Over the last two decades, public spaces of commemoration have increasingly addressed past episodes of violence and suffering; memorials, exhibitions, and art have taken up the traumas inflicted upon victims. Such representations of violence and its consequences raise particular curatorial challenges that established museology has yet to fully address. Curating Difficult Knowledge attempts to speak to these challenges and the many issues at stake in curating violent pasts. The editors in their introduction establish the necessity and even obligation to bear witness, and they raise questions concerning how violent pasts should be represented, and to whom, and what forms of curatorial assistance might be required to assist victims of violence and prevent re-traumatization. The editors present these questions as urgent ones, and this volume is a timely contribution toward answering their call.

Having said that, the volume would have profited from a more critical discussion of the benefits and detriments of public representations of violence. The book's essays address violent pasts from across the world, ranging from Poland to Peru, yet the inclusion of countries where violence remains a part of daily life, such as Israel, raises serious issues about the subject and its framing. Some of the essays explore how violence has become memorialized even while it continues to be perpetrated. Several authors suggest this may be part of a process of political suppression, which challenges the idea that the curation of violent pasts is necessarily cathartic. For instance, in a beautiful essay on Kliptown Museum in Soweto, Darren Newbury describes how the exhibition privileges a nationalist narrative of liberation and equal rights that is undercut by developments in the very neighborhood where the museum is situated. Likewise, Amy Sodaro shows that the national Memorial Centre in Kigali, Rwanda, presents a narrative that blames an external Other—the former colonizer—as the main culprit in the Rwanda genocide, and thereby leaves unexplored the question of national responsibility. Such examples suggest that the curation of violent pasts in public displays can serve to suppress rather than confront “difficult knowledge.”

To be sure, there are contrary examples in which perpetrators of past violence acknowledged it, and its representation may have a healing effect. For example, the opening essay by Inuit curator Heather Igloliorte examines an exhibition that enabled victims of the Canadian Residential School system to share their experiences through conversation. While this example shows that exhibitions can work in a curative way, Roger Simon's Afterword raises many questions regarding possible relations between affect and cognition, and suggests that we need to develop a new pedagogy to address them. This volume is a first, necessary step toward this goal.