Curating Difficult Knowledge Violent Pasts in Public Places

This volume inscribes an innovative domain of inquiry, bringing museum and heritage studies to bear on questions of transitional justice, memory and post-conflict reconciliation. As practitioners, artists, curators, activists and academics, the contributors explore the challenges of bearing witness to past conflicts.

ERICA LEHRER is Assistant Professor and Canada Research Chair in Post-Conflict Studies at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. She has published andundertaken experimental curatorial work on Jewish heritage and memory in post-Communist Poland.

CYNTHIA E. MILTONis Canada Research Chair in Latin American History and Associate Professor in the Département d'histoire at the Université de Montréal, Canada. She is author of The Many Meanings of Poverty: Colonialism, Social Compacts, and Assistance in Eighteenth-Century Ecuador (2007), editor of The Art(s) of Truth-telling in Post-Shining Path Peru and co-editor of The Art of Truth-Telling about Authoritarian Rule, (2005).

MONICA EILEEN PATTERSON is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the History Departments at Concordia University and the Université de Montréal, Canada. Her teaching and research interests include colonial and postcolonial southern Africa, anthropology and history, childhood, violence, memory, and public scholarship. She is a co-editor of Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline (2010).

List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Witnesses to Witnessing; E.Lehrer & C.E.Milton
PART I: BEARING WITNESS BETWEEN MUSEUMS AND COMMUNITIES
'We were so far away': Exhibiting Inuit Oral Histories of Residential Schools; H.Igloliorte
The Past is a Dangerous Place: the Museum as a Safe Haven; V.Szekeres
Teaching Tolerance through Objects of Hatred: The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia as 'Counter-Museum'; M.E.Patterson
Politics of the Past: Remembering the Rwandan Genocide at the Kigali Memorial Center; A.Sodaro
PART II: VISUALIZING THE PAST
Living Historically through Photographs in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Reflections on Kliptown Museum, Soweto; D.Newbury
Showing and Telling: Photography Exhibitions in Israeli Discourses of Dissent; T.Katriel
Visualizing Apartheid: Re-framing Truth and Reconciliation through Contemporary South African Art; E.Mosely
PART III: MATERIALITY AND MEMORIAL CHALLENGES
Points of No Return: Cultural Heritage and Counter-Memory in Post-Yugoslavia; A.Herscher
Defacing Memory: (Un)tying Peru's Memory Knots; C.E.Milton
(Mis)representations of the Jewish Past in Poland's Memoryscapes: Nationalism, Religion and Political Economies of Commemoration; S.Kapralski
Afterward: The Turn to Pedagogy: a Needed Conversation on the Practice of Curating Difficult Knowledge; R.I.Simon
Index