Museums and Migration

History, Memory and Politics

Laurence Gourievidis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415838757
• eBook ISBN: 9781317684886
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Recent decades have seen migration history and issues increasingly featured in museums. Museums and Migration explores the ways in which museum spaces - local, regional, national - have engaged with the history of migration, including internal migration, emigration and immigration. It presents the latest innovative research from academics and museum practitioners and offers a comparative perspective on a global scale bringing to light geo- and socio-political specificities. It includes an extensive range of international contributions from Europe, Asia, South America as well as settler societies such as Canada and Australia.

Museums and Migration charts and enlarges the developing body of research which concentrates on the analysis of the representation of migration in relation to the changing character of museums within society, examining their civic role and their function as key public arenas within civil society. It also aims to inform debates focusing on the way museums interact with processes of political and societal changes, and examining their agency and relationship to identity construction, community involvement, policy positions and discourses, but also ethics and moralities.

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REPRESENTING MIGRATION IN MUSEUMS

History, diversity and the politics of memory

Laurence Gouriévidis

The destiny of migrations is intercontinental: again and again space and time, geography and history, geopolitics and comparative cultural history are made to intersect.¹

(Ricoeur 2000a: 15)

Migration is no longer, in the phrase coined by Noiriel (2004: 17), a ‘non lieu de mémoire’.² Public sites increasingly harbour the memories of migrants in their diversity and specificity, making audible and visible versions of the past that had been occluded or simply neglected. If the integration of migration history in museum spaces and narratives is an increasingly notable feature of the international museum landscape, it also raises a host of questions. Some are linked with museums’ intimacy with processes of identity construction and memorialization of the past, the changing nature of museums in society, and the changes which have affected the societies that produce them, one of which is their ever more diverse character. In an age of globalization, intensifying human movements and flows, multifaceted transnational networks, along with cheaper and fast-evolving means of communication, museums are encouraged to reflect the socio-cultural implications of such changes and the increasingly plural face of the populations composing modern states. Museums, their locations, constituencies, origins and contents are revealing of museological thinking and practices as well as the advance of scientific knowledge – for instance, historiographical orientations and developments. They also disclose societal changes, social processes, policy developments and models, as well as political priorities – at local, national and international levels.

Whilst museums, particularly since the 1980s, have been theorized through the prism of different disciplinary practices and approaches, the representation of migration in museums in particular has recently become the locus of a fast-growing body of research and critical enquiry. That research in the domain should, in some cases, be sanctioned and sponsored by supranational structures and organizations, most notably the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)³ and the European Union,⁴ often with a view to promoting ‘an acceptance of culture-in-difference’ (Bennett 2006: 66) and tolerance, testifies to the strong belief, in the political sphere, that public culture, and museums in particular, can effect change at a social level in the face of socio-cultural mutations often twinned with the emergence of antagonisms – frequent signs of ‘colonial fracture’ (Bancel et al. 2010). Ethnic and racial tensions or overt conflicts are recurrently capturing media headlines,⁵ as are the debates and legislation changes regarding the award of citizenship rights – tests and ceremonies – alongside measures passed at the national or international level to control and regulate immigration. If an idea of immigration is wielded as a powerful instrumental weapon in political discourse – not exclusively by right-wing groups and parties fanning a sense of panic at times of economic insecurity – migration as a process is a fundamental feature of the post-modern and post-colonial world, and one whose implications historians and social scientists are currently unravelling.

In this introductory chapter, I shall examine some of the issues which have been addressed in the museum literature exploring such developments and their contexts.⁶ Those selected frame the chapters featured in this volume and structure my presentation. Following a short discussion of the ways in which heritage has variously embraced the pluralization of society, I will concentrate on three main, closely interrelated, issues: the impact of public discourses and policies related to diversity on the way museums engage with migration and its history, in particular examining the resilience of the national paradigm; the role of museums used as agents of social change; and, finally, the memorial function of museums seen as mediators of recognition. Whilst examples of museological developments throughout the world will be featured and those presented in this volume introduced, special attention will also be paid to the French case, which is not covered in the remainder of this book.

Heritage, museums and the making of plural identities

One key function that the past performs, through its use in heritage sites and venues, is the production of a sense of belonging and collective identity through the representation of place (Ashworth et al. 2007: 1). Heritage is not an existing place, an artefact or an intangible element but, in the words of Smith (2006: 3), ‘a constitutive cultural process’, constitutive of meaning, values, shared memories and experiences, and ultimately social identity. It is the process of moulding and negotiating social, cultural and moral values which takes place when decisions are made and actions taken to commemorate and interpret selected events, figures or processes; to preserve material or immaterial features; in short to define what must be transmitted and imparted. It is a ‘discursive practice shaped by specific circumstances’ (Littler 2005: 1) as the meaning and significance of selected aspects of the past and narratives are reconsidered, redefined or re-endorsed according to present ends and needs. Heritage is an activity; it is ‘doing’ and ‘making’ rather than ‘being’ and reflects present concerns, anxieties and ideals. Some of these are brought to the fore when it is made to translate the increasing cultural diversity of contemporary societies – when ‘pluralising pasts’ (Ashworth et al. 2007) is the goal.

Heritage also often serves to ‘shap[e] socio-cultural place-identities to support state structures’ (Ashworth 1994: 13), mirroring particular ideologies or policy orientations. Just as it has long been used by authorities and elites as a tool to serve and legitimize ideological purposes and programmes, it has also – and increasingly so in the 1980s and 1990s – been resorted to by social actors such as minority groups to contest, challenge or reposition (de-centre) dominant interpretations and as a means of gaining recognition. One critical aspect brought to light in heritage literature is the notion of ‘dissonance’ intimately linked with present-day uses and interpretations of the past (Turnbridge and Ashworth 1996) and seen as ‘a condition of the construction of pluralist, multi-cultural societies based on inclusiveness and variable-sum conceptualizations of power’ (Ashworth and Graham 2005: 6). Through heritage, the conflicting claims, aspirations, histories, memories and expectations of diverse communities meet and compete.

‘Museum frictions’ is the expression coined by Karp et al. (2006: 9) to describe this museological ‘moment’. It evokes not only the often tense and discordant relations that museums in the transnational and global age generate, but also their own condition or predicament as, with new practices, methodologies and theoretical frames, they strive to articulate the multiple visions of disparate communities and individuals – a mosaic of criss-crossing destinies – whilst adhering to democratic ideals and conveying a unified narrative of shared experiences. The moment is fraught with anticipation and challenges, and the grammar used to describe it in heritage and museum literature is one which recurrently underlines the complexity of multi-vocality, multi-layering and fragmentation (Macdonald 2003: 1) – a complexity which may well be heightened in the case of national museums whose task had long been to act as a centripetal force and erase difference.⁷

Unlike their nineteenth-century counterparts dedicated to buttressing Enlightenment and modernist classification and order and projecting grand national and imperial narratives, museums are now seen as places of contest, where master narratives can be unsettled and questioned and where alternative viewpoints can be projected.⁸ Yet they ‘remain powerful and subtle authors and authorities whose cultural accounts are not easily dislodged’ (Macdonald and Fyfe 1996: 4). As a result, museums come in many guises – in terms of scale, subject, content, methodology, and source of funding, to cite but a few of their distinctive traits – and their missions and functions are as diverse as their creators and audiences. They can be

temples of civilization, sites for the creation of citizens, forums for debate, settings for cultural interchange and negotiation of values, engines of economic renewal and revenue generation, imposed colonialist enterprises, havens of elitist distinction and discrimination, and places of empowerment and recognition.

(Kratz and Karp 2006: 1)

This list neatly encapsulates the shifts which the museum world has witnessed and is currently undergoing. If the present character of museums has to be linked with the history of their own development and that of museological practices and thinking,⁹ they are also spaces ‘inscribed with dominant discursive practice’ (Message 2006: 18) and with the stamp of wider socio-political relations and societal variations with their own history.

Museums, diversity and public discourses

Undergirding the orientations and work of museums – and, more widely, heritage – are the actions and policies of the states in which they are located. The political and administrative structures as well as the political cultures and doctrines that condition their existence and development stem from the different historical routes that national states have followed. It is a truism to speak of the instrumental role that national museums have played in the construction of unified and homogeneous national imaginaries, in projecting shared values and in the forging of citizenship with its cohort of rights and duties, notably through their showcasing of supporting scientific material evidence (Bennett 1995, Macdonald 2003, Aronsson 2012: 68–9). Closely meshed with unifying agendas was the erection of boundaries exclusive of ‘others’, reflected through collecting policies linked to the display and interpretation of material culture. This process of ‘othering’ differed according to geopolitical situations and national trajectories, but it is inseparable from the emergence, shaping and reshaping of nation-states. It is also inseparable from the experiences of colonialism and decolonization, resulting in hierarchical and alienating categorization, and later in their reappraisal (Healy and Witcomb 2006, Amundsen and Nyblom 2007, Aronsson and Nyblom 2008).

Changes in political configurations and state boundaries consequent on annexations, unions, Home Rule, autonomy, dis-unions and independence are commonly associated with mental re-mapping. These breaks also implicate (re)definitions of citizenship, influencing group categorization and feelings of belonging, difference or exclusion. Goodnow and Akman’s volume (2008) offers compelling examples of the ways in which the museum world in Scandinavian countries has responded, over time, to such socio-political shifts in its representations of indigenous peoples, national minorities and more recent migrants. It ends on analyses unravelling the links between cultural heritage and national identity, underlining the critical role of museums. Throughout, museums are shown to be operating as mobilizing tools for nascent or rising nationalisms and for the integration, within the national narrative, first of regional differences – internal to nation-states – and more recently of cultural diversity related to immigration. There are parallels between the changing cultural and political perception and the exhibition of such indigenous groups as the Sámi in Scandinavia (Goodnow and Akman 2008) and the Ainu in Japan, long eclipsed in the national heritage by settler narratives (see Chapter 15).

Given the potency of museums’ messages, discourses on cultural diversity, when set against aspirations for autonomy or even separatism that tend to heighten and politicize cultural distinctiveness, often have to be fused with competing agendas in migration exhibitions. The case of Spanish regional museums highlights their function ‘as emblems and engines driving Spain into democracy’ (Holo 2000: 12), following years of relentless centralization and dictatorship under Franco, but also as powerful agents in the formation and development of regional identities. In Catalonia, where the promotion of a Catalan identity had long been suppressed and where separatism is a burning issue, Van Geert (Chapter 12) argues that, since the 1980s, museums have appeared as crucial tools in the construction of ‘Catalanness’, yet in the face of significant historical waves of in-migration from other parts of Spain and abroad, they have not been used to the same degree and in the same fashion in the promotion of pluralism and tolerance. In the case of devolved Wales,¹⁰ Giudici (Chapter 13) probes the extent to which the Welsh policy of inclusion has been integrated in memorializing strategies, inclusive of museums and memorials, through a focus on the Italian migrant community. In the Republic of Ireland, where independence from the United Kingdom was achieved in the early twentieth century, Crooke’s essay (Chapter 11) – which contrasts the Republic with Northern Ireland – shows that the inclusion of artefacts and stories emblematic of immigration in recent exhibitions marks a symbolic shift in the representation of a ‘mono-cultural past’ and long-stan...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Representing Migration in Museums History, diversity and the politics of memory
• Part 1 Museums and migration history Issues and challenges
• Part 2 Engaging with cultural diversity Migration in museums
• Part 3 Migration history and national narratives in museums
• Index