This paper makes an argument about the relationship between political time and the familiarity and repetitiveness of exile in postcolonial Rwanda and Burundi. I suggest that the memory, recurrence, and anticipation of displacement is a central aspect of postcolonial life and crucial to national fashioning. With each cycle of forced expulsion, the boundaries of the nation are unmade and remade. This rhythm of recurrent displacement and exile makes for specific forms of political subjectivity that though tethered to the geography of the nation also always exceed it. 

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5 book titles related to the talk:

Loose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman

Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination by Adom Getachew

Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmology by Liisa Malkki

When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda by Mahmood Mamdani

Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment by David Scott

Antecedents to Modern Rwanda: The Nyiginya Kingdom by Jan Vansina