The contemporary museum intervenes in a specifically postmodern dynamics of memory and amnesia. Along with the other institutions and sites that organize our social memory, the museum plays a pivotal role in the postmodern predicament of memorial culture.
The issue of remembrance and forgetting touches the core of a multifacted and diverse western identity (...) Without memory, without reading the traces of the past, there can be no recognition of difference, (...) no tolerance for the rich complexities and instabilities of personal and cultural, political and national identities.

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