Hotel Rwanda Essay

Zinnia Ramirez

Tamara Beauchamp

Humanities Core

24 May 2018

Hotel Rwanda: Language Saved Thousands, but Killed Millions As American writer Patrick Rothfuss puts it, “Words are pale shadows of forgotten names. As names have power, words have power. Words can light fires in the minds of men. Words can wring tears from the hardest hearts,” and it becomes increasingly evident throughout history just how much impact words have, they have power, they have influence, they have in some cases caused reprehensible damage. Language creates the platform from which we derive our ways of communication that allow us to spread values, customs, beliefs as well as build societies, divisions, racecraft, and barriers between individuals.Taking a look at the

I will do this by examining not just scholarly literature that describes the history of scientific racism, but cross-examine film criticisms of the how African history is framed. Making references to the scholarly excerpts of Barbara and Karen Fields regarding how race is conjured and taking for example the work of author, Edith R. Sanders, that describes the Hamitic hypothesis and suggests that “[it] is symptomatic of the nature of race relations, that it has changed its content if not its nomenclature through time, and that it has become a problem of epistemology” (521), or Paul Rusesabagina, whose narrative we follow in Hotel Rwanda, illustrates where this hegemony originated in his autobiographical account, An Ordinary Man. Similarly, it becomes pertinent to explore the ways in which Africa is portrayed in cinema, has an effect on the way audiences perceive the film as well as how in self-orientalizing this continent, we detach ourselves from the events going on outside of our scope of knowledge as Mary Ellen Higgins associate English professor at Penn State explains in Hollywood’s Africa After 1994, Nigel Eltringham, senior Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Sussex describes in Framing Africa, and Vivian-Bickford Smith and Richard Mendelsohn analyze in Black and White In Colour: African History on