David Mwambari. Navigating Cultural Memory: Commemoration and Narrative in Post-Genocide Rwanda. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. 336 pp. $83. Hardback. ISBN: 9780190942304.

Navigating Cultural Memory is a powerful, challenging, and thought-provoking work of scholarship.Drawing on a unique combination of original data including interviews, focus group discussions, site visits, ethnographic "encounters," and his own memories and personal reflections, David Mwambari skillfully and sensitively exposes the complex, contradictory, and ever-shifting memory landscape of postgenocide Rwanda, and its intersection with both everyday lived experiences and the country's national and international politics.Theoretically, the book challenges us to reconceptualize and reimagine how memory is negotiated and reconstituted in postconflict contexts, drawing on decolonial approaches.It also illuminates how these processes both undergird and confront different power structures.Empirically, the study significantly advances our understanding of postgenocide Rwanda and the navigation of these issues by ordinary people, including survivors.Indeed, particularly given how over-researched Rwanda and the legacy of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda are in contemporary scholarship, Mwambari offers a disarmingly fresh and novel set of insights.This is in part due to the richness of his data, in part because of his own positionality as one of few Rwandan international scholars, and in part because of the interdisciplinarity of the work, with analysis of state discourses and approaches examined alongside the stories of artists and performers.Indeed, in many respects, the book is somewhat difficult to place within a particular discipline.Though conceptually framed within memory studies, the significance and relevance of Navigating Cultural Memory is truly multidisciplinary, and this reflects the ambition of the research.In many ways, the study of memory-particularly memories and memorialization of an event as traumatic and impactful as the Genocide in Rwanda-defies disciplinary categorization.As the book shows so powerfully, memory and memorialization is "messy" in the sense that it emerges from the intermeshing of subjective experiences of individuals and communities.What we experience is not siloed into disciplinary categories and the book presents, ultimately, a challenge to scholars in terms of where "memory" fits in the academy.Given that memory is at least in some way key to almost everything in the Social Sciences and Humanities, should memory studies be considered a sub-field or, rather, a