Abstract
In Human Rights Museums, Jennifer Carter identifies as the first human rights museum the Liberty Osaka Museum, which opened in 1985. Terence Duffy (2001) noted “the emergence of a distinct ‘human rights museum’,” a group of museums that serve as “custodians of what one could term a ‘human rights culture” (pp. 15–16), such as the Hiroshima Peace Museum (1955), the Maison des Esclaves (1966), the Musée National Pour la Paix (1988), and the District Six Museum (1994), among others. This new genre spread to many parts of the world at the turn of the millennium, and today human rights museums see themselves, and are viewed by their supporters, as important institutions for constructing, preserving, changing, and manipulating public memory for the purpose of promoting human rights. This makes them interesting and important sites for memory studies scholars. Human Rights Museums enhances our understanding of the histories of these museums, the human rights and museum discourses that shape them, and the theories and practices they deploy to leverage public memories of human rights violations to develop resources, motivate activism, and support transitional justice processes.
Carter examines a range of human rights museums, focusing on the political situations in which they are established, the local and national discourses that frame them, and their museological (theoretical) and museographical (practical) development. She foregrounds their strengths—including sophisticated presentation techniques—as well as areas that require more attention, especially the importance of addressing the multiplicity of experiences in historical events and social structures that enable human rights violations. Though critical, the overall tone of the book is positive, emphasizing the dynamism and accomplishments of these museums and their potential to promote human rights.
The book situates detailed case studies of individual human rights museums within the larger trajectory of the human rights movement and of museum history, resulting in a presentation that has breadth and depth. Carter brings local knowledge and perspectives to her analyses of museums in East Asia and Latin America by working with co-authors from the countries in which these museums are located. Each chapter in Human Rights Museums includes historical and descriptive material and points to dynamics that shape the ways each museum works to promote human rights. The introduction sketches the trajectories of museums and the human rights and social justice movements in the post-World War II decades. Carter identifies three phases in the evolution of human rights museums: the emergence of memorial museums in the 1940s to commemorate victims of mass atrocities; the expansion of their exhibits to provide a broader perspective and promote memory activism; and a third wave, starting at the turn of the new millennium, in which some museums foreground human rights in their name and mission statement. Carter explains how these museums provide acknowledgement for surviving victims and their families and work to engage visitors by linking memory to social justice.
Chapter 2 discusses Liberty Osaka (formally the Osaka Human Rights Museum) which opened in 1985 in Osaka, Japan (and has been temporarily closed since 2021), as one of several national initiatives to combat prejudice. Carter and co-author Jennifer Orange trace the permanent exhibition through three iterations, outlining a shift from object-based exhibits presenting different social groups in a multicultural setting, to broadening its focus to multiple issues and deploying video testimony and historical witnessing to bring the past into the present and encourage deeper visitor engagement. The third phase presented the right to freedom from discrimination by juxtaposing universal human experience with national and local issues and the role of the individual in realizing acknowledgement of difference and the valorizing of different cultures. Carter and Orange argue that this museum successfully dismantles the myth of Japanese homogeneity, but needs to address the social structures that made human rights violations – in this case, discrimination – possible and continue to support social inequality.
Co-authored with Chia-Li Chen, Chapter 3 describes the National Human Rights Museum in Taiwan, which opened in Taipei and Green Island in 2018 as part of a transitional justice process. Addressing the repression of the Kuomintang government during the years of the ‘White Terror’ (1949–1987), including internment, torture, and murder, it foregrounds the victims’ perspectives through its location on the sites of two former detention centres and former victims’ participation in mounting the exhibits and serving as guides. The authors describe how this museum supported Taiwan’s transitional justice process through its collections and archives, as well as its reconstruction of the victims’ experiences and various performances, workshops, and artistic interventions that promote dialogue and intergenerational exchange. But this museum also lacks an exploration of the structural underpinnings of state violence and a nuanced presentation of the multiple actors involved.
Chapter 4, co-authored with María Juliana Angarata, discusses human rights museums in Paraguay and Colombia. In Latin America, human rights museums are often driven by memory activists, especially survivors and families of victims of state violence. The museums also serve as depositories for the documentation of atrocities, making them important spaces of research, where citizens can themselves construct history. In Paraguay’s capital, Asuncion, two museums are in dialogue with each other. Visitors can view the state violence of the Stroessner dictatorship (1954–1989) in the Museum of Justice, Center of Documentation and Archive for the Defense of Human Rights, which opened in 2008. The museum is a small exhibition and documentation center established by the government in the Palace of Justice that uses official documents to reconstruct Paraguay’s national history and transition to democracy. However, it is housed in the archive and administered by the current government, many officials of which are holdovers from the dictatorship. The Museum of Memories: Dictatorship and Human Rights (2005), by contrast, has a multi-modal focus on the victims’ experiences and is housed in a former clandestine torture center. This museum, which supports the National Transitional Justice Commission, offers a reconstruction of victims’ experiences designed to engage visitors emotionally, facilitate healing and encourage memory activism. The two museums represent complementary processes of engaging with past human rights violations to rebuild democracy.
In Colombia, where the state is one of several participants in ongoing armed conflict and atrocities, the Museum of Memory of Colombia has yet to be built, though a preliminary travelling exhibit is testing its interpretation. Voices for Transforming Colombia, calls itself a ‘living museum’. It sees itself as a platform for visitors to encounter living producers of memory, through events in which members of victim groups perform their memories through dance, music, and language, rather than objects. Focusing on land, body, and water, and their relations to armed conflict, these performances bring new voices to the history and foreground new dimensions of the conflict.
Chapter 5 constructs a history of musealizing planetary change and climate justice, tracing a trajectory from traditional natural history museums to today’s eco-museums in Bremerhaven, Hong Kong, Hangzhow, London and Copenhagen, among other cities. The inclusion of environmental concerns within the purview of human rights is based on concepts of nature as a living being with rights and on the idea that humans have rights to clean air and water, and healthy food. Carter describes the shift in climate exhibits from a focus on science to multi-modal, multi-sensory, and multi-dimensional platforms for engagement. Today, these exhibits link climate change to social justice and Indigenous issues and they work collaboratively with other organizations. Carter argues that the ‘museum sector is uniquely poised to enhance understanding, promote creativity and stimulate active [. . .] responses to planetary change’ (p. 184).
The book concludes by invoking the duty of memory, the catharsis and healing that result from truth telling in museums and the role of museums in engendering and maintaining productive social dialogue, and including new voices. Human Rights Museums offers its readers copious detail and analysis of individual museums, and the social dynamics that inform their work, such as memory activism, transitional justice, trauma, and reparative justice. However, Carter refrains from addressing, or even mentioning, criticism of these museums. Sodaro (2018) and Apsel and Sodaro (2020) argue that, while memorial museums, which also address mass violence and trauma, can provide moving experiences for visitors and acknowledge atrocities, the politics that enable their establishment often preclude their ability to effect social change; hence, they remain largely ‘platforms that support the status quo’ (Sodaro, 2018: 14). Similarly, Lea David (2020) presents examples of human rights memorial culture that are ineffective and even counterproductive.
Carter presents new participatory and affect-oriented exhibitions in the museums she describes. But do they engender engagement and motivate activism, as they are intended to do? The book does not acknowledge the limitations of museum work identified in other studies, starting with the Sara Selwood Associates’ (2010: 54) argument that very little is known about the impact of museums on visitors’ sensibilities. Some museums conduct visitor reception studies, but their findings are rarely made accessible to researchers. Some ideas (though hardly conclusive) about the reactions of different kinds of visitors to museum exhibits can be found in reviews of the museums/exhibits in the local and national media and on platforms like Tripadvisor. This kind of research may be beyond the scope of this book, but acknowledging our limitations in understanding the impact of these museums and exhibitions is important.
A major strength of Human Rights Museums is that it suggests important directions for future research and thought, especially MA and PhD dissertations. Voices for Transforming Colombia points to the need for discussion about whether museums should simply offer their space for groups to perform their identities and memories of victimization, or whether museum experts are needed to contextualize and interpret these performances. Another area for future research is the appropriation of human rights discourses and exhibition formats to promote other agendas and interests in ways that can obscure the human rights violations of some museums’ stakeholders. Atlanta’s Center for Civil and Human Rights is built on land donated by Coca-Cola, despite many charges that Coca-Cola is involved in human rights violations. Further research on a broad spectrum of human rights museums will afford a more sober understanding of the human rights museum genre and enhance our thinking about what we can expect of these institutions and how we can measure their success and their limitations.
Human Rights Museums has helped me in my work, and it will be useful for human rights and museum scholars and practitioners, including graduate students. It provides new and detailed information and analysis, offers a broad view of this genre and introduces North American and European readers to museology and human rights work in parts of the globe that many of us do not visit. Carter concludes that ‘human rights museums [. . .] incarnate [. . .] a general will to do justice in the face of egregious and traumatic violations of the past’ (p. 195), but that engagement with them requires ‘justice, activism, equity and ethics’ (p. 182). The challenge is to do this within the complexities of their organizational structure and the political dynamics around them. The closing of Peru’s Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion by Lima’s ultra-conservative mayor in April 2023 warns us that museums of memory and human rights must also learn to defend themselves against their increasingly active enemies.