The use of a conceptual framework derived from economics – with its notions of market, profit and sell-out – to analyse memory work about past atrocities may seem highly inappropriate. One of the important contributions of Accounting for Violence: Marketing Memory in Latin America is that it consciously and respectfully breaks through this barrier, laying bare the memory market in all its aspects.

Ksenija Bilbija and Leigh A. Payne introduce the notion of a memory market that ‘explores the ways in which time and memory are used to produce value and values – to profit, or benefit, from remembering the repressive past, to not repeat it’ (p. 1). They underline that ‘the present volume … values the memory market and its products in some cases, criticizes it in others, and explores imaginative uses of such a market’ (p. 2). The editors emphasise that anti-marketing forces exist within the memory field and that their project does not promote a memory market, but describes and analyses it: ‘We explore when commercialization cheapens memory goods and derails progress toward building a human rights culture. We do not assume, however, that the memory market is inherently immoral or savage’ (p. 4).

Accounting for Violence grew out of a panel at a Latin American Studies Association meeting (2007) and comprises an introduction, 11 chapters about Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina, Mexico and Chile, and a thorough conclusion. The rich chapters offer case studies that reveal the paradoxes and intense debates surrounding ‘memory goods’, exploring how accounts, sites and images of the authoritarian past are produced and used by different actors in the present. Each chapter has its own distinct perspective as writers include scholars from cultural studies, political science, art, comparative literature, media studies, history, sociology and anthropology.

At the heart of the book are two keenly felt concerns. The first is the need to address the question of how to make memory work in order to advance towards a culture of human rights and ‘Never Again’ without ‘selling out’ memory through ruthless commodification, which may render memory empty and meaningless. The second is the wish to provide a profound analysis of how memory works in a globalised world, and how memory work contests the authoritarian/neoliberal project. The chapters address these concerns in rich detail. The power of the book resides in leaving aside quick and easy views of ‘good and bad’ memory work, instead taking a closer look at how memory really works, how this market actually functions on the local level, in a globalised world.

The chapter by Laurie Beth Clark and Leigh A. Payne on trauma tourism in Latin America explores how the mass and global marketing of sites of memory to advance the ‘Never Again’ project risks trivialising and depoliticising that very project. It shows the ‘memory market paradox’: commodification of memory potentially cheapens it, while too little public exposure may limit awareness of past human rights atrocities. Susana Draper takes a closer look at the spatial history of urban life in the post-dictatorship area, analyzing the Punta Carretas Shopping Centre at the site of a former torture centre in Montevideo and two former torture sites in Buenos Aires. This analysis reveals the erasure of certain unsettling temporalities and the proliferation of spaces of consumption on the one hand, and what she calls ‘critical folds’ (p. 139) on the other, where the texture and function of the different sites of former torture centres are constantly being debated and rupture the homogenising forces of the neoliberal city of consumption.

In her conclusion, Alice Nelson usefully clusters the chapters into two groups. The first set of chapters examines the technologies of representation which are explored through popular cultural and media analyses and shows how particular political meanings in the present are produced: Rebecca Atencio on the teleseries Anos Rebeldes in Brazil, Ksenija Bilbija on global fashion advertisements using images of torture in Chile and Argentina, Jo-Marie Burt on appropriation of testimonial narratives for political ends in Peru, Susana Kaiser on the consumption and production of memory goods in Argentina, and Carmen Oquendo-Villar on the symbolic meaning of Pinochet's clothes in Chile.

The second set of chapters explores memorials, museums and ‘memory sites’, addressing questions and ongoing debates as to how and whether to market them, who and what should be represented in them, who should sponsor them (p. 352), and how these initiatives may contest dominant narratives of the past. Laurie Clark and Leigh Payne write on trauma tourism in Latin America, Cath Collins on public and private commemorative space in Chile, Susana Draper on the reconstruction of torture centres as shopping malls and tourist sites in Uruguay and Argentina, Nancy Gates-Madsen on the tension between commodification and commemoration at the creation of the Parque de la Memoria in Argentina, Cynthia Milton and Maria Eugenia Ulfe on memory and tourism in Peru, and José Ramón Ruisánchez Serra on the commemoration of the 1968 massacre on Tlatelolco Plaza and its relation to the urban development of Mexico City.

After the sweeping introduction and the detailed chapters, it is the conclusion written by Alice Nelson that brings all threads together. She affirms that ‘memory formation is nothing if not a conflictual, mobile process’ (p. 340) and explores on a more theoretical level the dynamics of memory production and consumption in the context of neoliberal capitalist globalisation, structuring the arguments of the preceding chapters. She identifies two tensions. The first is between the notion of ‘marketing memory’ and memory projects often shaped by anti-market sentiments which may lead to renegotiations of interrelationships among public and private funders, agents of the state and human rights groups, and local and international memory ‘consumers’ which question and may reconfigure predominant neoliberal patterns. The second tension alludes to how ‘migration and media have dramatically reshaped the imaginable communities – overlapping and diasporic, rather than strictly national – that have a stake in constructing “our own” version of ‘Never Again” ’ (p. 345). This in turn requires a critical view of today's human rights frameworks, which ‘bear a complex relationship to capitalism … It seems crucial then, to recognize for whom borders have ostensibly disappeared under globalization and for whom they categorically have not’ (p. 353).

Edited volumes tend to run the risk of encompassing too broad a range of disciplines, topics and theoretical perspectives under a general theme, while lacking internal coherence. In the case of Accounting for Violence, the broad range of cases explored in the chapters is both sobering and inspiring. Moreover, the volume's excellent conclusion unites the chapters and raises larger questions, urging students and scholars alike to participate in the debate on the pressing concerns put forward by its contributors.