Special Issue: Museums and Monuments: Memorials of Violent Pasts in Urban Spaces (original) (raw)
2020
Chap. in Historical Dialogue and the Prevention of Mass Atrocities, Eds. Elazar Barkan, Constantin Goschler, and James Waller. Routledge, 2020. Abstract: Together with truth commissions, trials, and reparations, museums and memorials have emerged as important tools for confronting the past and “coming to terms with” traumatic histories and episodes of mass atrocity. These sites typically combine traditional museology frameworks and mission statements with activist agendas and ethical imperatives (e.g., Never again!), yet relatively little is known about their efficacy, and the discursive underpinnings of their presentations are, for the most part, under-theorized. This essay takes up four museums/memorials in order to assess their potential as sites for historical dialogue and atrocity prevention: the 9/11 Memorial and Museum (USA), the District Six Museum (South Africa), the Liberation War Museum (Bangladesh); and the Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice (USA). Although there are important differences to consider within this small sampling, each case is framed here by the same overarching questions: How do representations of large-scale violence at these sites help or hinder historical dialogue and the promotion of democracy and human rights? And also, which kinds of representations and narratives are most likely to contribute positively to the atrocity prevention program, which is the focus of this volume? This essay argues that museums and memorials, despite certain limitations, can play a helpful role in shaping how rival groups view one another and how responsibility for past violence is apportioned, thereby facilitating the processes of reconciliation that can ameliorate conflict and stem violence.
In Whose Honor? On Monuments, Public Spaces, Historical Narratives, and Memory
Museum Anthropology, 2018
Recent organized protests have incurred outrage over monuments commemorating Confederate military leaders; in some cities, such as Baltimore, statues of Confederate military leaders have been removed overnight. In this context of charged public discourse, we ask: Does the immediate removal of these statues and monuments truly change the representation of histories and heritage? This expanded commentary, emanating from a Late‐Breaking Roundtable Session at the American Anthropological Association's 2017 annual meeting, is a discussion of the nuances and more obvious manipulations of power exercised through public spaces, representations, place names, and the production of historical narratives embedded in material forms of cultural memory. Research in the field of museum anthropology offers analysis pertinent to this subject, as well as intentioned practices to support communities addressing the violences, disparities, and racisms embedded in American history, and its material forms of cultural memory. In organizing the session, we suggested participants might explore the significance of “dissonant” or “negative” heritage; the narratives, counternarratives, and contestations highlighted in these controversies; or offer comparative perspectives from contexts other than the United States.
Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials
University of Alabama Press, 2010
Though we live in a time when memory seems to be losing its hold on communities, memory remains central to personal, communal, and national identities. And although popular and public discourses from speeches to films invite a shared sense of the past, official sites of memory such as memorials, museums, and battlefields embody unique rhetorical principles. Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials is a sustained and rigorous consideration of the intersections of memory, place, and rhetoric. From the mnemonic systems inscribed upon ancient architecture to the roadside accident memorials that line America’s highways, memory and place have always been deeply interconnected. This book investigates the intersections of memory and place through nine original essays written by leading memory studies scholars from the fields of rhetoric, media studies, organizational communication, history, performance studies, and English. The essays address, among other subjects, the rhetorical strategies of those vying for competing visions of a 9/11 memorial at New York City’s Ground Zero; rhetorics of resistance embedded in the plans for an expansion of the National Civil Rights Museum; representations of nuclear energy—both as power source and weapon—in Cold War and post–Cold War museums; and tours and tourism as acts of performance. By focusing on “official” places of memory, the collection causes readers to reflect on how nations and local communities remember history and on how some voices and views are legitimated and others are minimized or erased. Reviews: “This is a very interesting and diverse set of essays in the field of public history, which focuses our attention on fascinating case studies that have not been widely examined before. That alone makes this collection of interest to a broad readership.” —Journal of American History “A timely and welcome addition to the literature on memory studies, Places of Public Memory seeks to marry memory studies with the methodology of the rhetorician. This exceptional book should be widely read by cultural historians, rhetoricians, students of public memory, designers of museums and public displays.” —Journal of Popular Culture “Places of Public Memory, makes a compelling argument that rhetorical scholarship on public memory has yet to attend sufficiently to memory's material manifestations and the ways in which they shape affective experience. . . . Dickinson, Blair, and Ott offer an exhaustive literature review-useful to anyone interested in the study of public memory-to show that attention to the materiality of remembrance and the ways such materiality structures affective experience will significantly expand our current understanding of the rhetoric of public memory. . . . The eight essays comprising this volume constitute a real contribution to the study of rhetoric and public memory.” —Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Journal for the Study of Education and Development
This paper explores the ways in which memorial museums open opportunities for a critical understanding of violent pasts. We build off the concept of 'popular uses of the past' to discuss the importance of including ethical reflection in history education. Next, we present an original rendering of the ways in which violence is often normalized in school history textbooks and derive analytical categories that are used to examine if and how historical narratives in memorial museums normalize or interrogate violence. We analyse the narratives of the Exile Memorial Museum in La Jonquera (Spain) and the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool (England) to shed light on the ways the exhibits invite ethical reflection. In the last section we discuss how schools may benefit from incorporating resources like museum exhibits that open up rather than minimize discussions of historical violence and its relation to the present and future.
Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places
2011
List of Illustrations List of Maps Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction: Witnesses to Witnessing E.Lehrer & C.E.Milton PART I: BEARING WITNESS BETWEEN MUSEUMS AND COMMUNITIES 'We were so far away': Exhibiting Inuit Oral Histories of Residential Schools H.Igloliorte The Past is a Dangerous Place: the Museum as a Safe Haven V.Szekeres Teaching Tolerance through Objects of Hatred: The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia as 'Counter-Museum' M.E.Patterson Politics of the Past: Remembering the Rwandan Genocide at the Kigali Memorial Center A.Sodaro PART II: VISUALIZING THE PAST Living Historically through Photographs in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Reflections on Kliptown Museum, Soweto D.Newbury Showing and Telling: Photography Exhibitions in Israeli Discourses of Dissent T.Katriel Visualizing Apartheid: Re-framing Truth and Reconciliation through Contemporary South African Art E.Mosely PART III: MATERIALITY AND MEMORIAL CHALLENGES Points of No Return: Cu...
War Museums as Agonistic Spaces: Possibilities, Opportunities and Constraints
of the Director, Manuel Borja-Villel, in establishing 'a new model of what a museum should be' (102), yet a Director is only one actor in a wide array of stakeholders with a direct interest in and decision-making power over museums. Furthermore, Mouffe suggests that a museum has traditionally had an educational function -admittedly, for the 'construction of bourgeois hegemony' (101) -which has been supplemented by a consumerist function but which can nevertheless be re-established in a new counter-hegemonic guise. However, museums engage in a much wider range of functions than just as educators and entertainers. For instance, they participate in processes of memorialisation and reconciliation (Apsel 2016). They also often attempt to negotiate divisive memories of the past, both at the national and international levels. As Sharon Macdonald remarked, we are witnessing 'an internationalisation of how memory is performed ' (2016, 19). Museums also play a role in states' cultural diplomacy and soft power, an area where supranational institutions like the EU have started to become involved (Clarke, Cento Bull and Deganutti, 2017).
2007
This article discusses the projections of the politics of memory in two post-colonial locations as Argentina and South Africa, specially taking the Museum of Memory (former ESMA) in Argentina, the Voortrekker Monument in South Africa, and two recent state ceremonies dealing with memory in these two countries. There are salient studies on how monuments and memorials were linked directly to the "commemoration" of national events, to fix a precise referent on the triad nation/origin/destiny. In our past century, all over the world we have had traumatic events that shocked the proper definitions of communities and social bodies. In that sense, we also have studies about how the "monumentalization" conjuring up historical traumas implies a specific reading on the "redefinition" of the imagined community-reconfiguration of nation. What happens when the nation-state is the "warrant" of historical reposition/recomposition after traumatic events? In postcolonial societies the pedagogic projection of nation was a substantial part of public politics of memory to create "new" senses of communities. In that sense, the memorial/statue/museum is not significant by itself, but in its agencied reading and in its enacted disposition towards power and representation.
Museums as Spaces Carrying Social Memory
MSGSÜ Sosyal Bilimler
The memory of societies has always been built over space and transferred to the next generation. These spaces sometimes appear as monuments, squares, or museums. In addition to their traditional roles in preserving history and historical artifacts, museums have taken on new roles, such as the re-creation of social memory. The aim of this paper is to show how museums shape today’s reality by re-presenting the past. The paper consists of three parts. First, discussions on what social memory is and what kinds of functions it has in building space are presented. Second, the phenomenon of social memory taking root in space is explored. The roles of space in creating identity, making history, and inventing tradition are explained. Third, analysis of the role of museums as places of memory in the reproduction of social and cultural norms is undertaken.
Memory, Community and the New Museum
Over the last decades, in response to feminist, postmodern and postcolonial critiques of the modern museum, objects, collections and processes of museaIization have been radically re-signified and re-posited in the cultural arena. The new museums emerging from this shift have redefined their functions in and for communities not simply by changing their narratives but by renegotiating the processes of narration and the museal codes of communication with the public. They define themselves now not as disciplinary spaces of academic history but as places of memory, exemplifying the postmodern shift from authoritative master discourses to the horizontal, practice-related notions of memory, place, and community. The key feature of these new museums is that they deploy strategies of applied theatrics to invite emotional responses from visitors: to make them empathize and identify with individual sufferers and victims, or with their own contemporaries inhabiting alternative modernities in distant places. This dossier seeks to probe these new museographic and curatorial discourses, focusing in particular on the memory museum as an emergent global form of (counter)monumentality. Drawing on different geographical and historical contexts, it argues that the new museums’ apparently global aesthetics implies a danger of surrendering the very specificity of historical experiences the memorial ‘site’ offers its visitors.
Monuments, Memorials, Landmarks, and Symbols: Conflicting Values in the American Narrative
2024
To fuse objects and space with the past, a cultural backdrop must be in place to serve as a structure for juxtaposition. This does not mean that we simply mix together the old and new, but carefully commingle past and present through formal gestures and narrative." -Walter Hood, Sites of Memory: Perspectives on Architecture and Race 1 It is important for students to confront sites that provoke critical discussions around ownership, politics, race, history, and basic human rights.Students explored the intersections of history, symbolism, form, and design within the context of a former site of enslavement registered as a national historic place2. An organization which provides individuals over the age of 50 with opportunities for community and learning is interested in expanding their facilities on their existing site.The program, although client conceived, was the subject of a discussion with the students as to what programmatic characteristics are appropriate for this site.
Post-Conflict Commemoration: Ethical Constraints in Museums & Memorials
In his lectures on the nature of love, power and justice, Paul Tillich (1954, 101) contends that the ideas and symbols (story) of a group"s identity are forms of power with ethical implications. After conflict, thus, broken societies face ethical questions about whose story will be told, what should be remembered, whose voices should be heard or suppressed. As curated memory keepers of a nation"s identity, values and power struggles, museums and memorials confront these questions and the related ethical considerations constraining commemoration. This essay draws theoretical assumptions from rhetorical and narrative theory and memory studies to explore two case studies that highlight ethical issues in commemoration: the creation of memorials representing Japanese American internment during World War II and post-Apartheid efforts in South Africa to reclaim a subjugated history through a series of state-sponsored memory sites.
The Museum in Hiding: Framing Conflict
The International Handbooks of Museum Studies: Museum Theory, 2015
Throughout the twentieth century, artists and theorists have converted the methodologies of art museum curatorship into artistic tropes to be activated and yet concealed. This chapter is composed of two related texts that confront the notion of theory at the museum with reference to artists’ ideas of their works as model “museums in hiding.” However, the present chapter is not concerned with a survey of the many well‐known instances of artists who have mined museum archives (for instance, Mark Dion, Fred Wilson, Andrea Fraser, Martha Rosler) but with a particular instance of museological representation: the atlas. In the first part of the chapter, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green identify what they call the “memory effect” of the artistic atlas through which many artists and theorists – from the early twentieth century until now – have constructed and thus rethought the effect of memory, describing this effect from the point of view of working artists. In the second part, Amelia Barikin presents a case study of Brown and Green’s work – and a specific type of museum – with particular attention to the mnemonic function of the Australian War Memorial. The curatorial synthesis of a modern memory effect is seen both as foundational to the formation of such museums and as a significant driver for the contemporary enactment of memory, in this case within Brown and Green’s art.
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd edition, 2020
Memorials and monuments are of increasing interest to geographers, growing out of recognition of the social nature of commemoration, and the important role that the construction, interpretation, and contestation of spaces and places play in the process and politics of remembering. Geographers envision these public symbols as part of larger cultural landscapes that not only reflect certain perspectives on the past but also work to legitimate them as part of the normative social order. Geographers analyze memorials and monuments through at least four conceptual lenses. The “text” metaphor emphasizes a critical reading of the histories and ideologies written into (or written out of) the content and form of memorial landscapes, as well as the dynamic nature of (re)inscribing memory into space. The “arena” metaphor focuses on the capacity of memorials and monuments to serve as sites for social groups to debate actively the meaning of history and compete for control over the commemorative process as part of larger struggles over identity. The “performance” metaphor recognizes the important role that sensory engagements, emotive politics, commemorative rituals, and cultural displays occupy in constituting and bringing meaning to memorials and monuments, suggesting that the body itself constitutes a place of memory. The “wound” metaphor highlights the inflicting and healing from individual trauma and structural harm that is inscribed into and even caused by the memorial landscape, emphasizing the necessity of “memory-work” to both recover and recover from the histories and memories of the violence associated with trauma and exclusion. Special attention is devoted to exploring these metaphors in the context of the “racialization of memory” in the United States the participation of memorials and monuments in struggles over white supremacy, black senses of place, and struggles for civil rights.
Urban narratives: museums as iconic symbols and agents of civic experience
2016
Cities embrace and express cultural, social and ideological agendas that are central to urban experience Cities are structured to orchestrate particular relationships between people and place, creating routines of movement, spectacle and memory. Throughout history, settlements have been formed around individual iconic buildings that codify meaning, which is either deliberately constructed or construed by the observer. The contemporary city has increasingly represented a paradox between two positions. On the one hand urban environments are being reordered to support the social life of cities, and on the other they are driven the need to engage with the global economy, corporatisation and international tourism. Brett Steel argues that this has led to a condition of 'hypervisuality', which has created a shift from 'place making to promotion and place marketing.'Museums have become a key part of this processes, with contemporary museum architecture frequently traded as a...