Museum Transformations. Группа авторов

tours, inflecting their narratives about the collections with interpretations and perspectives drawn from their own cultural backgrounds (Martin 2012). The project began life in 2011 as a collaboration that included Newham Family Learning Services, West Hampstead Asian Women’s Group, Aaina Women’s Group, and West Ealing Deaf Women’s Minorities Group, with the aim of making artwork for an intergenerational community exhibition entitled Journeys East. Supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, it celebrated the refurbishment of the Wallace Collection’s East Galleries which focus on the histories of the Dutch East India Company. The Southeast Asian communities were a target audience, as they were perceived to have been directly affected by the legacies of this period (Martin 2012). Such initiatives may simply demonstrate the degree to which liberal arguments presented in a museum are not yet seen as a threat by conservative governments. But they may also confirm the value of the museum’s semiautonomous status in relation to state patronage – something that has permitted even the boards of trustees of major national institutions to play a liberalizing role in mediating the decisions taken by museum administrators. Importantly, whatever the answer to these questions, the effects for the participants of such initiatives can be both enriching and enabling. It is telling, however, that these liberalizing and progressive programs have often been initiated by education departments or other interstitial environments within the museum rather than by curatorial and exhibitions staff.

       Difficult histories

A number of key political transformations and their recent anniversaries (the end of apartheid in South Africa; the commemoration of the Civil War and the retirada in Spain; the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade; the Canadian and Australian governments’ apologies for their abusive residential school system and forced removal policy for Aboriginal children; together with a series of brutal civil wars (Rwanda, Libya, Sudan, Serbia, and Syria)) have provoked a spate of commemorative initiatives including museums which claim to forge a path through the turmoil of memories left in their wake. In important ways, public history and its institutions have sought to tackle violent pasts where perpetrators and victims (rarely as clearly distinguishable as those labels suggest) are daily confronted with each other’s presence on the streets of their hometowns. For survivors of these tragic histories in Phnom Penh or on the streets of Kigali, Londonderry, Johannesburg, or Madrid, simply walking down the road may provoke a sudden collapse or terror generated by the insecurity of never being certain about the past of one’s interlocutor. Jens Andermann’s chapter (8) compares the implications of the different juridical and political contexts of two recent memorial museums in Latin America in Argentina (the Museo de la Memoria) and Chile (Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos). Often the decision to create a museum has followed public inquiries such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The task is inevitably daunting for any institution attempting to expose a history of political motives and their violent consequences that aims both to promote understanding for a broad public who may not have been directly involved and to foster reconciliation between the main protagonists. Another problem raised by the increase in museums dedicated to difficult histories is that they often focus only on large-scale atrocities that can be categorized as massacres or genocides. Accounts of the day-to-day forms of degradation and brutalization inflicted on individuals by oppressive regimes are left out. In the absence of acknowledgment of the effects of political repression in the domestic sphere of family life, women’s experience is often seen as secondary in these revisionist histories. In representing difficult histories, as in more standard historical narratives, questions arise over the valorization of certain kinds of experience over others and the kinds of narratives that can legitimately be included in the museum.

While it has clearly been crucial that difficult histories be acknowledged and exposed to public scrutiny, this museological trend has also spawned the institutionalization of new comparative areas of museum studies such as dark tourism and genocide.¹³ These are moral and ethical minefields. Inevitably, individuals speak on behalf of constituencies who are not there to speak for themselves. The reliance on ocularcentric narrative devices can tempt the museum to produce a visually stimulating account that may simply end up exposing victims to a form of epistemic violence. Similarly, attempts to recreate somatic experiences for visitors through immersive reconstructions of slave ships or gas chambers usually fail to produce an understanding of the relationship between the historical horrors that are being recalled and contemporary manifestations of slavery or genocide. Thus the constant refrain of “never again” reiterated at the exits of the Holocaust Memorial Museums in Washington and Los Angeles or in the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg rarely elicits the kind of call to arms which might make such exhibitions unnecessary in the future. But where emphasis has been placed on making the museum serve more as a meeting place that facilitates dialogue and less as the site of a spectacle to be consumed, community groups and human rights organizations have cooperated in turning it into an arena for social action and change. In some instances sites associated with violent political histories have been transformed into the headquarters of organizations committed to the highest ideals of new dispensations, and have become symbolic of their aspirations. Thus the Gender Equality Commission’s offices and the offices of the Forum for the Empowerment of Women (FEW) are now literally part of the built fabric of the site of the Women’s Jail in Johannesburg in its reincarnation as a heritage site museum, the subject of Annie Coombes’s chapter (9) in this volume.

       Social agency

      That the potential for social advocacy is always latent in the museum is suggested by the activities of a number of early twentieth-century museum anthropologists who, despite working within the salvage ethnography paradigm of their day, nonetheless tried to oppose the oppressive laws and government policies afflicting the peoples they studied. One such anthropologist was Frank Speck, who lobbied the United States and Canadian departments that oversaw Indian affairs to urge the repeal of an antimiscegenation law in Virginia and the prohibition of Innu fishing in Quebec – a ban intended to protect the sport fishery for white tourists (Pulla 2008). It is only in the late twentieth century, however, that the commitment to activism for social justice was formalized as an ethical obligation. The inclusion of sections on “Activism and Social Responsibility,” “The Radical Potential of Museum Transparency,” and “Visual Culture and the Performance of Museum Ethics” in an edited volume on museum ethics is suggestive of the level of articulation and reflexivity in contemporary museology (Marstine 2011).

      Today the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience has proved a successful model of cooperation and collaboration, working with memory sites associated with social and political trauma and violence. Now a global network with around 200 members in 50 countries, the coalition prides itself on an activist agenda which involves understanding the lessons of the past, working “not only to preserve memories of what happened before, but also to understand the context in which these events occurred and apply these lessons to today’s struggles for human rights and social justice.”¹⁴ Crucially, the coalition also recognizes that, “without safe spaces to remember and preserve these memories, the stories of elderly survivors of atrocity can vanish when they pass away; societies that have overcome conflicts may never seek justice for fear of re-opening old wounds; and the families of the disappeared may never find answers.”¹⁵ One of the consistent strategies mobilized by member sites is the conscripting of local survivors as guardians and curators. Visitor experience is thus shaped by the memories of individuals who are intimately connected with the events commemorated at the site and this alone has a huge impact on the motivation for social action.

Museum work with difficult histories presents distinctive challenges and opportunities. It can be difficult to avoid engaging in an unfortunate meritocracy of trauma, especially where different sites of conscience, and the constituencies and legacies associated with them, may be competing for dwindling funds accompanied by a desire for basic human rights. Yet museums have played important roles in bringing to the fore human rights issues, land claims, and other injustices and enabling dialogue to take place in the face of official amnesia. For example, Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen, the complex and intelligent exhibition held in 1996 at the South African National Gallery (SANG), was criticized by some for casting