Museums, Memory and Human Rights

1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-1-032-80457-6
Verlag: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Buch, Englisch, 276 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: Routledge Research in Museum Studies

Museums, Memory and Human Rights examines how transregional Holocaust memory and the associated duty to remember shape museum commemorations of violent pasts and their aspirational visions of cosmopolitan justice, responsibility, and political community building.

Bringing museum studies and memory studies together, the book draws on in-depth case study analyses of four human rights museums located in Western Europe, North America, and East Asia to explore how top-down and bottom-up museums engage with the guilt-based politics of memory and human rights through their mandates and exhibitionary narratives. It shows how state-funded museums mobilise the duty to remember to close the books on the past and affirm narratives of national renewal, while grassroots museums use it to sustain ongoing demands for justice and challenge official historical accounts. At the same time, it traces convergences between these forms, showing how both types of human rights museums configure responsibility and agency in ways that may enable remembrance, belonging, and political action, or foreclose them.

Museums, Memory and Human Rights will be of interest to researchers and students in museum studies, memory studies, and Holocaust studies, as well as those interested in the ethical implications of travelling Holocaust memory practices and cosmopolitanism in contemporary human rights museums.

Zielgruppe

Academic and Postgraduate

Autoren/Hrsg.

Graefenstein, Sulamith

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Politische Kultur Menschenrechte, Bürgerrechte
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Kunstsammlung, Museen, Ausstellungen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Introduction: Transregional Holocaust Memory, Neoliberal Subjectification, and Cosmopolitanism in the Human Rights Museum

- Conceptual Preliminaries: Narratives of the Past, Neoliberal Subjectification and a Cosmopolitan Ethics of Representation

- Human Rights and Neoliberalism in Museums

- Human Rights and Holocaust Memory in Museums

- The Memory Imperative in Western Europe: Holocaust Representation at Kazerne Dossin – Memorial, Museum and Documentation Centre on Holocaust and Human Rights in Mechelen, Belgium

- The Memory Imperative in Canada: Settler Colonialism at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, Canada

- The Memory Imperative in the United States: Racial Segregation and the Civil Rights Movement at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, United States

- A Grassroots-Approach to the Memory Imperative in Asia: The ‘Comfort Women’ Past at the War and Women’s Human Rights Museum in Seoul, South Korea

- Building Cosmopolitan Communities? Difficult Memories, Neoliberal Subjectification, and Human Rights in Museums in Belgium, the United States, Canada, and South Korea

- Conclusion.

Über Autor(innen)

Sulamith Graefenstein is Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University. She has undertaken research in Belgium, Austria, Canada, the United States, and South Korea. Her work in memory studies and museum studies focuses on developing an understanding of how human rights museums advance notions of (trans-)national justice and cosmopolitan solidarity in an era of circulating Holocaust memory and human rights.