Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin America. KSENIJA BILBIJA and LEIGH A. PAYNE (eds.): Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011

Abstract

We seem to want to account for violence with the linear. Often, though, derivatives bend the curve. At Canada’s new Human Rights Museum, the Shoah is worth one gallery of twelve. So too is the slaughter of indigenous peoples. Genocides in Ukraine, Srebrenica, Rwanda, and Armenia, however, will all be crammed into a single gallery. Several groups balked at the math. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress wants a separate gallery for the Holodomor. Meanwhile, as construction costs (and perhaps the political costs of accounting for violence) soar, the Canadian government has pulled the plug on more funding. The outer building structure is complete. As experts argue, though, over the value in gallery units of one genocide or another, for now there is no money to finish the museum. The building shell becomes a metaphor.