Through a global comparative approach, Amy Sodaro uses in-depth case studies of five exemplary memorial museums that commemorate a range of violent pasts and allow for a chronological and global ...examination of the form: the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC; the House of Terror in Budapest; the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre in Rwanda; the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile; and the National September 11 Memorial Museum in New York. Together, these case studies illustrate the historical emergence and global spread of the memorial museum and show how this new cultural form of commemoration is intended to be used in contemporary societies around the world emerging from widely divergent forms of political violence.
Museums and Sites of Persuasion examines the concept of museums and memory sites as locations that attempt to promote human rights, democracy and peace. Demonstrating that such sites have the ...potential to act as powerful spaces of persuasion or contestation, the book also shows that there are perils in the selective memory and history that they present.Examining a range of museums, memorials and exhibits in places as varied as Burundi, Denmark, Georgia, Kosovo, Mexico, Peru, Vietnam and the US, this volume demonstrates how they represent and try to come to terms with difficult histories. As sites of persuasion, the contributors to this book argue, their public goal is to use memory and education about the past to provide moral lessons to visitors that will encourage a more democratic and peaceful future. However, the case studies also demonstrate how political, economic and social realities often undermine this lofty goal, raising questions about how these sites of persuasion actually function on a daily basis.Straddling several interdisciplinary fields of research and study, Museums and Sites of Persuasion will be essential reading for those working in the fields of museum studies, memory studies, and genocide studies. It will also be essential reading for museum practitioners and anyone engaged in the study of history, sociology, political science, anthropology and art history.
Tradução do capítulo "Memorial Museums", contido no livro "Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence", de autoria de Amy Sodaro,
This article analyses the new Greenwood Rising museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which tells the largely forgotten story of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. Greenwood Rising is influenced by the broader global ...proliferation of memorial museums created to confront historical violence vis-à-vis today’s ‘politics of regret’ and works to centre slavery and racial inequality in American history as well as in contemporary society, representing a new intervention in the mnemonic struggles over slavery and its legacies in the United States. In its adherence to global memorial ethics, Greenwood Rising also places (White) visitors in the position of what Michael Rothberg has theorized as the ‘implicated subject’. However, Greenwood Rising has been highly controversial among Tulsa’s African American community, many of whom see the museum as a ‘symbolic gesture’ intended to obscure ongoing racism and replace material reparations. This controversy raises questions about the limits of memory in the face of ongoing injustice and highlights tensions between increasingly globalized ethics of remembrance and local mnemonic struggles.
The National September 11 Memorial Museum opened in New York City in May 2014. Like other memorial museums, it uses affect and experience to produce in visitors what Alison Landsberg calls a ...“prosthetic memory” of 9/11: an individual, personal memory of 9/11 whether or not the visitor actually experienced the event. However, the museum also constructs 9/11 as an event that is collectively, culturally traumatic. Thus, the prosthetic memory might be better conceived as a “prosthetic trauma” that, in recreating for visitors the trauma of 9/11, encourages strong identification with the victims as embodiments of the American cultural identity that was targeted by the ideology of the terrorists. In this article, I examine how the 9/11 Museum constructs 9/11 as cultural trauma and uses the act of bearing witness to create “prosthetic trauma” and a simplistic dualism between good and evil that has important political implications.
Emerging from the extremely violent 20th century, memorial museums are a new form of commemoration, created to both commemorate and educate about past genocide, human rights abuses and other ...injustices with the goal of instilling in their visitors an ethic of “never again.” However, these ambitious goals are often compromised by the politics behind the creation of memorial museums. The focus of this paper is on the ways in which memorial museums produce history according to the dictates, needs and desires of the regimes that build them, using the example of the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in Rwanda. Despite the fact that the Kigali Center commemorates the 1994 Rwandan genocide using the increasingly familiar, global memorial museum form, it reveals much more about current Rwandan politics and the government’s hopes for the future of Rwanda than it does confront the terrible past.
Emerging from the extremely violent 20th century, memorial museums are a new form of commemoration, created to both commemorate and educate about past genocide, human rights abuses and other ...injustices with the goal of instilling in their visitors an ethic of “never again.” However, these ambitious goals are often compromised by the politics behind the creation of memorial museums. The focus of this paper is on the ways in which memorial museums produce history according to the dictates, needs and desires of the regimes that build them, using the example of the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in Rwanda. Despite the fact that the Kigali Center commemorates the 1994 Rwandan genocide using the increasingly familiar, global memorial museum form, it reveals much more about current Rwandan politics and the government’s hopes for the future of Rwanda than it does confront the terrible past.
The Jewish Museum in Berlin is devoted to telling the 2,000-year history of Jews in Germany in a stunning building designed by Daniel Libeskind. It is Germany's premier museum devoted to Jewish ...history and memory, but it is expressly not a Holocaust museum and most reference to the Holocaust is architectural. In its interactive and sophisticated exhibitions, the Jewish Museum represents contemporary international trends in museology and in many ways resembles the many Holocaust and other memorial museums around the world, one of the most prominent and striking international museological trends. However, in rejecting the categorization as a memorial museum and in focusing on a celebration of German-Jewish culture and history rather than the tragedy of the Holocaust, the Jewish Museum is what we might call a countermemorial museum. As such, it challenges the new norms around the creation of memorial museums and other sites of memory to be self-reflexive meditations on the negative past and its trauma. If memorial museums emerge from a particular orientation toward the past that Jeffrey Olick calls the "politics of regret" and claims is a major characteristic of our age, then the Jewish Museum might represent a parallel trend that we can call a "politics of nostalgia." The museum serves, in many ways, as a screen upon which present-day Germany can project an idealized image of its past, masking some of the present tensions around German national identity and ideas of German multiculturalism. At the same time, the museum often seems to be in conflict with Libeskind's building, which is infused with Holocaust symbolism and meaning.
MEMORIAL MUSEUMS Sodaro, Amy
Exhibiting Atrocity,
01/2018
Book Chapter
Open access
Memorial museums are intended to be about both memory and thinking in the form of historical understanding; they are also aimed at inspiring emotional, affective responses and empathy. This is a ...broad mandate for any cultural institution; add to this their focus on the most sensitive of subject matter and memorial museums emerge as very complex institutions. In this final chapter, I would like to suggest a few broad conclusions about the form that can be drawn from these five case studies and reflected in dozens of other memorial museums around the world.
Through these case studies, I have endeavored
MEMORIAL MUSEUMS Sodaro, Amy
Exhibiting Atrocity,
01/2018
Book Chapter
Open access
In Ggolo, Uganda, ground has been broken for a new memorial museum focused on the 1994 genocide in neighboring Rwanda (Muramira 2016). Though Rwanda has an active program of genocide memorialization, ...including the national memorial museum discussed in chapter 4, the Ugandan museum will be the first of its kind outside of Rwanda and reflects the desire for memory and education about the genocide to extend beyond national borders, much like how the bodies of genocide victims that were tossed into Rwanda’s rivers and ended up on the shores of Uganda’s Lake Victoria had crossed national borders. Across the globe,
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