Memory studies were once chiefly the psychologists' domain, yet today they have burgeoned across the social sciences. Political scientists no longer dismiss memory as too subjective; historians no longer decry memory as too detached from fact. Memory debates have found their ways into the highest levels of government and opposition, as matters of policy as well as politics. Scholars have come to appreciate how traumatic memories pervade quotidian social practices and relationships, as well as conjunctural moments of political transition and change. Indeed, growth in studies of the politics of memory is such that many argue that a memory industry, a memory market, has emerged, producing reams of rhetoric, texts and journals, art, videos, miniseries, and even museums. Whether scholars view this memory explosion as welcome or exploitative, a consensus has emerged that memory studies should be subjected to serious critique.

Ksenija Bilbija and Leigh Payne's edited volume, Accounting for Violence, lands us squarely within this critique of memory studies. It is interesting, however, that Bilbija and Payne's introductory essay, “Time Is Money: The Memory Market in Latin America,” adopts rather than critiques the memory market. The authors frame all memory as market transactions, akin to a basic neoclassical Economics 101 lesson, in which “memory-makers” “produce” and “sell” their “goods” (p. 5) and use “brands” (p. 15) to compete for visibility and “patrons,” (p. 9), at times for profit (pp. 12–13). All memory actors are marketers: “Victims and survivors, for example, simultaneously produce memory goods, promote them, and acquire them” (p. 11). The struggle for accountability is assessed as a market relation (p. 3). Ethics drops out, ceteris paribus.

In contrast to the vast scholarship on the politics and memories of trauma that emphasizes the pain of bearing witness (Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony, 1992), the atrocities' unspeakability (Lawrence Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory, 1991; Mieke Bal, Of What One Cannot Speak: Doris Salcedo's Political Art, 2010; and Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics, 2003), or the labors of memory (Elizabeth Jelin, State Repression and the Labors of Memory, 2003), Bilbija and Payne have turned all such witnesses into operators. Memory scholars have recognized state and capital power dynamics and the commodification or kitschification of memory (Marita Sturken, Tourists of History, 2007), as well as varying degrees of entrepreneurship at work (Jelin). Yet it is unclear what is gained from terming those directly affected by the repression as “patrons” in a “niche market” (p. 22).

Bilbija and Payne are well aware that their approach will be “provocative” (p. 3), and the language they deploy is purposeful. Why might framing traumatic memory practices in market terms be considered questionable? What takes place, for example, analytically and politically, when we attribute the call of “Never Again,” to effective “sloganeering” for public consumption (p. 15)? Memory scholars will certainly accept that Never Again has been deployed in contradictory and unsavory ways, and that human rights terminology has been co-opted to elicit sympathy or support for causes that make a mockery of human rights. Yet it is an entirely different proposition to work with a model that assumes there is a neutral social and political playing field on which memories compete, or that morals and ethics can remain on the sidelines. And it cannot be lost on the authors that there is something deeply ironic about reducing the grassroots memory makers, including many who were brutalized for their anticapitalist militancy, to market players. The provocation is in the authors' depoliticizing the very practices they wish to critique.

Individual chapter contributions to the Accounting for Violence volume by Rebecca J. Atencio, Jo-Marie Burt, Cath Collins, and Bilbija (her chapter on the corporate fashion industry in Argentina) specify important capital/state/power logics at work. Atencio brings a cultural and media studies lens to the corporate power, reach, and marketing control of Brazilian media giant Globo. She focuses on the crafting and marketing of telenovelas that make the repressive past their central themes in a seemingly successful Globo effort to rebrand itself. Burt nicely traces political manipulations of the memory of the life and murder of Afro-Peruvian grassroots leader María Elena Moyano. Collins analyzes public–private tensions in Chilean memorial making, emphasizing the limits of the state and the disappointments of the grassroots.

In addition, Cynthia E. Milton and María Eugenia Ulfe's chapter thoughtfully explores the primary intents and representations of two distinct Peruvian national memory projects, in which symbolic reparation, education and testimony figure most prominently. Their chapter travels from the inside out—from the curators and the activists to the tourists' reflections on “difficult knowledge” in the comment books (p. 209). Laurie Beth Clark and Payne's chapter on memory tourism travels from the outside in, analyzing trauma tourism as a complex and often voyeuristic growth industry, and raising useful reflections for all outsiders regarding what is appropriate, what is responsible, what is callous. None of these chapters sticks to a market transactional analysis.

Alice Nelson's concluding chapter centers global power and inequality as inseparable from, even as determinative of, the dynamics, production, and reproduction of memory. Nelson explicitly recognizes that the intense marketization, privatization, and commercialization that have taken place in the past two decades on a global scale in good part produce the tensions, the conflicts, over the memories that are forwarded, which are erased, which reappear, which are rewritten (p. 340).

Perhaps the most powerful assertion in the volume comes from novelist Luisa Valenzuela's foreword, as she reminds readers that such intense globalization and power dynamics can “degrade the word ‘memory,’ misusing it to the point where it loses meaning.” Valenzuela challenges memory scholars “to keep remembrance alive without losing respect” (p. ix). She opens up the challenge of a conceptually richer meaning of “accounting.”

Steve Stern's Reckoning with Pinochet appreciably rises to Valenzuela's challenge. Stern's book is the final volume of his trilogy—a deep social history that treats with care and sensitivity Chile's leadership and citizens across the political spectrum. For Stern, theorizing memory drives at “the meaning we attach to experience” (p. 20), the way we attempt to make sense of (particularly traumatic) events in relation to our place in the world and in relation to one another. He traces the relationships between “emblematic,” shared collective memories and “loose,” individualized ones (pp. 10–11). He notes the dramatic effects of a neoliberalizing political economy on Chilean culture and, therefore, on the production and reproduction of memory, and he captures the paradox of such contextual shifts that, on the one hand, contribute to greater public attention to memory while, on the other, tending to fragment collective identities.

Stern is enormously respectful of his subjects, whether they are former presidents, street vendors, or grandchildren of ex-political prisoners. The book is full of insightful vignettes, all in relation to the broader and quite ambitious project of accounting for the “frictional synergies” (pp. 368–69) and dynamics of coming to terms with Chile's atrocious past. Of particular interest among many thoughtfully analyzed dimensions is Stern's discussion of the 1991 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (commonly known as the Rettig Commission), where he traces the many tensions at various levels of politics and takes readers into the effects of family members' and survivors' testimonies on the young staff members (pp. 65–105). His observations about such effects affirm the power of human connection across social distance and political difference. Through his telling of the 1998 London arrest of Augusto Pinochet, Stern also provides a synthetic account of the ways international efforts for human rights and accountability can intersect powerfully with long-term local struggles, to dramatic effect.

Stern is obviously a good listener as well as storyteller: In Reckoning with Pinochet, he conveys sentiments without being overly sentimental, he draws out difficult reflections, and he steps back to reserve judgment or comparative analysis for separate “Afterwords” that follow each chapter. And Stern is thorough, using virtually every conceivable kind of source to weave his narratives and analysis, which accounts for the 100 pages of footnotes and source explanations of his 500-page text. One poignant telling (among many) comes from his interview of Gastón Gómez, a staff lawyer with the Rettig Commission. Gómez introduced Stern to the story of 16-year-old Henry Francisco Torres Flores and his family (pp. 103–4). Torres, who worked loading trucks, was inexplicably arrested and taken to the Pisagua prison camp in northern Chile in July 1974. He subsequently disappeared. It is a story that leaves us dumbfounded, without words. In a few short paragraphs, Stern makes the 16-year-old come alive through Torres's mother's testimony, including her sharing of the one letter she received from him from prison. He sensitively uses the story of Torres to illustrate the unexplainable, enjoining what happened to Torres with the many atrocities of the Chilean dictatorship and with atrocities throughout the world.

Performance studies scholar Diana Taylor urges the constant self-interrogation of one's own academic subject positions in order to “recognize that ‘looking’ is always an intervention,” irrevocably intertwined with the search for professional gain (Taylor, Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's “Dirty War,” 1997, pp. 264–65). Memory is a politically and ethically complex phenomenon, and as critical scholars analyze its diverse social meanings in a world inextricably bound up with market forces, it is important that they remain attentive to the brutality of repression and the possibility of the dignified recognition of loss.