The memory imperative as a narrative template: difficult heritage at European and North American human rights museums

This article explores how the prescriptive expectation placed on governments to confront violent pasts operates as a three-tiered narrative template in exhibitions at state-authorised Euro-American human rights museums. Using Kazerne Dossin, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights as case studies, I illustrate that in representing the histories of Nazi collaboration in Belgium, racial segregation in the U.S. and settler colonialism in Canada these museums promote similar master narratives of human rights progress. I thereby build on current museum scholarship which, in describing these institutions as ‘ideas-focused’ and ‘issues-based,’ largely frames them through their focus on tackling present-day human rights abuses by inciting visitor activism and drawing attention to the suffering of the oppressed. I contend that these activist engagements are regulated by an important commemorative function. This function is tied to the imperative to remember dark pasts which produce representations marked by hidden engagements with the ongoing structural inequalities that led to the commission of state-enforced violence in the first place working to the effect of marginalising some voices of suffering. This is evidenced by the narrative template which seals off the past from the present making visitors the most important present-day connection to the difficult past addressed.