Museums and Mass Violence examines the varied ways in which museums around the world address – or fail to address – the problem of mass violence and severe human rights abuses.
Bringing together a diverse group of scholars and practitioners and a transnational set of case studies, this volume explores the potential of museums to contribute to social justice in the contemporary era. At the same time, it directs attention to the perils these institutions face when they curate and exhibit “difficult” knowledge concerning genocide, mass killing, and other kinds of atrocity crimes. The question of how museums shape historical understanding of political oppression, particularly within the political, social, and economic contexts in which they operate, is another major issue addressed by this volume. Asking for whom, exactly, “difficult histories” are difficult, contributors to this volume also ask the hard question of what museum professionals should do when the “terrible gift” they offer visitors through exhibits detailing historical episodes of mass violence are met not with horror, but with indifference – or worse, approval.
Providing comparative discussion of the perils and potential of exhibiting atrocities in countries as diverse as Sweden, Argentina, Rwanda, and Canada, Museums and Mass Violence will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of museums, memory, ethics, genocide, trauma, heritage, social justice, culture, and human rights.
List of figures; List of contributors; Foreword; Introduction; I. Mobilizing Memory in the Wake of Atrocity – 1. Remembering and Prosecuting Atrocities in Argentina: The ESMA Memory Museum; 2 Recovering Silenced Pasts: Representation of Racial Violence in Montgomery’s Legacy Museum and Tulsa’s Greenwood Rising; 3. Promise and Challenges of Digital Memorialization in Museums; 4. Difficult Knowledge as Bequest: Implementing the “Terrible Gift” in Exhibition at the Former Shingwauk Indian Residential School; II. Designing Exhibitions of Difficult Knowledge – 5.“You’d Have to See It to Believe It”: Commodifying Trauma at a Museum Near You; 6. Designing “Difficult” Exhibitions: Strategic Design for Representing Testimonies of Rrauma; 7. Future Foundations: Designing Around Sites of Trauma and Resilience; 8.Perils of Working with an Inconvenient Truth: Exhibiting Rwandan Hutu Rescuers; III. Encountering Violence and Nonviolence in Museum Collections – 9. “I remember her”: Challenging and Reclaiming Archival Spaces through the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, Karine Duhamel, National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, Canada; 10. Silence or Bravery: Swedish Museums Facing Contemporary Mass Atrocities in China and Myanmar; 11. Picture This: Social Memory and the Tuol Sleng Photographs in Museum, Commercial, and Virtual Spaces; 12. From War Materiel to Peace Pathways: Changing Visions for Global Peace Museums; Afterword; Index.
Dr. Paul Morrow is a visiting researchfFellow in the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin, Ireland. Dr. Amy Sodaro is professor of sociology at the Borough of Manhattan Community College/City University of New York, USA. Dr. Leora Kahn is the Executive Director of PROOF: Media for Social Justice,a non-profit organization that uses visual storytelling for social change.
