The construction of national identity and the curation of difficult knowledge at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

The curatorial function of the relatively new human rights museum is to act as an intermediary between past atrocity and present social justice. However, as entrusted agencies of the state, national museums function as authorities on history through selective recollections that strategically define the parameters of their nations and citizenry. Through the analysis of two exhibits at the newly inaugurated Canadian Museum for Human Rights, this article explores how museums act as sites of historical consciousness through narratives that convey past, present and future visions of nationhood. It illustrates an innovative research approach that problematizes state visions that exclude or silence particular individual, or group identities, and offers insights into the practice and implications of Simon’s notion of a curatorial pedagogy of difficult knowledge. This article is pertinent not only to museum studies, but also more generally to the fields of public history and critical heritage studies.