerment, the anthology crosses anthropology, architectural history, conflict studies, geography, public policy, science/technology studies, and urban planning. Edited by Delia Duong Ba Wendel and Fallon Samuels Aidoo.
Books
Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage, Duke University Press (2025)
In Rwanda’s Genocide Heritage, Delia Duong Ba Wendel contends with the forms of justice and sovereignty enacted through sites of violent memory. Drawing from oral histories and a newly available visual archive of memory work after the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, she explores the human rights and government priorities that preserved killing sites and victims’ remains for public display. Rwanda’s genocide memorials exemplify a global phenomenon that Wendel terms “trauma heritage,” wherein hidden or unrecognized violence is spatialized—made visible in public space—to demand justice and recognition. She argues that trauma heritage innovates on the form histories take by “writing” them into landscapes, constituting a reparative historiography from the Global South. Among those sites, Rwanda’s genocide heritage comprises exceptionally visceral sites of truth-telling that highlight the politics of a past made present. Wendel demonstrates that such sites of memory require reckoning with the ethical and political dilemmas that arise from viewing violence as forms of repair and control.
Spatializing Politics: Essays on Power and Place, Harvard Design Studies (2015)
Spatializing Politics is an anthology of emerging scholarship that treats built and imagined spaces as critical to knowing political power. The essays in this collection illustrate how buildings and landscapes as disparate as Rust Belt railway stations and rural Rwandan hills become tools of political action and frameworks for political authority. By focusing on the architects and spaces of political empowerment, the anthology crosses anthropology, architectural history, conflict studies, geography, public policy, science/technology studies, and urban planning. Edited by Delia Duong Ba Wendel and Fallon Samuels Aidoo.