Museums of Europe: Tangles of Memory, Borders, and Race (original) (raw)

In this article I investigate the making of two new museums of Europe-Marseille's Museum of the Civilizations of Europe and the Mediterranean and Berlin's Museum of European Cultures-by focusing on the kinds of "Europe" envisioned in their exhibitions. I argue that museums represent an important site where the geopolitical imaginary of a bounded, culturalized Europe is produced, even if by default. I explore how these older national folklore collections were strategically rebranded as museums of Europe to give a second life to their nearly obsolete displays. National projects and geopolitics play a key role in such memorial Europeanization. These insights challenge takenfor-granted understandings of scale in memory studies and offer a more nuanced understanding of how Europeanization is playing out within cultural institutions. Amid multiple European crises, "Europe" is increasingly imagined as a diverse but essentially united cultural space-however fuzzy and contested its cultural content may be-while this spatial imaginary is racialized in subtle ways. [museums of Europe, European memory and heritage, strategic Europeanization, transnationalism, cultural racism]

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