Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display 9780520961456

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ARTIFACTS AND ALLEGIANCES

ARTIFACTS AND ALLEGIANCES How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display Peggy Levitt

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2015 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Levitt, Peggy, 1957– Artifacts and allegiances : how museums put the nation and the world on display / Peggy Levitt. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-28606-1 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-28607-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Museums—Social aspects. 2. Museums and community. I. Title. am7.l48 2015 069′—dc23 2015013636 Manufactured in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

In memory of my mother, who loved aquamaniles In honor of my father, who loyally schlepped to see them And to family life, version 2

CONTENTS

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Introduction 1 The Bog and the Beast: The View of the Nation and the World from Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Gothenburg 14 The Legislator and the Priest: Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Boston and New York 50 Arabia and the East: How Singapore and Doha Display the Nation and the World 91 Conclusion 133 •

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Notes 143 Bibliography List of Plates Image Credits Index 223 •

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

So many generous family members, friends, and colleagues deserve thanks for these pages. My ideas grew stronger and clearer with every conversation on the trail, over coffee, on the mat, in a gallery, or around the seminar room table. My greatest debt is to the museum professionals, academics, and critics who openheartedly shared their insights and time with me. I began this book while I was the Willie Brandt Guest Professor at the University of Malmö. My colleagues at the Malmö Institute for the Study of Migration, Diversity, and Welfare taught me much of what I know about their part of the world. I am equally grateful to colleagues on the Danish side of the bridge, especially Karen Fog Olwig and Tina Damsholt. I thought through much of my argument during two wonderful years as the Faculty of Social Sciences International Fellow at the Vrije University in Amsterdam. I thank Susan Legêne, in particular, for our many conversations. Without help from Northwestern University in Qatar, and the wonderful and dedicated Geoff Harkness, the Qatar portion of this research would not have been possible. I spent a heavenly summer as a recipient of the Ethel-Jane Westfeldt Bunting Fellowship at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico. I owe much to the kind and helpful staff there as well as to the Aspen groves in the Santa Fe National Forest. During the years I worked on this project, I interacted frequently and fruitfully with colleagues from the Bucerius Ph.D. Scholarship Program in Migration Studies Advisory Board and with the members of the Social Science Research Council’s project on Religion, Migration, and Globalization. I am most grateful, too, for the continuing generous support I’ve received from friends, colleagues, and administrators at

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Wellesley College and from the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University, particularly the Transnational Studies Initiative team. My amazing students at Wellesley have made their mark on these pages. I thank Samaa Ahmed, Sarina Bajwa, Grace Abraham Cobbinah, Olivia Kingsley, Nan McGarry, Tiffany Shi, Claire Cerda, Megan Turchi, and Megan Goosen. Kit Cali deserves special credit, staying with me throughout and proving, over and over, that she will undoubtedly go on to write brilliant books of her own. If I listed everyone individually who contributed to these pages, I would surpass my page limit. Friends and colleagues who read chapters or who were especially helpful in facilitating my fieldwork include Daniel Levy, Adrian Favell, Sharon Zukin, Courtney Bender, Jens Schneider, Mads Daugsjerg, Laura Marie Schütz, Patrick Simon, Christoph Rausch, Barbro Klein, Sally Anderson, Brigitte Suter, Ninna Nyberg Sørenson, Nils Bubandt, Erik Olsson, Grete Brochmann, Inger Sjørslev, Eva Silvén, Diana Wong, Rachel Ama Asa Engmann, Quinn Slabodian, Laura Grattan, Paul Fisher, David Cook Martin, Pál Nyíri, Sharon Macdonald, Fredrik Svanberg, Jette Sandahl, Garbi Schmidt, Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Adriana Muñoz, Nana Bernhardt, Ken Olwig, Andrew Gardner, Erica Righard, Anders Björklund, David Henkel, Kwok Kianchow, Iskander Mydin, Vicky Wong, Daniel P. S. Goh, John Miksic, Benson Puah, Michelle Dezember, Peggy Loar, Kwok Kian Woon, Weibke Sievers, Laura Harkness, Ivan Gaskell, Cecil Marie Pallesen, Dan Monroe, David Luberoff, Mark Barth, Chris Geary, Erica Hirshler, Terry Carbone, Kevin Stayton, Barbara Martin and Elliot Bostwick Davis. Deep thanks to Karen Levine, Naomi Schneider, Jack Young, and the staff at the University of California Press for believing in cross-border projects. I am blessed to have so many good friends, old and new, who have accompanied me on my writing journeys and who I hope will stay near wherever my path leads next. They exemplify what accompaniment is all about. My biggest thanks go to my husband, my sons, and my father, without whom I simply could not do what I do. These pages are for you.

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INTRODUCTION

Even as a young boy, Sir Hans Sloane was always fascinated by science.1 He grew up to study medicine and, in 1687, at the age of twenty-seven, had just been accepted into the Royal College of Physicians when an intriguing career offer came his way. Christopher Monck, the second Duke of Albemarle and the recently appointed governor of Jamaica, needed a personal physician to accompany him to his new post. Sloane accepted, not only out of a sense of duty to his country, but also “to see what I can meet withal that is extraordinary in nature in those places.” Colleagues and friends who had traveled abroad were bringing back new medicines and unknown species, and he didn’t want to miss out on the fun. Over the next fifteen months, Sloane enthusiastically studied Jamaica’s geography and climate, carefully documenting its plants and animals. His research came to an abrupt end, however, with his employer’s death. Sir Hans’s last duty was to embalm the duke’s body so it could be shipped back to England, along with the more than eight hundred specimens his erstwhile physician had acquired. Sloane returned to England to enjoy a distinguished career. He married well and thrived as a doctor and surgeon, made a fortune by introducing Britain to the wonders of milk chocolate, and even became Queen Ann’s “physician extraordinaire” in 1712. He figures so prominently in these opening pages not because of his diagnostic or entrepreneurial abilities but because of his talents as a collector. In addition to the materials he gathered in Jamaica, Sir Hans amassed plants, rocks, and shells from China, Japan, and the Philippines, as well as treasure troves of personal papers and manuscripts written by the historians and scientists who studied them. To accommodate his massive holdings,

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Sir Hans acquired the property adjacent to his London home at 4 Bloomsbury Place. He was always ready, given proper notice, to “admit the curious” and, recognizing its intrinsic public value, to make his collection available to the scholarly community. It would become one of three used to establish the British Museum. Director Neil MacGregor told James Cuno, who was then president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, in a 2009 interview that the British Museum was, as a result, “never a national collection.” It was always, he explained, a collection of the whole world meant to be studied by people across the globe, so they could understand not the nation better but the world.2 Sir Hans wanted visitors to recognize that people around the globe had a lot in common.3 In a way, said Mr. MacGregor, “what the British Museum is about is an attempt to create a new kind of citizen, a citizen who would be a citizen of the whole world and able to compare what happens in one part of the world to what happens in another, and above all to see how connected the world is.” Had the British Parliament rejected his bequest, Sir Hans would have gladly donated it to Saint Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, or Madrid, in that order.4 Ever since France’s new leaders opened the doors of the Louvre to the public in 1793, however, museums have also played a starring role in producing and representing the nation. They helped create unified “teams” out of millions of people who would never meet, by showcasing the knowledge and customs they share. Even now, in museums on every continent, guests feast on paintings, furniture, and other decorative objects they are told represent the nation. So, in today’s global world, what kinds of citizens are museums creating? Can they inspire an openness to difference, whether it be next door or across the world? How does the globalization of the museum world affect local institutions, and how does the local talk back? What is it about particular cities and nations that helps explain the answers? I take on these questions by visiting museums in Europe, the United States, Asia, and the Middle East. I talked with museum directors, curators, and policy makers about current and future exhibitions and collected their stories about the paintings, iconic objects, and sometimes quirky benefactors that define their collections. In the United States, I compare museums in allegedly parochial Boston with their counterparts in the so-called center of the national cultural universe, New York. In Europe, I focus on Copenhagen, Gothenburg, and Stockholm, former bastions of tolerance that have become, to varying degrees, hotbeds of anti-immigrant sentiment. I then ask if museums in Singapore and Doha create Asian and Arab global citizens. How does the tension between globalism and nationalism play out outside the West? Taken together, these accounts tell a fascinating story of the sea change under way in the museum world at large and of how nationalism and cosmopolitanism come together under museum roofs in different cities and nations. How curators, educators, and museum directors think about these issues, rather than how museums are organized and run, is the focus of my story, although objects and exhibitions play strong supporting roles. I discuss what museum professionals think they are doing, not how well they are doing it. I profile art museums, ethnographic muse-

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ums, constituency museums (institutions that focus on particular groups), and cultural history museums chosen selectively to highlight different stances along the nationalismglobalism spectrum. Each type of museum plays some role—whether purposefully or by default—in citizenship creation and showcases the nation from a slightly different angle. “National” collections of paintings, decorative objects, and material culture, along with cultural history museums, tell us something about how nations represent themselves to insiders and outsiders. The ethnographic objects that collectors, colonizers, and explorers acquired tell us what these individuals wanted people to know about the world beyond the nation. Constituency museums showcase the experiences of particular groups but also reveal something about where they stand in relation to the nation as a whole. No museum I visited told an entirely national or global story.5 Instead, the nation always reared its head in depictions of the cosmopolitan, and cosmopolitanism always came with something of the national. Rather than seeing these as competing, I think of cultural institutions as falling along a continuum of cosmopolitan nationalism whose two constantly changing parts mutually inform and transform each other. In fact, in some cases, it is by recognizing and representing the nation’s internal diversity, and thereby redefining the national, that some institutions connect to the cosmopolitan. Where a museum ultimately lands is determined by the intersection between national and urban cultural politics and the globalization of culture, an encounter that transforms museums and to which they are important contributors. The variations I discovered in where institutions fall on the cosmopolitan-nationalism continuum have to do with their histories, funding, collections, and curatorial expertise. They have to do with whether museums are public or private—with whether they are tools governments use to pursue social goals or whether they are mostly beholden to a changing cast of donors and visitors. Museums’ contrasting practices are partly explained by their scope—whether they were founded as museums of art, created to preserve and display humanity’s greatest treasures, or as museums of artifacts collected and showcased to safeguard national traditions and teach visitors about worlds beyond their own. These differences also arise from a city’s cultural armature—its social and cultural policies, history, and institutions. This armature reflects deep cultural structures—the traces of old ways of thinking and doing that are left in the bricks and mortar of today.6 Long-standing ideas about community, equality, or the collective good do not disappear but continuously echo in the ways things get done. A particularly important piece of this armature is a city’s diversity-management regime—how diversity is regulated, and distributed, through a combination of immigration, socioeconomic, and political policies, and the strategies, labels, and power relations underlying how difference gets talked about, measured, and negotiated. How cities manage difference contributes to but is not always the same as how difference gets managed nationally.7 Finally, museum practices vary because cities and nations understand their historical position on the global stage differently and have different aspirations for the future. Where a country is in the arc of its nation-building and global claims-staking projects,

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and the kinds of citizens it believes it needs in order to reach its goals, also influence what museums put on display.

A WORLD ON THE MOVE

You just have to walk down the street in any immigrant neighborhood—Washington Heights in New York City, Kreuzberg in Berlin, or the Bijlmer in Amsterdam—to realize that big changes are under way. No doubt many of the businesses you will pass will have to do with migrants’ homelands, be they travel agencies; ethnic grocery stores selling fruits, vegetables, phone cards, and videos; or stores that wire money to relatives back home. This is because more and more people continue to vote, pray, and invest in businesses in the places they come from at the same time that they buy homes, open stores, and join the PTA in the countries where they settle.8 Putting down roots in the location you move to, while continuing to remain active in the economics and politics of your homeland, isn’t just for poor and working-class migrants. Think of the many highly educated, highly skilled professionals who populate the boardrooms and bedrooms of the world’s cities and suburbs. More and more, they too buy homes, raise children, invest, and cast ballots across borders. As a matter of fact, more people than ever are on the move. In 2013, 232 million people, or 3.2 percent of the world’s population, were international migrants, compared with 175 million in 2000 and 154 million in 1990.9 These individuals send a lot of money back home.10 According to the World Bank, international migrants from developing countries were expected to remit nearly $416 billion dollars in 2014.11 In countries like Mexico and Morocco, these contributions are among the principal sources of foreign currency, and governments—now dependent on them—want to make sure the money keeps flowing. Migrants are also a tremendous source of ideas, know-how, and skills, and some governments try to systematically harvest these social remittances as well.12 At the same time, we live in a world of heightened diversity. Because people from a wider range of countries—with different legal statuses and levels of access to benefits— travel to a greater variety of places, new patterns of inequality and discrimination are emerging. This new complexity layers onto existing patterns of socioeconomic difference, residential segregation, and social exclusion.13 In 2005, for example, people from more than 179 countries lived in London.14 How they answer the question “Who are you?” gets complicated. They might respond that they are Dominican and American or Indian and British at the same time that they are New Yorkers or Londoners. An individual may also say that she is Muslim, a professor, or an environmentalist, thereby claiming a place through her membership in a religious, professional, or activist tribe. For some, living across borders comes easily. Like many of the museum professionals in this story, they have the education, skills, and social contacts to take advantage of opportunities anywhere. Many more, like the construction workers who build the buildings in which these professionals work, are forced into transnational lives because they

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cannot provide adequately for their families in the places where they come from or where they move. Either way, today’s migrants are moving in a world of economic crisis, neoliberal restructuring, precarious jobs, and major cutbacks in social welfare. And while more and more people live transnational lives, they are still served by legal and social service systems that are stubbornly nationally bounded. The social contract between state and citizen is national, but people’s lives are not. These dynamics challenge basic assumptions about how and where class and race are produced, family life gets lived, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship get fulfilled. They raise questions about the new kinds of social policies and institutions needed by people who work, raise children, and retire in different places. To be able to respond, we need a different vocabulary that allows us to talk about nations that do not necessarily end at their geographic borders. We need new ways of conceptualizing identity that take into account that many people belong to several groups at once and that these multiple allegiances can coexist, if not complement each other. We need new strategies that help instill the willingness and skills to engage with difference across the world and across the street. That is where museums come in. As MacGregor suggests, they are among the many messy arenas where countries might diversify their self-portraits and re-create themselves as more cosmopolitan nations.15 Museum displays influence how the nation and its place in the world get imagined, even among people who never step inside their doors.

C R E AT I N G C O S M O P O L I TA N I N D I V I D U A L S , I N S T I T U T I O N S , A N D N AT I O N S

Dreams of world citizenship underlay Kant’s vision of a “perpetual peace,” Goethe’s vision of a world society, and Marx’s call to workers to unite and free themselves from capitalism’s chains.16 Religious thinkers also had something to say about global citizenship. Implicit in Saint Augustine’s idea of the City of God was that people could belong to several communities at once. Luther spoke of “two kingdoms”—the kingdom of Christ, inhabited by true believers who were “subject to Christ,” and the kingdom of the world, where non-Christians lived under the rule of the law. Though clearly one was better than the other, you could belong to both at the same time.17 This is the story of cosmopolitanism told from the West, which is, in fact, quite uncosmopolitan.18 We limit the possibility of cosmopolitanism when we ignore how history, culture, and power influence what “openness” means and how much it is valued.19 The Muslim umma—that crisscrossing network of travelers that was always more inclusive and polycentric than the capitals and outposts of Western empires—is inherently cosmopolitan, a “global civil society” before the age of globalization.20 Circulating traders, intellectuals, religious professionals, and adventurers created a Sanskrit cosmopolis. While Rome tried to contain or destroy “the other,” in the Sanskrit world he or she was invited in.21

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Many critics still see self-described cosmopolitans as belonging everywhere and contributing nowhere.22 Others, redefining the term, argue that people who care about global issues like human rights and climate change can care about particular cultures and groups too.23 What’s more, the Euro-American cosmopolitans of yesteryear do not have a monopoly on these experiences. The new networks of economic power emerging from China, India, and the Gulf are leaving global footprints that bring people together, producing friction and conflict as well as creating cosmopolitan sensibilities. In fact, some argue, and I agree, that in today’s global world, cosmopolitanism is a necessity rather than a luxury. Because we are so well connected, risks and opportunities regularly cross borders.24 Inequality is defined globally and requires a global response. I find it helpful to think of cosmopolitanism as a broad umbrella with various parts. It is an ethos, idea, or value; a set of practices or competencies; and a political project— although these parts do not always come together.25 Endorsing cosmopolitanism does not mean that everyone can or would want to join in, or that we would all call the same set of values “universal.” It does mean not stopping at ideas or philosophy but trying to figure out how and where people become competent and committed enough to engage with others who are different, both near and far away. It means finding out what allows us to move from idea to practice to cosmopolitics.26 So where do we learn about what we all have in common or learn to feel a sense of responsibility for groups and problems other than our own? How do we learn to live in increasingly diverse neighborhoods and to connect that experience to people living on the other side of the world? How and where do museums help?

M U S E U M S A N D N AT I O N B U I L D I N G

Some of the world’s greatest museums, and what have been some of its most powerful nations, were born, more or less, under the same sign. Although Mr. MacGregor would probably disagree, many believe that while universal survey museums put the world on display, they also display their countries’ most revered beliefs and values.27 To grow strong, a new nation needed to perform itself well enough that complete strangers would claim the knowledge and rituals on view as their own.28 What got included in the collection and who created it sent clear messages about which groups belonged and what the country stood for. But connection and belonging generally stopped at the border.29 Because the nation was defined in opposition to other nations and ethnic groups, people who were out of place—such as immigrants and people of minority faiths—were not likely to see themselves represented, or, if they were, not without serious biases.30 What’s more, not everything on display was “of the nation.” By displaying artifacts from other lands, countries demonstrated their ability to collect and control the world beyond their borders. In fact, many works of national patrimony became more highly valued because they were also valued as the cultural heritage of humankind.31 As new ways of understanding and classifying took hold in the late nineteenth century, driven

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by the emerging disciplines of anthropology and sociology, curators rearranged what had been taxonomical displays into evolutionary sequences ordered by geology and history. Most of the time, the nation occupied the highest rung of the ladder, which gave it license to colonize, civilize, and Christianize others.32 Museums not only created nations but also justified their imperialist projects. They were, therefore, never egalitarian. Museums exposed visitors to certain kinds of knowledge based on a certain set of values. The ordering and reordering of objects and how they were positioned in relation to each other legitimized particular social and political hierarchies, privileging some ways of knowing while excluding others.33 Culture and identity could be represented as simple, factual, and real. The trained visitor arrived ready to exercise a particular kind of gaze and be exposed to a specific kind of objective truth, communicated through “rhetorics of value” or exhibition designs, texts, and lighting that focused visitors’ attention and appreciation in specific ways.34 This “museum effect” made the objects inside seem more special and provided visitors with a model for interacting with the world outside. The understandings about truth and knowledge expressed, and the model of museums that was used to express them, were then exported around the world.35 These hierarchies stubbornly persist. They are reflected today in the distribution of what museum curators jokingly refer to as “real estate.” How the square footage in a museum gets carved up sends clear signals about what its priorities are. As Kim Benzel, an associate curator in the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, told me, “If you come here [into the Met] just cold, there is now a fabulously grand spread of Greek and Roman to your left and an enormous spread of vast and grand Egyptian to your right and then up the stairs is European paintings. Since time immemorial that has been the ‘holy of holies’ of many western institutions. You have to really look if you want to find Africa or Latin America.” Even museum architecture reflects these assumptions. Think of the grand staircases we ascend to enter some of the world’s great museums (before laws requiring accessibility for the disabled forced their redesign). The polished stone makes visitors feel they are entering a temple of wisdom. Think of museums’ elegant, high-ceilinged entrance halls. The symbolic messages of Western superiority and triumphant progress are embedded in the blueprints. Most visitors are so well socialized into these values that they barely notice they are being expressed. As a result, some critics see museums as beyond salvation.36 They are simply too flawed to right their historical wrongs. It would be impossible to overcome their Western-centric, colonialist genealogies. Because museums are elite institutions, the critique continues, only the upper class feels welcome. Rather than being a catalyst for change, they reproduce social boundaries and privilege.37 A second view dismisses these critiques. Writing in response to people who see museum installations as always “ideologically motivated and strategically determined,” James Cuno, now president and CEO of the J. P Getty Trust, asks readers if they really

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experience museums in this manner. “Do you walk through the galleries of your local museum and feel controlled in any significant way? Do you feel manipulated by a higher power?”38 He believes that museums still matter, and that “enlightenment principles still apply.” For people like Cuno, museums do not create citizens, either national or global. They collect, classify, and present facts, calling into question unverified truths and opposing prejudice and superstition for the betterment of humankind.39 Similarly, former Metropolitan Museum director Philippe de Montebello declares museums unsuitable places for social activism. Museum visitors are looking not for more of what they encounter in their daily lives, he says, but for “something different, conceivably uplifting.”40 But a third view, held by many of the museum professionals profiled here, is that museums can and must reinvent themselves as socially relevant institutions for the twenty-first century. They know they are still primarily the stomping grounds of people with money in their wallets and degrees on their walls. But they also recognize the tremendous power museums wield in shaping public views, even influencing people who never cross their thresholds.41 They believe that museums can and should encourage empathy, curiosity, tolerance, creativity, and critical thinking—in essence, cosmopolitan values and competencies. Whether or not museums willingly accept this role, they necessarily star in the national performance. What’s more, these tensions are shaped by factors extending far beyond national borders. James Clifford describes museums as contact zones, places of “an ongoing, historical, political and moral relationship—a power-charged set of exchanges, of push and pull.”42 In museums today, the contact is not simply between unequal cultural producers and consumers. To varying degrees, museums operate within transnational social fields—multilayered, unequal networks created by individuals, institutions, and governance structures. More and more, the things on display, the museum professionals who put them there, the financial and administrative arrangements that make it all possible, and the visitors who enjoy the fruits of these labors are connected to people, objects, and politics all over the world. Museums, therefore, are increasingly sites of encounter where global approaches bump into regional and national history, culture, and demography.43 Assemblages are contingent clusters of people, technology, objects, and knowledge, which circulate through the social fields that museums inhabit, coming together in different constellations depending on where they land.44 Multiple assemblages inform and are informed by my story. One key cluster is constituted by what I call global museum assemblages—changing repertoires of ways to display, look at, and organize objects and educate others about them that get vernacularized selectively each time they come to ground.45 The programs awarding master’s degrees in fine arts, the museum education programs, and the curatorial studies programs offered around the world form part of this assemblage. It inheres in the gift shops, gourmet restaurants, and blockbuster exhibitions museum visitors now expect. It seeps into the stone of iconic museum buildings, designed by a select group of “starchitects” whose work features prominently on many continents. It is regulated by institutions of global governance, like the International

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Committee on Museums. The biennales mounted throughout the global north and south, and the cadre of artists they anoint, inform it. A transnational class of museum directors, administrators, curators, and educators, some of whom circulate regionally if not globally, form part of these assemblages but also carry pieces of it with them in their laptops, suitcases, and portfolios when they move from post to post.46 These professionals, like their peripatetic corporate, religious, and professional counterparts, connect with varying degrees of intensity to the places where they work. Some “parachute” in during a crisis, find out what they need to know, fix the problem, and move on. While “spiralists” stay longer, they also move on within a few years, in contrast to “long-timers” who settle semipermanently.47 Regardless of how long these transnational professionals stay, an overarching backdrop or regional story line shapes their work as their work reshapes it. They operate in the context of two simultaneous frames that speak to but are in tension with one another—cultural globalization of increasing breadth and depth and changing urban and national cultural politics.

THE ROLE OF PLACE

The city, writes Robert Park, is “a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition.”48 These customs and traditions materialize in physical spaces and buildings. They manifest themselves in norms and values that guide and are spread by cultural institutions. Therefore, the answer to whether and how museums see themselves as creating citizens has a lot to do with place. A city’s cultural armature, and how it echoes over time, strongly influences what museums do and the kinds of ideologies and commitments they shape. In fact, the story of every city, says Lewis Mumford, “can be read through a succession of deposits: the sedimentary strata of history. While certain forms and phases of development are successive in time, they become, through the very agency of the civic process, cumulative in space.”49 Some even go so far as to say that cities have distinct personalities.50 Those familiar with the East Coast of the United States will recognize how true certain old sayings still are. Mark Twain recalled what had become a popular joke in the United States: “In Boston they ask, ‘How much does he know?’ In New York, ‘How much is he worth?’ In Philadelphia, ‘Who were his parents?’ ”51 Another version had Boston as the city of bests, New York as the city of the latests, and Philadelphia the city of firsts.52 This is because, as Twain put it, history does not so much repeat itself as it rhymes. Since we focus so often on explaining change, we miss the relationship between change and continuity—how long-standing patterns of doing and thinking grow and evolve in ways that are somehow consistent with their roots. How these constant overlays, like the successive deposits of sediment from a continuously erupting volcano, become part of a city’s cultural armature is an important part of my story. The resilient cultural structures they lay down—such as patterns of social

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hierarchy, how the needs of individuals stack up against the needs of the group, the appropriate role of the state in caring for and managing its citizens, and how social difference gets talked about and managed—appear and reappear throughout history.53 As these attitudes become more deeply rooted, they affect the kinds of institutions a city creates, the policies it embraces, and the values that undergird them: they affect, in essence, its current cultural armature and how the city sees itself in relation to the rest of the world. Take the example of Salem, Massachusetts, where the Peabody Essex Museum, one of the institutions profiled in these pages, is located. The maritime industry prospered there in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, until advances in technology created commercial ships too large for its relatively shallow harbor. But because, according to the museum’s director and CEO, Dan Monroe, travel and international trade were the twinned vocations of the museum’s founders, global issues have always been part of that museum’s portfolio. But cities are located in nations. And national history, culture, institutions, and demography shape the urban experience in the same way that what happens in cities influences the nation. Indeed, it is often difficult to separate the two, particularly in citystates like Qatar and Singapore, where Doha and Singapore interchangeably refer to the city and the nation, and in Sweden and Denmark, where what happens in Stockholm and Copenhagen disproportionately affects what happens in the nation as a whole. The cases I profile reflect this spillage. They reveal how national and urban cultural politics interdependently shape the warp and woof of museum practice in countries of different sizes, populations, and degrees of cultural centralization, and how the globalization of the museum sector weaves itself between the threads.

THE METHODOLOGICAL CHALLENGE

Between 2009 and 2013, I spoke with nearly 185 curators, policy makers, academics, museum directors, and educators in seven cities around the world.54 My respondents work at a variety of museums, not simply official “national” institutions, because all are sites where the global, national, and local, and the relationship between them, get worked out. While I could not visit all the museums in each city (Stockholm alone boasts more than eighty museums), I explore how much museums see themselves as part of a larger ecology within which each institution plays a unique role. To get at how museums create diverse communities both within and beyond their borders, I selected three pairs of cases with several goals in mind. The first was to compare how the different stages in the arc of nation building and world claiming affect museums’ position on the cosmopolitan-nationalism continuum. Denmark and Sweden are postempire and, despite limited colonial forays in the past, have long since abandoned pretensions of superpower status. As it turns out, they use museums to make sense of their place in the world, not to claim to be its leader. In Copenhagen, museums used the global to reassert the national, while in Stockholm and Gothenburg they put the country’s inherent cosmopolitanism on display, as a good thing in and of itself that also

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strengthens the nation. The United States, depending upon where you sit, is still at the height of its power or is on the decline. As we will see, using museums to create citizens who engage actively and effectively in the world is less of a priority in a country where many residents still believe they live in the world’s preeminent superpower. In many of the museums in Boston and New York that I look at, the national gets cosmopolitanized through its internal diversity, which gets linked, only occasionally, to the world at large. In contrast, the city-states of Singapore and Qatar are both small, centralized, aspiring global players that use museums to display nations created from the start in conversation with carefully chosen aspects of cosmopolitanism. Each site is also going through (or has already undergone) major demographic shifts that are strongly shaped by the diversity management regimes in place. Boston and New York have always been diverse cities, though in different ways, located in a country that understands itself as such. Museums do their work in a context where the starting point is difference and newcomers are allowed and expected to become part of the whole. Because “the market provides,” the government does not use social institutions actively or explicitly to bring about the society it deems fit. While, in this book, I touch briefly on the Smithsonian Institution as the country’s national museum, I quickly return to the regional cultural landscapes of Boston and New York. This is because the United States is so much bigger, with respect to size and population, than the other sites I explore. How the nation is imagined and understood varies dramatically by region. Many of the country’s former industrial cities are home to outstanding encyclopedic museums that easily hold their own against Washington, D.C. These institutions, in cities like Chicago, Houston, Kansas City, Cleveland, Detroit, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, as well as Boston and New York, ensure that no one city is the preeminent cultural center. While Swedish and Danish narratives have long been about being tolerant though homogenous, both nations now struggle with their heightened diversity caused by recent immigration. They have vacillated between periods of extreme generosity and extremely strict immigration and naturalization policies. These battles play out against the backdrop of dramatic reductions in welfare benefits and the urgent need, felt in some corners, to define the nation more clearly in the face of European Union membership.55 In this context, cultural institutions represent difference from a starting point of similarity, where social policies are important tools for pursuing social goals. In Singapore and Doha, both relatively young countries, ethnic and racial diversity is strongly managed by the state, which actively determines who is in and who is out. Citizens are generously provided for, while noncitizens, who are permanently impermanent, have almost no rights. Recent influxes of long-term and temporary migrants layered onto these already diverse settings only complicate the difficult task of figuring out who the nation is and what its place in the world will be. The museums I studied are also located in places that form natural pairs frequently compared with each other. The cultural worlds of New York and Boston often develop in

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conversation (or at least Boston would have it that way). Sweden and Denmark frequently define themselves, or are defined by the world, in relation to each other. Many times, analysts speak of Doha and Singapore in the same breath. Both are entrepôts, city-states, and seen as “punching above their weight” in their efforts to achieve greater global prominence. Finally, I was attracted by what certain institutions seemed to be saying about themselves with their names. What did an institution called the Museum of World Culture or the Asian Civilizations Museum think it was doing? What would the Museum of Islamic Art or Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art actually put on display? I hope to contribute novel insights into old debates about cosmopolitanism, migration, and museums by asking new questions about old settings and asking old questions in new ones. I have tried to add nuance to studies of cosmopolitanism by listening closely to how it has been expressed, has materialized, and has been displayed in different parts of the world. My goal, however, was not to produce a grand theory about museums and globalization. Rather, I wanted to understand how the people, ideas, and tangible and intangible cultural forms that are the stock and trade of museums, and that circulate across and through the global, national, and urban levels of my analyses, land on the continuum of cosmopolitan nationalism in particular places, and why. I have tried to tell my story so that museum professionals, colleagues, students, and my ninety-five-year-old father will all want to read it. There is a book in the text and a second, more theoretical book in the footnotes. This is the only way to produce serious scholarship that reaches beyond academic borders. I join a small but growing number of observers devising new ways to study global processes. Researchers who follow ideas, things, or groups across different sites, and the connections between them, have taken an important step forward.56 Others who look at how people and objects are integrated into different types of networks that span spaces and scales have too.57 What I do here is describe and explain various sites of encounter— how and why global museum assemblages come to ground in specific places. I then turn this question on its head and ask why particular histories and culture, institutions, and demography combine to produce different versions of cosmopolitan nationalism. In each chapter, a different part of the puzzle features more prominently in my account because, in that place, at that moment, it was the engine that naturally drove my story forward. Analyses produced by experts who study countries and regions for long periods of time are very important. We need people with deep linguistic, cultural, and historical fluency. But in today’s world, we also need deep analyses of several different places that illuminate the broad social patterns they share, or what Richard Wilk called their “structures of common difference.”58 Tony Judt, in an homage to Isaiah Berlin,59 described himself in one of his last books as “decidedly not a hedgehog. I have no big theory of contemporary European history to propose in these pages,” he wrote, “no single, all embracing story to tell.” It doesn’t mean, he goes on to say, that European history has no thematic shape. Rather, “fox-like Europe knows many things.”60 For me, Judt makes an

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important methodological point. We also need accounts that are more foxlike, that do not pretend to capture every detail of the places they describe, but that produce valuable insights precisely because they see the forest and the trees—and the patterns that unite them. This approach, not surprisingly, is imperfect. To do it right, you have to be clear about what you can and cannot claim based on your findings, to own up to what you know and cannot know. You have to do your homework, depending on the hedgehogs in a particular field and trying to read in languages you might not speak. You cannot be a cowboy ethnographer, who gallops in on a high horse, believing it is possible to see everything quickly and easily from your saddle. But most important, you must proceed with great humility, asking colleagues to guide and accompany you along the way. “In music,” write Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz, “to accompany other players entails more than simply adding new sounds to the mix. Accompaniment requires attention, communication, and cooperation. It means augmenting, accenting, or countering one music voice with another.”61 Many generous museum professionals, scholars, and friends have accompanied me during this project. For that, I am very grateful.

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1 THE BOG AND THE BEAST The View of the Nation and the World from Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Gothenburg

During the winter of 2009, the sun rarely came out in Copenhagen. When it did, it hung like a pale white circle barely distinguishable from the surrounding clouds. Day after day, the city’s residents looked up and stared hard, wishing that by sheer desire they could turn that dim pinprick of light into a fiery orb. One April day, Copenhagen got its wish. The city woke up to a velvet blue sky and trees that could barely contain themselves. The light glistened as it does only when the season first changes. I was entranced as I walked from Copenhagen’s Central Station, across Rådhuspladsen, or City Hall Square, to the National Museum of Denmark. The sunlight flooded its large entrance hall as I entered, laying down a lemon-colored diagonal line across the floor. The first visitors, including me, turned as they exited the coatroom and headed for the galleries, hearing laughter behind them. A gaggle of floppy children tumbled into the foyer. Marching in two crooked-straight lines, they were dressed in full Viking regalia. Some had on helmets with horns. Others wore fake fur vests held closed by belts into which they tucked swords. Others had chosen plastic armor breastplates, painted gray with gold trim, and matching boots. As they traced the sunlight path, they erupted into a rousing rendition of the Danish national anthem. “I know a lovely land,” they sang, “with spreading, shady beeches, near Baltic’s salty strand, near Baltic’s salty strand.” So, another generation of Danes learns about its nation’s fabled past, laying the foundation for what, hopefully, will be its glorious future. All children in Copenhagen visit the National Museum of Denmark at least once while they are in school. They spend time in its world-renowned ethnographic collection,

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marveling at the African masks, the Indian carvings, and the seventeenth-century paintings that Dutch artist Albert Eckhout made of the “new world.” Or they visit the Stories of Denmark exhibition, which chronicles Danish history from 1660 to the present. They undoubtedly go to the reinstallation of the New Danish Prehistory exhibition, which showcases the ancient peoples who lived in what is now Denmark, including the famous Gundestrup cauldron, a nine-kilo masterwork of intricately carved silver that dates back to 100 b.c. Schoolchildren visit museums in Sweden too. In fact, Denmark and Sweden have a lot in common. Stockholmers also stare hard at the sky wishing for the sun during their never-ending winter. And Sweden is concerned about defining and preserving Swedishness, given that it, like Denmark, is experiencing unprecedented levels of immigration. But at about the same time that Denmark spent over a million dollars to reinstall its New Danish Prehistory exhibition, Sweden opened the Museum of World Culture (MWC), which features exhibitions about human trafficking, migration, and Bollywood. Danish visitors are offered a narrative of pride in and responsibility to a nation that is cosmopolitan, in order to reaffirm its nationalism. For Swedish visitors, the takeaway point is about their responsibility to the world and the values and skills they need in order to fulfill it. Museums operate closer to the cosmopolitan side of the cosmopolitan-nationalism continuum, because creating worldly Swedes is good for the world and for the nation.

THE WORLD IN A TRUNK

Stockholm’s 2 million residents can spend their Sundays in any number of museums. Vasa Museet chronicles the foibles of a state-of-the-art wooden warship built by King Gustav II Adolf in 1626 that sank minutes after it first left the dock—Sweden’s very own Titanic. At the Music Museum, visitors compose on instruments from around the world. At the Strindberg Museum, they climb four flights of stairs to the apartment where the writer painted and wrote during his final years. Each institution, in its own way, affords a view of the nation. At the National Museum of Fine Arts, works by famous French and Dutch painters hang alongside paintings from the former royal collections and paintings by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Swedish artists like Carl Larsson, Ernst Josephson, and Anders Zorn. In 2008, the Swedish History Museum opened the country’s first comprehensive, one-stop-shopping exhibition about Swedish history. Artur Immanuel Hazelius founded Nordiska Museet, a cultural history museum housed in an imposing castle, and Skansen, the world’s first openair museum, in the late 1880s. Visitors to Skansen enter actual homes preserved from all over Sweden and chat with reenactors wearing period costumes, who explain the life and traditions of the day. A small zoo, where animals from around the country are on display, even includes a reindeer. Hazelius lived during a period of dramatic change. In the mid-1800s, Sweden traversed the predictable, yet traumatic, path toward industrialization and urbanization.

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Land reform left thousands without fields to cultivate. To make a living, many peasants, who had been the touchstones of Swedish rural life, moved to the city or even left the country for what they hoped would be more prosperous shores.1 Hazelius was no displaced farmer. He was the Stockholm-born son of the middleclass publisher, former military officer, and cadet-school founder Johan Hazelius, a progressive-minded patriot. Accompanied by his good friend the romantic poet Carl Jonas Love Almqvist, Johan took long treks through the Swedish countryside. Both men felt great sympathy and admiration for farmers, who, they believed, were the moral and spiritual nucleus of traditional Swedish culture. While Almqvist wrote pastoral poetry and founded the Manhem Society, a Swedish-culture-promoting organization for young men that is something like a cross between the Boy Scouts and the Freemasons, Johan sent Artur, then nine, and his older brother to live on the farm of the vicar Thure Reinhold Ekenstam, who also became their tutor. Johan hoped that, exposed to the vicar’s education and influence, his sons would learn the value of hard work and be shielded from the corruption of the city. Artur’s immersion in “peasant values” ended when he returned to Stockholm at fourteen to attend private school. Nevertheless, he often revisited the countryside to nourish his passion for rural life. In 1854, Artur entered the University of Uppsala, where his interest in folk life drew him to pan-Scandinavianism. In 1860, the twenty-seven-year-old graduated with a degree in Scandinavian languages. While his friends predicted a bright academic future, his father convinced him that practice mattered more than theory. Artur left the ivory tower to teach Swedish literature and language at three Stockholm teachers’ schools. Meanwhile, his treks in the countryside continued. By 1872, the dramatic changes he witnessed convinced him that traditional Swedish culture was threatened. Commonplace objects needed to be protected and preserved before they were lost forever. Nostalgia and a reaction to the dreary repetitiveness of industrialization were not the only things that moved him. He hoped that collecting peasants’ folk costumes and handicrafts would do the same thing for contemporary Swedish culture that his youthful studies of ancient Nordic aphorisms did for the Swedish language: provide modern Swedes with a solid grounding in tradition that would allow them to express themselves in distinctly Swedish ways. Starting with an inheritance he received from his father, Hazelius avidly collected ordinary objects and scurried to find a location where he could display them. Ultimately, he founded the Nordiska Museum and Skansen.2 The museums expanded rapidly with support from the royal family and Swedish Parliament and with donations from ordinary individuals excited by Hazelius’s interest in their traditions. His pioneering displays, which included realistic life-size dolls posed in emotional depictions of family life, were a sensation among visitors. One tableau, based on a portrait by the Swedish painter Amalia Lindegren, of a grief-stricken family gathered around their little daughter’s deathbed, allegedly created such a buzz at the 1878 World Exhibition in Paris that there was not a dry eye in the house. Some even credit Hazelius with inventing the experiential,

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emotional style so common in museums today.3 He can certainly take credit for Nordiska Museet’s telling motto, “Know thyself.” But what would Hazelius think about Swedishness today, given that close to 15 percent of the population is now foreign-born? Would he be happy eating kebabs and falafel alongside the herring and schnapps that are the standard fare at midsummer celebrations? Would he object to seeing women wearing veils on buses, or would he simply see that as something else Swedes need to tolerate? Where would he fall on the continuum between cosmopolitanism and nationalism? In the late 1990s, the Swedish minister of culture decided to take the bull by the horns and tackle the challenge of diversity. Sweden’s foreign-born population was growing. The tall, blond, Christian stereotype was a thing of the past. How could museums revitalize cultural life and, at the same time, help the nation come to terms with its new face? The minister focused her efforts on collections dealing with non-Swedish matters (or what came to be known as world culture), including the Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities (Medelhavsmuseet), the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (Östasiatiska Museet), the Museum of Ethnography (Etnografiska Museet) in Stockholm, and the former Museum of Ethnography in Gothenburg, Sweden’s second-largest city.4 Her staff drew up a bold plan to relocate these collections to Gothenburg under one brandnew roof. The cultural establishment strongly objected. For one thing, the plan involved relocating many national treasures away from Stockholm, the country’s cultural showcase. Doing this in the name of something as abstract and fluffy as “world culture” didn’t help. Opposition grew so strong that the plan was ultimately shelved. Instead, decision makers compromised—they would build a new museum in Gothenburg that, together with the three museums in Stockholm, would become the Swedish National Museums of World Culture. “The 1990s were not an easy time for Sweden,” Thommy Svensson, the first director general, told me. Immigrants had access to housing, health care, and schools, but if they could not find a job, they were not really considered part of Swedish society. In the 1940s and 1950s, Sweden used museums to turn workers into the middle class, so it made sense that it would use them again to make immigrants into Swedes. But while the country struggled to integrate its newcomers, it was also struggling to reinvent its place in the world. “During the 1960s and 1970s, Sweden thought of itself as a ‘light unto the nations’—the world needed Sweden as a Social Democratic model it could emulate,” said Svensson. But after the traumatic assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme, an outspoken internationalist, in 1986 and the economic slump that followed, Sweden needed the world. Creating the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg was a way to figure out where Sweden belonged. The MWC had no official blueprint; staff constantly debated what world culture meant. When Jette Sandahl was hired as its first director, she knew she needed a working definition. To take things out of Sweden and put them in a larger context, she looked to

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international conventions. “When you heard Swedes talking about cultural diversity,” she explained to me, “they meant ethnicity or religion [particularly Islam]. I took all that off the table. I went straight to the UNESCO positions on cultural diversity and to the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights and used them to build the mission statement for the museum.” She knew these documents were flawed, she said, but “they were also all we had.” She knew, too, that critics saw a human rights approach as just another form of naive universalism or Western imperialism—a false dichotomy she wanted to get away from. “UNESCO says that all cultures are equal and make equal contributions, but I cheated on this. There are cultural practices that I don’t like, that I don’t value equally, such as female-genital cutting. The UNESCO statement is valueless, but we corrected this by coupling it with the UN definition, which speaks to another basic core human value. If you just have the UNESCO statement, you are a cultural relativist, but if you add the Declaration of Human Rights, there are certain things that are unacceptable.” The second step Sandahl took was to do away with permanent exhibitions. People expected a museum organized around regions of the world. “I had not yet seen a permanent display in a museum that was not based on an evolutionary perspective or a colonial value system. I didn’t think I could get away from that. Permanent exhibitions are permeated by a false sense of timeless, unquestionable truth. The stories they have to tell, to stay relevant for the twenty years they are expected to last, use ideas and categories for describing and organizing material that are rife with Western-centric assumptions.” Audiences, Sandahl believed, needed to see their experiences reflected in exhibitions. If imported art and ethnography collections acquired under questionable circumstances were to stay in Europe, museums had to involve potential stakeholders in decisions about how they were displayed. Curator Adriana Muñoz realized just how much her thinking had been changed by her work at the MWC when she escorted a visitor through one of the museum’s first exhibitions, Sister of Dreams: People and Myths of the Orinoco. Rather than realistically re-creating the natural environment of indigenous peoples, the installation depicted a “magical realist” rain forest combining the material and spiritual. “Did you know,” she asked the visitor, “that the Orinoco can really be a jaguar?” “You mean they think they can be jaguars?” he replied. “No,” she said. “They can really be jaguars.” You have to understand the way people know truth on their terms and not try to squeeze their world into your own categories, she explained. To really understand difference, you have to get inside the other person’s head and become fluent in his or her language and grammar. That the MWC hired a curator for contemporary global issues also signaled it was traveling a road not often taken. It meant, among other things, says Klaus Grinnell, who holds that position, that unlike “traditional museums, which have curators for regions of the world, the MWC is about world culture in singular. When we are dealing with local subjects, we always want to show how they are connected to the global frame, how globalization takes different forms, trajectories, and directions.” The MWC, its website

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explains, is “in dialogue with the society in which it exists,” serving as a meeting place “where sensitive, intellectual experiences will enable people to feel comfortable at home and abroad, trusting in and taking responsibility for a shared global future in a constantly changing world.”5 Regularly hosting film screenings, seminars, festivals, workshops, and live music performances, it offers much more than just exhibitions. Take, for example, an exhibition on Bollywood, which featured a collection of Indian film posters. When the exhibition was shown in another museum, recalled Grinnell, the objects and texts that accompanied it informed visitors about Hinduism and India. But when the posters came to the MWC, staff used them to make the point that “world culture is not ethnification or Americanization but polycentric, with connections everywhere.” In Destination X, which opened in March 2010, curators wanted visitors to think about how and why people travel and how people change when they move. “We wanted to explore,” said Grinnell, “who has the freedom to move and who doesn’t. Today if you don’t have the right color passport, money, or skin you can’t move freely. . . . Societies are not stable, because mobility is a fact of modern life. The nation-state might just be a parenthesis, just one way of understanding and organizing human life.” The exhibition did not propose an answer or a solution but instead tried to get visitors to think about the idea that how “we imagine who belongs somewhere, who should stay, and who should travel is rather contingent.” Etnografiska Museet in Stockholm is located on the city’s equivalent of New York’s Museum Mile. Positioned outside the center of the city, it sits on the mainland, north of the island of Djurgården, where Vasa Museet, Nordiska Museet, and Skansen are located. The first thing director Anders Björklund showed me when I visited the museum in April 2009 was the permanent exhibition called Bringing the World Home. It’s about how influential travelers brought the world back to Sweden, and how their travel reports, radio broadcasts, and the objects they collected reflected their understandings of the world and Sweden’s place in it at the time. How did these ideas shape what Swedes imagined of the world beyond their borders, and how did they gradually become part of what Anders referred to as the “Swedish cultural knapsack”? “When 20 percent of the Swedish population is born outside Sweden, it’s evident that the border between ‘us’ and ‘them’ has changed over time,” he said. Museum staff wanted visitors to realize just how much Sweden had changed during the last two centuries, and that “just as the museum’s collection demonstrates that the outside world came back to Sweden in multiple ways in multiple voices, that also happens today. Visitors need to listen, not just to one voice, but to listen, read, and travel so they can decide for themselves.” So who are the great men—and they were great men—who so strongly influenced Sweden’s understanding of the world at home and abroad? What did they bring back to aid them in their task? “God created, so he classified” is the aphorism often used to describe Carl Linnaeus. In the eighteenth century, Linnaeus created the system still used to categorize the

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hereditary relationships between organisms today. He ranks among Mendel, Watson and Crick, and Marie Curie in the annals of scientific history not only because of the categories he proposed but also because of the new perspective on the world that underlay them. August Strindberg claimed that “Linnaeus was actually a poet who happened to become a naturalist.”6 In fact, Linnaeus named so many species, including our own, Homo sapiens, that he earned the nickname “the Second Adam,” surpassing the original Biblical name-giver.7 A boundless curiosity about all the world’s creatures, from lichen to human beings, coupled with a typically eighteenth-century conviction that studying the natural world created by God was a sacred calling, motivated Linnaeus. Today, his classifications might seem like a strange mix of medieval and modern thought. He originally divided the animal kingdom into six classes—Quadrupedia, Aves, Amphibia, Pisces, Insecta, Vermes— but also included a category called Paradox, a virtual junk drawer of oddities that included unicorns, phoenixes, dragons, and satyrs, along with a strange—but real—frog that shrinks in size as it matures. Linnaeus surrounded himself with a group of naturalists who assisted him in the daunting task of cataloguing all God’s creations. He sent his disciples (he called a chosen seventeen his “apostles”) around the world with long lists of plants, foods, minerals, and medicines to document and collect. Several died on these journeys, but those who lived brought back wonders. Linnaeus’s bounty included lacquer, ostrich eggs, paddles, and limestone collected from Japan, the Pacific Islands, and Africa. When Anders Sparrman, a Linnaeus disciple who accompanied Captain James Cook on his second voyage, brought back an engraving of an unusual figure, Linnaeus declared it half human and half ape. He included this new species, Homo troglodyte, in his Systema Naturae, even though a real-life sample was never found. Linnaeus collected and classified so he could improve crops, medicines, and other goods. But embedded in his taxonomy was an implicit hierarchy—the specimens from out there were necessarily less valuable and less developed than objects produced around the corner. Both Swedes and Pacific Islanders used utensils, but Swedish forks and knives were clearly more sophisticated than those that explorers brought home. So, while Linnaeus advanced science by inventing many still used scientific classifications, he is also partly responsible for the taken-for-granted values concerning progress and modernity embedded within them. His work laid the foundation for the line in the sand between the European, Western, white “us” and the uneducated, backward, dark-skinned “them” that are still at the heart of contemporary debates about museum practice. The next great man showcased in Bringing the World Home is Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, famous for his intrepid travels during the height of colonialism and social Darwinism. After he successfully crossed the Northeast Passage for the first time, thousands gathered in Stockholm to greet his triumphant return and see the riches he displayed at the Royal Palace. The public took the carvings, photos of Artic residents, and samples of their clothing and shoes as proof that human beings could master and order nature.8

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The explorer, geographer, and mapmaker Sven Hedin follows Nordenskiöld. When he was not busy leading expeditions through Central Asia, he found time to write a children’s book, From Pole to Pole, from which generations of Swedish schoolchildren learned their geography. In the early 1900s, when Hedin’s book was published, Sweden was suffering a crisis of confidence. The country had just lost Norway, which had been part of Swedish territory, and poor economic conditions forced many Swedes to leave their homes and seek their fortunes in the United States. Sweden needed heroes to boost its morale and reinforce its traditions and values. Hedin obliged, writing travel reports that his fellow countrymen enthusiastically devoured. The children’s stories he crafted stressed courage and independence, values Swedes readily embraced. The showcase that comes next chronicles Swedish missionary activities in the Congo and their enduring impact on how the nation perceives Africa today. At the height of Belgian king Leopold’s rule in the 1890s, close to four thousand Scandinavians lived in the Congo. The Danes, the text reads, were astute engineers who invented machine guns and worked as soldiers. The Finns, who were skillful navigators, manned the ships that brought raw materials out from the heart of the continent. And the Swedes saved souls. When missionaries came back to visit Sweden, they not only regaled their supporters with tales of paganism and slavery but also described their efforts to help Africans find God, learn to read and write, and improve their lives. The Second Coming was imminent, they told fellow believers, and the mission was urgent. Africans, like Swedes, deserved to go to heaven, and the Swedish people had to do their part to get them there. In the late 1880s, at the height of Sweden’s religious revival, thousands donated money to build missions along the Congo River. In 1884, Sunday school students contributed what would today be the equivalent of nearly 2.2 million Swedish kronor. The visitor then enters a typical Swedish living room from the 1950s, complete with overstuffed armchairs, shag carpet, faded wallpaper, and a large radio console. A generation of family and friends used to sit mesmerized as Sten Bergman, a zoologist, evolutionist, and wildly popular radio personality, delighted Swedish audiences each week with fascinating accounts of “his father, the cannibal”—a chief in Papua New Guinea he came to know and love. Bergman became a national hero, revered for his bravery for living among “barbarians.” The backward society he described served as a mirror against which Swedes took the measure of their own mark just as their welfare state was coming into its own. The last part of the exhibition includes a row of lockers from Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport. Behind each door are examples of things travelers bring home today. One contains an ivory sculpture. Another contains cheap souvenirs. Another houses sacred objects. The display, Anders said, is meant to encourage viewers to think about what happens today when people buy, collect, or steal things from other places—to understand world power dynamics through the prism of collecting. Is it right for individuals to bring back something that is sacred, even if it is for sale? Is it right to collect something that is

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produced under conditions that hurt the environment? Is it possible to explore the world without controlling it? Anders firmly believes that museums must pose these kinds of questions. In Sweden, the collections belong to the public and should be used democratically, for democratic purposes.9 Of course, exhibitions must be based on state-of-the-art science that is tested. But they can also be used to pursue social goals, to help create a certain kind of Swede in a certain kind of Sweden. It would be more of a problem, he thinks, if the collections were in private hands and served private interests. Society uses different resources to solve different problems. “Museums are like hospitals and schools,” he told me; “we just use different tools to do our work.” This kind of thinking underlies the exhibition on human trafficking that we visit next. It shows, according to the introductory wall text, “the indelible stamp and imprints left on the bodies and souls of people, most often those of vulnerable women and children, by the trade in human beings. Trafficking is about borders and the violation of borders, about geographical borders creating boundaries and erecting barriers and about openings penetrated and forced” (plate 1). The exhibition Trafficking, said Anders, is essentially about modern slavery. All Swedes, especially young people, need to know that human trafficking is a global problem, and that therefore it is a Swedish problem everyone must do something about. “In some sense, this exhibition is about the fact that solidarity doesn’t stop at the border. It’s like airborne diseases: national borders are of no importance. Trafficking is the same. It crosses the border everywhere you look. Young people need to understand that this is not just a Swedish problem but a universal problem, but they also need to see it as a Swedish problem that is structured in a global way.”

ACROSS THE SOUND

Across the Oresund Bridge in Denmark, a mere twelve miles away from southern Sweden, something very different is happening. Sensory overload probably does not begin to describe what Albert Eckhout first experienced when he arrived in Recife, Brazil, in 1637. He had never traveled outside Germany before. The trip across the stormy Atlantic in a cramped, constantly leaking caravel was probably long and arduous. At the dock, a crowd would have gathered to greet the arriving emissaries, including Eckhout’s employer, the German count Johan Maurits von Nassau-Siegen, who was taking up his post as the first governor general of the Dutch West India Company. The squawking parrots, fan-shaped palms, and dark-skinned locals Eckhout encountered in what was then Dutch Brazil were probably unlike anything or anyone else he had ever seen. Few people remember that the Dutch occupied northeastern Portuguese Brazil between 1624 and 1654. One of their goals, besides getting rich quick by carving sugar plantations out of the rainforest, was to flex their colonial muscle and expand a commercial empire that already stretched from present-day Indonesia to Suriname to what would

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become New York City. The indigenous inhabitants of Brazil were seen as godless savages who needed conquering and converting. To accomplish their goals, the Dutch set about documenting and classifying daily life. The governor general’s entourage, including court painter Eckhout, Dutch landscape painter Franz Post, German natural historian Georg Marcgraf, and Dutch physician Willam Piso, collected written and visual ethnographic information. Art and science too were tools of conquest. While the Dutch in Brazil never amassed significant riches, they did produce some of the first European scientific accounts of the region. According to art historian Rebecca Parker Brienen, Nassau-Siegen’s team generated spectacular, detailed written descriptions and illustrations of the plants, animals, and everyday life of the people living in the colonies—one of the richest treasure troves of information about the colonization of the New World and the first glance many Europeans had of non-Europeans.10 Not until the eighteenth century, when Captain Cook journeyed to the South Sea Islands, would such a textured account reach Europe’s eyes and ears again. Eckhout painted still-life scenes and figures, including the African, Indian, and mixed-race people living in the colony. Parker Brienen describes these as artificial and constructed ethnographic portraits based on firsthand knowledge but also incorporating elements of the prevalent stereotypes of non-Europeans and of the travel accounts, costume books, and portrait styles that were popular in the day. Their rich colors and strange plants and animals fueled fantasies about the exotic cannibals and beasts to be found in the New World. Excited viewers responded enthusiastically when Nassau-Siegen brought these reports and artifacts back to Europe in 1644. In fact, people coveted them so much that some ended up in the curiosity cabinets of King Frederick III of Denmark and Louis XIV of France. This is how the set of nine Eckhout paintings came to be included in the National Museum of Denmark’s ethnographic collection. Walk in the door marked “Peoples of the World” and that is the first thing you see. The Tarairiu Woman is perhaps the most famous and most striking (plate 2). A nearly life-sized woman stares directly from the painting. In her hand is someone else’s hand, and a foot sticks out prominently from the basket she carries on her back. Exotic plants and animals surround her, painted versions of the specimens catalogued by the team’s scientists. Behind her looms an ominous, cloudy sky, looking as much like a rainy day in Amsterdam as a thunderstorm in the tropics. Despite the major historical significance of these works, many museum visitors who pass them just keep walking. There are no wall labels explaining who painted them, how they got to the museum, or how dramatically they influenced the ways in which generations of Europeans imagined “the other.” According to Karin Tybjerg, a former curator, “The paintings are virtually unexplained; they are simply left as a kind of monument to their artistic value. They are, of course, set in an ethnographic context with objects used by the same people they refer to, but it is a shame that there is not a little more about how they came into the collection or about the kinds of social processes that produced

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these paintings.” The average visitor cannot possibly grasp how much these works shaped Europeans’ sensibilities about the world beyond their borders, or about how backward, inferior, and in need of salvation they became convinced its inhabitants were. Contrast this to what greets visitors when they enter the New Danish Prehistory exhibition just downstairs. “Experience over 14,000 years of Danish prehistory, from the reindeer-hunters of the Ice Age to the voyages of the Vikings,” boasts the museum website. This completely revamped display was met with great excitement when it reopened in 2008. The renovation, funded largely by the owner of the A. P. Moller-Maersk Shipping Company, one of the wealthiest men in Denmark, cost millions of dollars. The showcased riches include Denmark’s most significant archeological finds from the Iron, Bronze, Stone, and Viking Ages. Professional archeologists, farmers, and amateur diggers—who are numerous in Denmark—discovered many of these icons in bogs. For over ten thousand years, hundreds or maybe thousands of bodies, and the objects the deceased individuals had used, were buried in peat bogs across northwestern Europe; the first were discovered in the eighteenth century, and peat cutters have been finding them ever since. The earliest bog body, a leathery, shrunken mummy with what must have been painfully arthritic fingers and toes, is the Kølbjerg Woman from Denmark, who dates back to 8000 b.c. Anthropologists Jarrett Lobell and Samir Patel say that archeologists name their finds because they inspire such a strong connection to the past. X-rays and CT scans enable us to grasp just how much they resembled us—to look under their skin, peer inside theirs stomachs, and literally put more flesh on their bones.11 Thus the fascination with the Egtved Girl, a blonde of about sixteen years buried during the summer of 1370 b.c. Amateur archeologists discovered her wrapped in cowhide and laid in an oak coffin along with her jewelry, a small box containing a hair net, and a bottle made from birch bark filled with a fermented drink of wheat, cowberries, and myrtle. She is dressed in the height of Bronze Age fashion—a short woven wool shirt and a skirt made of cords with a band at the top and at the bottom. The museum’s website even includes a photo of an attractive blond woman smiling shyly at the camera, dressed like the Egtved Girl might have been.12 Also uncovered in a bog—in Zealand in 1902—is a magnificent sculpture of a bronze horse pulling an intricately decorated goldcoated disk in a chariot, depicting the sun as it travels from east to west. The Sun Chariot, or Solvognen, which has become a national icon, is unique. “No religious artifact like it,” the museum’s website boasts, “has been found anywhere else in the world” (plate 3). These treasures, found in bogs and elsewhere, are sumptuously lit and luxuriously ensconced in cases draped in velvet. Extensive text, written in simple language and displayed with eye-catching graphics on attractive, backlit panels, explains in great detail how people lived, worked, and worshipped during each “age.” Though the exhibition highlights commercial and trade links, connection to the outside is not the central theme. “You will not find this message directly,” said Per Christian Hansen, the museum’s current director. “If you put up great signs telling these things in a few sentences, you would be a missionary. The visitor has to work his way through to get that a lot of what’s there

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is of foreign origin but it is also a national treasure. The Sun Chariot, which you see everywhere, was probably made in Denmark, but the belief in the sun as a God was not widespread here during the Bronze Age. . . . Many things going on in Denmark were also going on in Southern Europe.” The contrasting treatments of these two very important objects inspired the title of this chapter. The Bronze Age Sun Chariot became an icon of Danish nationalism. This symbol of Denmark’s glorious past, and other objects like it, is elegantly displayed, thoroughly documented, and central to the museum visit. Meanwhile, Eckhout’s 1637 painting of the Tarairiu woman became a symbol of the uncivilized “beast” enlightened Danes were destined to tame. Like much of the museum’s ethnographic holdings, it is displayed in a gallery that feels slightly abandoned and features little explanatory text. This contrast between the “prehistoric bog” and the ethnographic, cannibalistic “beast” reflects deep divisions within the museum over how its sees its place in the world. Danish prehistory is favored, while the ethnographic collection has become the stepchild. This was not always the case. In fact, the museum’s ethnographic collection used to be the jewel in its crown. Before airplane travel, the History Channel, and foreign films became commonplace, the public flocked to the museum’s ethnographic exhibitions to learn more about the world. According to Inger Sjørslev, former curator and now a professor of anthropology at the University of Copenhagen, staff in the 1960s and 1970s, saw the museum’s role as pedagogical: to teach the Danish people that there were other ways of living and thinking, that you didn’t have to live like a Dane. They organized an extremely popular exhibition about the Buddha that probably did so well because it built upon the country’s fascination with hippie culture at the time. Exhibitions about China, Japan, and South American markets followed, attracting close to two hundred thousand visitors each. But all good things come to an end. By the 1980s, mass media brought the world to Denmark, and Danes began traveling widely. They did not need museums anymore to teach them about the world. Curators also realized that exhibitions depicting things as realistically as possible had grown stale. The public was tired of being “talked at” and wanted something more artistic and aesthetically pleasing. Anthropology, the discipline in which most curators had been trained, recalled Sjørslev, had entered its postmodern phase, asking probing questions about how to represent the “other.” You could no longer treat culture as a cohesive whole. A 1986 exhibition about Brazil, one of the museum’s last major ethnographic shows, reflected these changes. Curators created a kind of collage. “I thought we had to say clearly that this was our exhibition, our creation,” recalled Sjørslev. We wanted to call it ‘This is not Brazil.’ ” Fewer than a hundred thousand visitors attended. According to Hansen, the director, it is not that the ethnographic collection has been sidelined. It is that I am writing this book at a particular point in the museum’s renovation cycle. If I had arrived in the early 1990s, when the department got its last facelift, I would have been greeted by state-of-the art exhibitions complete with touch-screen

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computers, which were then the latest rage. The prehistorians would have been complaining. “Looking at it from the outside,” he said, “you have to take a longer view, not just the last five to ten years but a twenty- to twenty-five-year arc.” But many people disagree. The conflict over the relative value of national archeology and ethnography, they say, dates back to the museum’s founding. The organization and classification of the collection has its roots in another vision of the world and how we know and describe it. In sixteenth-century Europe, rulers, merchants, and aristocrats created kunstkammern, or cabinets of curiosities, filled with artifacts, relics, and works of art like Eckhout’s paintings. They thought of the kunstkammer as a theater or reproduction of the world, a collection that controlled and ordered what lay outside the door.13 The larger and more varied the collection, the more powerful the owner. In 1816, Christian Jürgensen Thomsen became head of the “antiquarian collection” of the Danish Royal Committee, one of the museum’s original collections; he became its first curator in 1819. The son of a wealthy merchant, Thomsen grew up in a happy, bustling home where his parents nurtured his interests. When his older brother chose to become a scholar, Christian went into the family business; but by all accounts, his true passion from boyhood on was collecting coins. Coins led Christian to art and from there to organizing Denmark’s first museums and collections. He remained in the business until his mother’s death but then happily abandoned it to dedicate himself full time to his nascent museum.14 Perhaps Thomsen’s love of coins—their subtle differences, how they changed over time, their classifications—prepared him for what became his most important project. What began as a practical attempt to put his collections in order resulted in an intellectual breakthrough with a huge and lasting impact on archaeology: the invention of the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Age classification system. In 1841, he established the first ethnographic museum in Copenhagen. When the National Museum opened in 1892, it combined the three strands still present, including a prehistory collection, an ethnographic collection, and an ethnological collection of Danish cultural materials. The organization of the collections today reflects a particular interpretation of the nation— where its boundaries and fault lines lie and where fictional ones were invented to serve particular interests. Thomsen urged Danish missionaries, colonial administrators, and tradesman living all over the world to gather and send home trophies. The collections grew actively through the 1950s. The materials were classified chronologically (the older, the more primitive) as well as geographically (the farther way from Denmark, the less advanced, with certain exceptions, like India and China). Danish prehistory was on par with that of the “low cultures out there.” Some staff valued the collections only for what they could teach Danes about themselves. In other words, said Ulf Dahne, who headed the collection between 2006 and 2008, visitors were supposed to grasp that, in the Stone Age, Denmark too had been “uncivilized and backward like these people,” and to say to themselves: “But look how far we’ve come.” The message then and today is subtle. “You see

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nice, beautiful things displayed from all over the world; and you compare these things to what you have, and you get a kind of strength in your own identity. They have cups and we have cups, and they make theirs one way and we make ours another way; but ours is better.” Others argued that the collections were valuable in their own right. “They cover millions of people out there who live lives that have nothing to do with Denmark, that are worthy in and of themselves, thank you very much,” said one curator. Recent government policy, however, seems to disagree. Some politicians have questioned why Denmark needs ethnographic collections at all, asking what these materials have to do with Denmark today. As of late, the government has funded only research that sheds light on contemporary Denmark or on places where Danish “traces” persist, including former trading posts in Ghana, the Southeastern Indian coast, and the Caribbean.15 According to former curator Karin Tybjerg, “The foreign is interesting to Denmark’s leaders only in that it pertains to some aspect of Danish history.” The National Museum of Denmark is not alone in its struggle to deal with objects acquired from other cultures under questionable circumstances. As debates at the British Museum reveal, much of the museum world is implicated. Museums have responded in several ways. They either treat objects as art and showcase their most beautiful pieces, or they take on the challenge of speaking for the “other” and try to say something about the culture and context that created the materials in their collection. When the National Museum of Denmark reinstalled its ethnographic collection in the early 1990s, it opted for art. “The ethnographic exhibition became an art exhibition,” said Dahne.16 “Everyone felt guilty about telling other people’s stories, so they decided not to tell them at all.”17 But while all roads do not necessarily lead to Rome, there have to be several ways to get there. The nation, and its place in the world, is on display in other parts of the museum. The Danish Modern History collection is one of them. Its Stories of Denmark exhibition, which covers Danish history from 1660 to 2000, reopened in 2001. It traces Denmark’s trajectory from its position as “a European superpower controlling the entrance to the Baltic to [its position as] a minor nation finding its voice in alliance with other nations” by showcasing changing Danish lifestyles and customs as well as the stories of both prominent and ordinary individuals.18 Curators found the herculean task of covering more than three hundred years of cultural history particularly challenging. They realized, according to Lykke Pedersen, the curator in charge, that Denmark has not one story but many: “Danishness was more like a question than an answer.” “People in Denmark,” the introductory wall text reads, “have always lived different lives. Peasants and nobles, the wealthy and servants, women and men. Living a good life has not always been possible for everyone. Today all citizens have equal rights and responsibilities[,] but there are still differences in the way people live. Some dedicate their lives to their careers, some invest everything in their own businesses[,] and some choose ordinary paid labor so they have more time for their hobbies and families. Some are born in Denmark and others are adopted by Danish parents[;]

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others have come to find work or have come to Denmark to escape war and oppression. Today, as in the past, they all have to be accommodated within Denmark’s boundaries.” But most curators I spoke with, inside the museum and out, agreed that what Danes have in common is much more central to the exhibition than their differences are. Director Hansen claimed this is due to the museum’s mandate. There are only 5.6 million people in Denmark. The number of foreign-born residents is relatively small. The museum’s job, he says, is to showcase the national experience, to collect and preserve the Danish experience broadly and strengthen Danes’ collective memories, not to focus on particular regions or groups. Documenting “Danish peasant culture” is key, he believes, because that is what Danes share as a nation. It’s only right that only a small amount of the museum’s real estate should be dedicated to immigrants. One “story of Denmark” is about Milan, a forty-seven-year-old man who lives in a flat in a Copenhagen suburb. He describes himself as a self-employed taxi driver who also works other jobs. In 2000, he got divorced. To avoid discrimination, his adult children use their mother’s surname so people cannot tell that their family migrated to Denmark—even though, Milan says, he came to Denmark in 1970 and feels Danish. He chose to put his shirt and tie on display because they are his working clothes. Then there is Susanne, a forty-year-old woman who lives with her husband and two children in a villa. She is a director, depicting people’s lives and their stories on film. Susanne says her priorities are humor and a good story line. She comes from a Jewish background and values Danish steadiness and tolerance. The item she put on display is her grandmother’s 1928 wedding dress, worn in Berlin, and which Susanne later dyed and used as an evening gown. So what is the idea of Denmark that today’s museum visitors take away? My conversations revealed a collective sense among curators and commentators alike that the current message comes up short. They felt the museum had not gone far enough. It needed to create global citizens more actively, either by teaching visitors explicitly about their responsibility to the world or by making the museum more welcoming to new Danes so they don’t need a magnifying glass to find themselves in it. As one curator put it, “Part of what a national museum needs to do is to explore what our place is in the world. Part of a liberal education is to know about the world. So this should occupy center stage, because as citizens of Denmark we need to know about the world. But that is not how the collections are used at the moment.” So, for now, the bog is clearly winning over the beast, even if, as Per Christian Hansen claims, it is only a temporary victory. While the New Danish Prehistory exhibition stresses Denmark’s long-standing ties to the outside world, it does so to fortify Danishness. Colorful maps with arrows pointing in all directions show ancient trade and commercial partners. The coins people used to trade with one another are also on display. Diagrams indicate the many points where violent contact plagued the region. This is the cosmopolitan side of the equation. But although visitors are asked to reconsider the roots of the country’s most iconic treasures, in the end they can still claim them for the nation. In

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every room, says Peter Aronsson, there is a map with Denmark in the center.19 The schoolchildren parading through the museum’s lobby in their Viking costumes should be very proud. They are clearly meant to embrace a more nationalistic cosmopolitanism. That Denmark celebrates its prehistory while Sweden stresses global problems gets to the core of how each country relates to the city, the nation, and the globe. The National Museum of Denmark, most curators believe, is concerned about globalization as a way to understand Danishness. The Museum of World Culture creates cosmopolitan Swedes, which eventually strengthens the nation. At the same time, both countries showcase internal diversity reluctantly, although, at least until recently, Sweden did so a little more loudly and a little more often. Why? What is it about each city’s cultural armature and its nation’s history, culture, and geopolitical standing that helps explain these differences?

SWEDEN IN A NUTSHELL

Although Sweden does not feature prominently in a list of former colonial powers, it had its day as an important player on the regional, if not world, stage. In the early seventeenth century, Sverige took its place among the great European forces to be reckoned with after Gustav II Adolf successfully brought neighboring Danes, Germans, Poles, and Russians to their knees. The country’s prominence lasted until the second half of the 1700s, when Sweden became a minor state as a result of losses at war. These experiences had a lasting effect on the national psyche, making Swedes allergic to war and messy involvements with Europe and instilling in them a deep sense of respect for state authority and power.20 It also led the country to self-identify as a regional leader that could and should set an example for its neighbors, if not the world. The same can be said of Stockholm. Tradition has it that Sweden’s capital began life as a fortress built by Birger Jarl in 1250 on a small island at the mouth of Lake Mälaren. Its strategic location kept it relatively safe from maritime attacks and ensured its place as a commercial crossroads—all the iron and copper exported from Sweden’s interior went through the city. As early as the thirteenth century, trade between Sweden and the German Hanseatic ports flowed steadily through Stockholm, which was part of the Hanseatic League, a trading block that prospered for nearly three hundred years and which some call the world’s first common market.21 German entrepreneurs, attracted by the area’s natural resources and economic opportunities, flocked to Stockholm’s shores, and German could be heard on its streets almost as often as Swedish. The Germans ranked among the city’s wealthiest residents and had their own parish and graveyard. In fact, an early ordinance, later repealed, mandated that at least half of Stockholm’s town council members be German. These early influences are still evident on the streets today. Tyskabrinken, literally “the German Slope,” is a major street in the city’s Gamla Stan, or Old Town. The Tyska Kyrka, or German Church, is located nearby on the site where the German Guild of Saint

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Gertrude operated in the fourteenth century.22 German immigrants kept their language, “nationality,” and connections to their towns of origin but were expected to abide by Swedish laws and social norms. Birger Jarl welcomed but also controlled them, setting the stage for future immigration policy.23 Swedish royals took an early, avid interest in urban planning. Seventeenth-century Sweden boasted one of Europe’s most efficient state bureaucracies, and Swedish citizens were among the region’s most socially disciplined and politically controlled.24 The government concentrated foreign trade in Stockholm and Gothenberg, thereby cutting off other cities from foreign contact. Specific commodities, like iron, circulated through certain towns via certain routes, creating a new urban hierarchy and a new urban-rural relationship.25 By midcentury, Stockholm, with its population of thirty to forty thousand, was well on its way to becoming the splendid center of an expanding empire.26 Its grandeur depended heavily on its economic role. All goods brought to Stockholm were processed at one of six customs stations; approximately three-fourths were then exported. The city also became the center of military production supporting Sweden’s aggressive foreign policy. Foreign visitors marveled “at the sight of large ships with 60 or 70 cannons” moored along the eastern quay next to the royal castle.27 From the very outset, then, Stockholm had trade, connection, and immigration in its DNA. During the eighteenth century, this mercantile model of economic growth grew even stronger. The Swedish nobility came into their own, making fortunes by selling bar iron on the international market and controlling its chartered companies. The most successful was the Swedish East India Company (1731–1813), headquartered in Gothenberg. But the shipyards, trade houses, and showrooms where exotic products from the Orient got sold were all located in Stockholm. The China trade, in particular, greatly influenced the city, since most of the men who sailed to the East called Stockholm their home. Gustav III’s late-eighteenth-century reign also left a deep imprint on Sweden’s national character and on Stockholm’s cultural landscape. Gustav, who loved France dearly, was actually in Paris when his father died, and he had to rush back to become king. He vowed to make Sweden as culturally sophisticated as France, ushering in a period of great creativity. He built the Royal Opera and founded the Swedish Academy. While the intellectual elite loved him for generously supporting the arts, the nobility were less convinced, particularly after he lost a fruitless war with Russia and declared himself an absolute monarch. In 1792, a disgruntled nobleman assassinated him. Sweden did not fare well in the nineteenth century. Although Swedish inventors created ball bearings, the table telephone, and dynamite, the country lost ground industrially. Scarce investment capital, poor roads, and a shortage of cultivable land forced many people to emigrate. By the end of the 1800s, a million and a half people had left the country—nearly a quarter of the population. The government’s response to these social ills foreshadowed the strong social safety net it would later provide for its people. In 1847, the country enacted a “poor law,” requiring each parish and town to feed its needy. Between 1844 and 1859, King Oskar I humanized Swedish prisons in ways that leaders

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around the world later emulated. In 1889, a group of progressive activists founded the Social Democratic Party, which set the stage for the Swedish model of governance and ushered in Sweden’s golden age.28 After World War I, Swedish industry came into its own. Companies founded by Alfred Nobel and John Ericsson gained international prominence. The country’s iron and shipping industries boomed. Ivar Kreuger, the “Match King,” came close to monopolizing global match production. As a result, Sweden overcame the economic ravages of the Depression more easily than most countries. By 1936, wages returned to their precrisis levels; by the end of the 1930s, unemployment was low. During this period, social democratic ideas of the folkhemmet (the “people’s home”), which holds the state responsible for its citizens in times of unemployment, sickness, or old age, took hold. Financed by taxes on income and employer contributions, the Swedish model, as the Social Democrats’ project became known, provided Swedes with unemployment insurance, pensions, improved and accessible medical care, subsidized housing, and a revamped, fully-paidfor public education system. Around the world, interest in Sweden grew. In 1936, the American journalist Marquis Childs wrote Sweden: The Middle Way, a sympathetic account of the country’s efforts to chart a humane course between unfettered capitalism and dogmatic socialism. Critics, however, saw Swedes as the “new totalitarians,” whose government exercised far too much control over its citizens. World War II prevented full implementation of the model. Sweden declared its neutrality, although it still feared a German invasion. Throughout the war, the country supplied the Nazis with iron ore and tolerated regular challenges to its sovereignty, including, most famously, a 1941 train that carried German troops from Norway across Sweden to Germany’s then-ally Finland. After the war, the Social Democrats easily won the 1946 election. They remained in power for the next thirty years, during which they created the folkhemmet in all its glory as a cradle-to-grave welfare state. Unlike those of its war-torn neighbors, World War II left the Swedish economy relatively unharmed; it could easily restart its export industries. “It was not only industry,” writes Jonas Frykman, “but also Sweden’s modern heritage that was still intact when it entered the post-war era.”29 Exports rose from 5 percent of GDP at the end of the war to more than 22 percent by 1950. Sweden’s industrial competitiveness increased, its postwar prosperity soared, and the welfare state thrived. Between 1950 and 1970, unemployment remained very low. In fact, the country needed more skilled and semiskilled workers, which it invited in by the tens of thousands, initially from neighboring countries, and then from southern Europe. At first, Swedes warmly welcomed these invandrare, or immigrants, into their bountiful folk house. During this golden age, Swedes saw themselves, and were seen by others, as tolerant, egalitarian, and rational, modeling for the rest of the world a unique, neutral path that combined the rewards of capitalism with generous social protections. But small cracks began to appear in the late 1960s. Public expenditures spun out of control. The state had to create more public-sector jobs to keep down unemployment,

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especially as more women entered the workforce. Sweden’s bloated economy could not respond quickly or flexibly enough to absorb external shocks. The Social Democrats lost their bid for reelection in 1976, replaced by a coalition of liberals, moderates, and Center Party members. Three powerful figures captured national and international attention during this period. The first two were Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, Nobel laureates, politicians, and social scientists. The third was Olof Palme, an internationalist, anticolonialist, and ardent socialist, revered and reviled for refusing to take sides in the Cold War and for speaking truth to the United States and the Soviet Union alike. Palme described two experiences that led him to socialism and contributed to his internationalism.30 The first was the three months he spent hitchhiking in the United States and Mexico after graduating from Kenyon College in Ohio in 1948. The trip brought Palme face to face with real-life social problems that many of the activists he admired were working to fix. The thirty-state trip culminated in an interview with his personal hero and the subject of his thesis, Walter Reuther of the United Auto Workers.31 These encounters, he later wrote, instilled in him a faith in the possibility of solidarity across borders, of nations working together to address poverty, oppression, and inequality. When, in 1953, as a twenty-six-year-old law student and member of the Social Democratic Party, he traveled to India and Southeast Asia to investigate local students’ experiences, what he saw firsthand solidified his lifetime commitment to internationalism and anticolonialism.32 Palme persuaded many Swedes—and others around the world—that Sweden had been a regional power in the past, and that it should continue to be a moral exemplar in the future.33 It was, he believed, a country that led and defended nations outside the superpower system and followed its moral compass wherever it pointed. Palme’s “controversial rhetorical style became a trademark.”34 He was an equal opportunity critic, opposing U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Soviet repression during the Prague Spring, South African apartheid, and the rightward turn of the Reagan-Thatcher era. In a 2011 remembrance of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, journalist Karen Holst notes, “Palme left behind a legacy that swept the globe. It’s evident in the more than 70 streets, public facilities and memorials that bear his name in all corners, such as an elementary school in the Western Sahara, a children’s hospital in Vietnam and a city park in Iraq.” But in Sweden his enduring influence goes even deeper. “Palme’s outspoken position on global affairs transformed the international image of Sweden,” writes Holst, “from an undistinguished country on the northerly fringe of European borders into a defender of the weak and a powerful voice for peace and disarmament.”35 As Klas Eklund, one of Palme’s former speechwriters, explains, “Palme is known, more than anyone else, for opening Sweden to the rest of the world, for putting Sweden on the map.”36 He strove to make Swedes into consummate cosmopolitans. Palme’s assassination in 1986 plunged Sweden into a deep identity crisis. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union robbed the country of its prized role as the global voice of reason. Both domestically and abroad, Swedish certitudes began to

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crumble. Ingvar Carlsson, who became prime minister, could not match Palme’s charismatic presence. The economy suffered dramatic reverses. In 1991, with a 90 percent election turnout, the country shifted dramatically to the right. The Christian Democrats and the New Democracy Party, a far-right anti-immigrant group, gained prominence. Sweden had not experienced significant immigration until World War II. Jews fleeing Nazi Germany had sought asylum; although small numbers were allowed to settle, most were rejected owing to anti-Semitism, the prevailing ideology of racial purity, and the government’s policy of avoiding conflicts with Nazi Germany. During the war, large numbers of neighboring residents came to Sweden in search of safe haven. Finnish children arrived after the Soviets attacked in 1939. When Germany occupied Denmark and Norway, resistance fighters and Jews also crossed into the country. Though at first reluctantly welcomed, these foreigners were later warmly embraced because they could fill in for workers who went off to support the National Defense Service.37 During the second phase of immigration to Sweden (1949–71) labor migrants from Finland and southern Europe entered the country with few restrictions and provided much-needed labor for Sweden’s thriving export industries. Unlike some European countries, such as Germany and Switzerland, Sweden treated labor migrants as future citizens. A 1968 government bill established that immigrants should live under the same conditions as the native-born population and attain the same standard of living. Foreign workers enjoyed the same wages and rights as Swedes, including access to unemployment benefits.38 Few problems arose until the economic downturns of the 1970s that forced the government to stop unsponsored migration. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, however, asylum seekers from Uganda, Somalia, Chile, and other parts of Latin America, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East continued to arrive.39 From the 1970s to the mid-1990s, Sweden instituted its own brand of multiculturalism with a social democratic twist. It pursued a corporatist strategy, organizing society into groups and providing for people according to their collective memberships. Immigrants permanently residing in Sweden enjoyed the same rights as Swedish citizens (equality), including access to the welfare system. In private life, they could decide how much of their native culture to maintain (freedom of choice), which the state supported through initiatives like language classes for all immigrant children and by broadcasting hour-long children’s news programs in the most popular minority languages. What people did at home, however, was not supposed to conflict with the essential Swedish values and norms of the street (partnership). The principle of partnership justified immigrant voting rights in local and county elections and efforts to encourage newcomers to participate in Swedish political parties and trade unions. Partnership also meant informing native-born Swedes about the immigrants and minorities now living in their midst. In the 1990s, the political winds shifted significantly. People blamed the government for the nation’s economic slump. The political discourse changed from discussions about culture and collective identities to talk about individuals with rights, including the right to decide who you are on your own. Critics of multiculturalism claimed it locked people

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into homogeneous categories that masked diversity. When people were treated above all as “immigrants,” the need to recognize individuals as belonging to a specific cultural group trumped the risk of marginalizing or excluding them. By 2014, about one-fifth of Sweden’s population had an immigrant background, up from 11.3 percent in 2000 and 9.2 percent in 1990. Immigrants were defined as those who had been born abroad or born in Sweden to two immigrant parents.40 The most prominent sending countries, after Finland, included Iraq, Poland, the former Yugoslavia, and Iran. The economic challenges now facing the country as a whole seem to disproportionately affect immigrants. In 2009–10, for example, Sweden had the highest gap between native and immigrant employment rates among member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Only 63 percent of immigrants were employed, compared to 76 percent of the native-born population. The challenges immigrants face are particularly evident in Sweden’s cities. In 2012, residents with immigrant backgrounds made up 23 percent of Stockholm’s population, including labor migrants from Finland (8.7 percent), Poland (5.3 percent), and Turkey (3.7 percent) and refugees from Iraq (8.1 percent) and Iran (5.7 percent).41 As in many European cities, immigrants are residentially segregated in specific neighborhoods or districts, often on the outskirts of the greater metropolitan area. In 2011, residents with an immigrant background made up 17 percent of the population living in Stockholm’s inner-city district of Södermalm, compared to nearly 80 percent in outlying Rinkeby-KistaI.42 Districts were also sharply divided according to immigrants’ countries of origin. In the inner-city districts of Södermalm and Östermalm, nearly 40 percent of residents with an immigrant background were from Europe and North America, compared to those in Rinkeby-KistaI, where 30 percent were from Africa, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Lebanon, and Syria. Migrants from Somalia, Iraq, and other primarily Muslim countries tend to be residentially segregated from native-born Swedes more than migrants from other parts of Europe.43 In 2010, the Sweden Democrats, a far-right party whose motto is “security and tradition,” which pledged to reduce immigration by 90 percent, received 5.7 percent of the vote; unlike elsewhere in Europe, however, the country’s mainstream parties refused to form a coalition with them. In 2013, unrest erupted when police killed a sixty-nine-year-old Portuguese immigrant living in Husby, a suburb in Stockholm County, where over 60 percent of residents were from immigrant backgrounds and unemployment was twice the national average.44 The protests magnified into a week of riots by bands of young people, including immigrant youth as well as far-right supporters angry over long-term youth unemployment and poverty. These incidents were not entirely new—riots had erupted previously in Södertälje (2005), Malmö (2008 and 2010), and Rinkeby-Kistal (2010).45

THE DANISH PAST IN THE PRESENT

When it comes to size and political power, Denmark, like Sweden, has also seen better days. Though the Vikings swept across Europe between 800 and 1100, getting as far as

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what is today England, by 1800 Denmark was a minor imperial power. It ruled over a small group of tropical colonies and trading posts in India, Ghana, and the West Indies; controlled several territories in the North Atlantic, including Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and Norway; and held suzerainty over the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Denmark lost most of this territory in defeats to Sweden and Germany, and today only the Faroe Islands, Greenland, and the northern part of Schleswig are still governed, if only in part, by Denmark.46 Like Stockholm, Copenhagen lies at the site of an impressive natural harbor. An active fishing trade drove its early economic expansion. Unlike Stockholm, Denmark did not belong to the Hanseatic League.47 In fact, the league took up arms against the Danish king Valdemar in 1361, when he attacked the city of Visby, on the Swedish island of Gotland, in protest over Hansa restrictions on Danish trade. The league needed Visby because it was strategically located near the shipping routes connecting Baltic communities and the North Sea. The seventy-odd cities that fought to protect Visby’s independence resoundingly defeated Valdemar. The 1370 Treaty of Stralsund, signed at the height of the league’s strength, reflected its power and arrogance. All Hansa ships (but not Denmark’s) could travel freely through “the Sound” between Denmark and Sweden. The league even gained the right to veto whom the Danes chose as king. Between 1500 and the mid-1700s, Sweden and Denmark battled fiercely for control of the Baltic. Six short wars occurred between 1563 and 1720. When Christian IV of Denmark unsuccessfully intervened in the Thirty Year War (1625–29), his country grew even more vulnerable and would have fallen to Sweden had the Netherlands and England not intervened. The cost of autonomy was high. Denmark lost what is today the Swedish province of Scania (Skåne), reducing its population by about one-third. A political crisis ensued and a hereditary monarchy replaced what had been an elected one. Frederick II and his successors enjoyed absolute power until Denmark adopted a democratic constitution in 1848. Absolutism had its advantages. The king introduced sweeping reforms that made farming more efficient and profitable. A new independent class of farmers emerged that would become the driving force behind the country’s folk high-school and cooperative movements in the 1900s.48 But despite these gains, Denmark kept shrinking. The country became hopelessly embroiled in Napoleon’s conflicts with the rest of Europe. The government refused to take sides, and the English navy attacked Copenhagen, seizing the Danish fleet. When Denmark lost Norway in 1814, the country was reduced to what it is today, plus the German duchies. But this too soon changed. After its defeat by the Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1864, Denmark ceded all three duchies and lost almost one-third of its total area and population. About two hundred thousand ethnic Danes remained stranded south of the new border.49 These experiences strongly affected Danes. The well-known motto “Outward losses must be compensated by inward gains” captured the national spirit of the moment. Denmark was now a small country. While it had once been ethnically diverse, now it was

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homogeneous. To heal and move forward, Denmark had to turn inward and look to its own strengths. Throughout the eighteenth century, multiple languages could be heard on Copenhagen’s streets. The royal family, the court, and the army spoke German and French. “Middle-class” Copenhageners, as well as the city’s many Jewish merchants, spoke German. But by the mid-eighteenth century, interest in the Danish language and “the fatherland” was on the rise. Who belonged and what was required to become a member of the nation was a subject of great debate. One view held that the nation included everyone living on Danish soil, while another restricted membership based on language and birthplace.50 The tension between Germans and Danes in Denmark came to a head in what became known as “the German Feud” precipitated by, of all things, an opera. Holger Danske, written in 1789 by a Danish lyricist and a German composer who lived most of his life in Denmark, tells the story of a legendary Danish hero who symbolized the strength and courage of the Danish people. Although it was initially well received, Danish audiences later objected to what they claimed was a demeaning portrayal of the main character. Among the most offended was the author Peter Andreas Heiberg, who stated that “experience has taught me that all those whose mother tongue is German prefer to be seen as subjects of the Holy Roman Empire rather than Denmark and they despise the Danish language and everything that is Danish contrary to all duty and obligation.”51 From then on, German applicants for citizenship need not have applied. The influential Danish philosopher, writer, and minister N. F. S. Grundtvig (1783– 1872) helped guide Denmark through some of these tumultuous times. After graduating from the University of Copenhagen, Grundtvig took up the study of Scandinavian literature. But an 1811 spiritual awakening transformed the young academic into a fiery and controversial theologian and minister. While his attacks on Lutheran thinkers, whom he deemed excessively rational, left him convicted of libel, officially censored, and without a pulpit for many years, Grundtvig prevailed and became enormously influential. Even today, many of the hymns Danes sing each Sunday are his compositions. Perhaps Grundtvig’s most enduring legacy is the folk high school, which offers a kind of adult education designed not only to teach the “common man” but also to provide him with a sense of pride, dignity, and self-reliance. The folk high school educates pupils to actively participate in the nation’s social and political life, teaching them practical skills as well as Danish poetry and history through a Christian lens. Like many of his fellow nationalists, Grundtvig saw traditional universities as elitist and criticized their focus on the classics and Latin over biblical and national history. He believed strongly in the wisdom of ordinary working people, whom he deemed more capable of enlightenment than the upper crust.52 Grundtvig stressed unity based on similarity. His views differed sharply from those of Meir Aron Goldschmidt, his intellectual contemporary and fellow countryman, who supported a more cosmopolitan view. The two debated heatedly and publicly, with most onlookers concluding that Grundtvig won. Meanwhile, the folk-high-school

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movement gained popularity. By 1867, there were twenty-one folk high schools around the country; by 1918, there were sixty-eight, and there are still more than seventy in Denmark today.53 The birth of museums in Denmark went hand and hand with the folk-high-school movement. National pride inspired many villages and towns to start parish museums (stiftsmuseum). Local citizens, for example, started the Viborg Stiftsmuseum in 1861 to entertain history buff King Frederik VII when he visited. At first, the National Museum of Denmark loaned most of the items these local museums put on display. But as Grundtvig’s ideas gained prominence, so did the idea that local objects, reflecting the Danish peasant experience, were also valuable. The Germany concept of heimat—the idea that you can’t love your country if you don’t love your own little corner of the earth— seeped over the Danish border.54 It’s not surprising, then, that many Danes associate the birth of democratic Denmark with an ethnically Danish, monolingual egalitarian nation-state that single-mindedly pursued its own social and economic growth. These ideas have deep roots (remember, “Outward losses must be compensated by inward gains”). The country’s strength arises from its common cultural, religious, and linguistic traditions. Newcomers are frequently seen as not wanting or not being able to fit in.55 The Danish-born, Macedonian-origin taxi driver who took me from the airport to my hotel during one trip conveyed this feeling when he explained to me how Danes do politics, but did not include himself among them. But immigrants have long been coming to Denmark. As early as 1521, Christian II invited Dutch farmers to settle in Amager, today a thriving part of Copenhagen, to supply the Danish court with vegetables and feed the city’s residents. In the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century, thousands of poor Swedish and Polish farm laborers came to the country. As we have already seen, well into the eighteenth century Germans were regarded as resourceful, contributing citizens. After the king allowed Jews into Copenhagen in the 1600s, he later welcomed French Huguenots. Whereas the nation reluctantly accepted immigrants, introducing restrictive laws as far back as the early 1900s, the fast-growing city of Copenhagen depended on them. They were welcome in the city as long as they could support themselves.56 During the 1960s and early 1970s, thousands of immigrants from the Balkans, the Middle East, Pakistan, and North Africa came to work in industries hard pressed for labor.57 Refugees also arrived from Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, and Somalia. In 1973, when oil prices rose sharply and unemployment soared, the government stopped letting people in; but many of those already living in Denmark stayed. By 1983 the immigrant population from non-Western countries had grown to approximately 50,000, or almost 60,000 including their descendants.58 In the second quarter of 2014, there were 280,282 foreign-born residents of non-Western origin in the country and 202,594 immigrants from Western countries. Descendants of immigrants numbered 22,109 and 129,315 from Western and non-Western countries, respectively.59

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Today, Denmark’s diversity is still concentrated in Copenhagen. In 2011, 17 percent of the city’s population was foreign-born, compared to 8 percent in the country as a whole. As in Stockholm, residential segregation among immigrants is high owing to labor market discrimination, limited social housing units, rising housing costs, and restrictive immigration policies. In the Nørrebro neighborhood, which boasts the largest numbers of immigrant residents, 28 percent of the 20,360 people living in the area were either immigrants or their descendants in 2009. More than half came from countries with large Muslim populations, including Bosnia-Herzegovina, Turkey, Somalia, Morocco, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Syria.60 Since 2010, immigrants and their descendants are becoming better integrated into the labor market, but gaps still persist between ethnic Danes and “Western” and “non-Western” immigrants. Immigrant unemployment rates are also declining, although rates vary considerably by immigrant group.61 As the numbers of newcomers grew and tolerance dwindled, Denmark tightened its borders and withdrew its welcome mat. The Aliens Act in 1986 made it much more difficult for people to obtain asylum or citizenship and much easier to deport undocumented immigrants. In 1992, the legislature toughened the criteria for family reunification. Concerns about immigration dominated the elections in 1998, 2001, and 2005 and catapulted the nationalist and populist Dansk Folkeparti (Danish People’s Party) to prominence, in part because of its anti-immigrant stance. The last government (2001–11) consisted of the party Venstre (a center-right liberal party) and the Konservative Folkeparti (Conservative People’s Party) with support from Dansk Folkeparti. After taking office, legislators introduced a package of reforms restricting the numbers of immigrants and refugees allowed into the country, toughening the requirements for permanent residence and citizenship, and pressuring newcomers to embrace “Danish values” and became socially integrated.62 As part of its new politics of immigration, the government introduced a citizenship test in 2007 including forty questions about Danish history and culture. Tensions came to a head in the Danish cartoon debacle of 2006, when a Danish newspaper published inflammatory political cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad. Protesters around the world burned Danish flags and boycotted Danish goods. Many Danes were stunned by the world’s anger, still seeing themselves as respectful, peace-loving people who valued, above all, freedom of expression. The prime minister even went on Arab-language TV to argue that the right to free speech trumped any violation of religious rights. In September 2011, Helle Thorning-Schmidt became Denmark’s first female prime minister and its first prime minister from the left in nearly a decade. Thorning-Schmidt’s coalition, composed of Social Democrats and two other parties, defeated the incumbent right-wing bloc by a narrow margin of five seats.63 Nevertheless, Thorning-Schmidt was triumphant, telling supporters, “We did it. Make no mistake: We have written history. Today there’s a change of guards in Denmark.”64 Observers around the world agreed that the election changed Denmark’s political landscape in at least one key way: until the next

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election, the conservative Danish People’s Party would no longer be Denmark’s kingmaker.65 Much of the rhetoric, however, remains the same: A new “new to Denmark website” states that in order to be granted a permanent residence permit, immigrants must submit a signed “Declaration of Integration and Active Citizenship in Danish Society.”66 The majority of Danes understand integration as assimilation. Museums are part of the arsenal the Danish government uses to create a more cohesive Denmark. Part of his job, remarked Ole Winther, head of the Museum Department at the National Office of Cultural Heritage, is to make sure that Danes of all ages and backgrounds visit the country’s museums. In 2009, the government published a comprehensive plan titled Culture for All. Its goals included making sure that ethnic and nonethnic Danes could access and feel connected to the country’s culture and heritage. It’s very hard, admitted Winther, for “nonethnic Danes” to feel comfortable in Danish cultural institutions. “There is a nonverbal culture, expressed in poems, songs, or why the flag is important, that we need to make verbal so that other ethnicities can understand.” So where is this work currently being done? In very few places, Winther admitted when we spoke in 2010. “Museum directors have not been keen on discussing citizenship. The Danish People’s Party is trying to tighten immigration. Your [American] green card is nothing compared to how hard it is to get into Denmark. Immigration is a political minefield, and museum directors have been afraid to take it on.” Nor, from his perspective, have Danish museums been particularly good at creating cosmopolitans either. Museum attendance is frustratingly low among the sixteen-to-thirty-year-old set. The typical visitor, he said, is a woman, aged fifty-five or older, who is not particularly global in her outlook. She wants to see things that are close to her physically and mentally. “When we get a generation that is more global, which will happen with the next generation because of the Internet, then our museums will become more global.” The one place where people felt “diversity is happening” was at the Museum of Copenhagen. This is no accident. Its director, Jette Sandahl, took up her position following stints at the National Museum of Denmark, the MWC in Gothenburg, and the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand. One of the first exhibitions that went up after she arrived, in November 2011, was Becoming a Copenhagener. It is, according to the museum website, “the first exhibition that places immigration at the very core of Copenhagen’s development[,] . . . not just as a curious feature in the life of the town, but rather as a key ingredient in the town’s growth and development.”67 The show tries to convince visitors that Copenhagen has always been a global city, because people from around the world have always lived there. It also calls into question who gets to belong in the city: who chooses to belong and who is allowed to choose. A new Danish Immigration Museum, located in Farum, a suburb of Copenhagen, opened in January 2012, suggesting a greater overall willingness in the museum community to put the nation’s internal diversity on display. The website text describing the exhibition Welcome? reads, “Integration is to assemble parts into a whole. Throughout

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history, various groups of immigrants have been received in Denmark in very different ways depending on the historical situation, the physical conditions, etc.”68

D E S T I N AT I O N X

The former Gothenburg City Museum, out of which the Museum of World Culture grew, was well known for its Latin American collections, particularly its remarkable pre-Incan textiles from Paracas, Peru. In the 1930s, Sven Karell, who was then the Swedish consul general, bought about a hundred textiles from an archaeological museum in Lima. The textiles had been looted from graves; no one knows how they became part of the museum’s collection or whether Karell realized they had been stolen.69 Debates about where these treasures rightfully belong rage today. Some argue they are Andean, rather than Peruvian, because they were made before Peru became an independent nation. Others claim they are an unquestionable part of Gothenburg’s patrimony, becoming Swedish as soon as they crossed the border. In fact, some Gothenburgers felt so strongly they had the textiles declared official city property, so that if the national government started repatriating objects, these holdings would be beyond their reach.70 To no avail. In June 2014, according to the U.S. media outlet CBS News, the first batch of ancient works “that Sweden is returning to Peru 80 years after they were smuggled out by a diplomat” arrived in Lima.71 The exhibition where the textiles are displayed, A Stolen World: The Paracas Collection, is also controversial. Some visitors find it too exotic. Because they are fragile and cannot be exposed to much light, the works are shown in a setting reminiscent of a child’s bedroom, lit only by a nightlight. The visitor enters a kind of dream world, made even more mysterious and alluring by the figures and neon designs that flash off and on along the bottom of the showcases. There is little text. The people who created and used these masterpieces are not present. But a wall panel clearly states that the museum acquired them under dubious circumstances. Margareta Ahlin, the museum’s second director, described this solution as a typical Swedish “middle way”—exhibiting the textiles because so many people come to see them while fully acknowledging that they came to the museum through questionable channels. Another exhibition on display during my 2010 visit was Destination X. Curators structured this reflection on different types of mobility around nine pillars, each with its own theme. One explored how different travelers move with different degrees of freedom. A section titled “In Transit” compared what it is like to be “in transit” in an airport with what it is like to be “in transit” in a Liberian refugee camp. How do the plastic toys that airlines give to children stack up against what the United Nations High Commission on Refugees distributes to young refugees? A second section included objects people brought with them on important journeys—the children’s clothing a woman took when she traveled to Columbia to adopt her daughter, the shoes worn by a religious pilgrim, or a water bottle contributed to the show by a woman who traveled to Hungary to meet

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the man she had fallen in love with over the Internet (plate 4). The last pillar, called Paradox, included photos by the Spanish photographer Rogelio Lopez Cuenca. One showed a split image—the body of a woman swimming in a pool below the surface of the water and, above it, the head of someone who fell overboard while traveling from Africa to Spain. Another group of photos shows a strip of a beautiful beach by day and the same scary stretch of sand at night as migrants try to land there. A place that is beautiful and safe can also be a place of terror and pain. Sweden’s commitment to tell global stories does not stop there. Even institutions that might be expected to be bastions of Swedishness—like the National Historical Museum in Stockholm—adapt a global story line. In contrast to the New Danish Prehistory exhibition at the National Museum of Denmark, the introductory text to Sweden’s comparable exhibition reads, “In the year 1000, there was no Swedish nation, there were no fixed boundaries or borders. There was no common law or currency, and there were few common traditions. People did not think of themselves as ‘Swedish’ but rather as living in a particular place, belonging to a certain clan, or having a certain lord and master. The history of what we call Sweden is really the thoughts, decisions, and actions of innumerable people—a chorus of voices, only a few of which can be accommodated in this exhibition.” Archeology, said curator Fredrik Svanberg, has always been used to build nations, but the staff at the National Historical Museum wanted to use these materials in a different way. The first part of the exhibition moves chronologically, following a set of characters who lived during different time periods. The second part is organized thematically around a set of questions about who the visitor is, what he or she believes in, and how history is made. Museumgoers become the ninth person in the line of the eight characters they encountered earlier. Based on the directions they choose (organized like the gates in an airport), visitors explore these questions in rooms organized around themes— in what, according to Lars Amreus, museum director and head of the Swedish Museum Association, “is one of the world’s few postcolonial prehistory exhibitions.”72 But while Swedish museums showcase Sweden’s deep connections to the world beyond its borders, one has to look harder to find the diversity within. As in The Stories of Denmark exhibition in Copenhagen, the immigrant experience is there, but subtly— although somewhat more in the forefront than in Denmark. To my repeated questions about where immigrants are represented in museums, a curator at Nordiska Museet responded, “Maybe you don’t see them explicitly. Nowhere, really. But, of course, they are there. When you look at the silver, you realize it reflects the German influence which was big in Sweden in the seventeenth century.” Recently, staff started using labels to make these connections more explicit for visitors. The public learns that even the quintessentially Swedish potato is really a South American import. Charles the Twelfth introduced the coffee culture of which Swedes are so proud when he returned home from a stint in a Turkish prison in the eighteenth century. As in Denmark, there is an implicit institutional division of labor. Over and over, respondents mentioned the Mångkulturellt Centrum, or the Multicultural Center, located

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in the immigrant neighborhood of Botkyrka, as the place where immigrants would find themselves on display. The Center, founded in 1987 “promotes a society where diversity is reflected in the national self-image and where migration-related phenomena are a natural part of the Swedish cultural heritage.”73 Its research and documentation try to capture how migration changes society—to show that being a multicultural society is not just about people from different countries but about native-born Swedes as well. At the Stockholm City Museum, where the immigrant experience is also on display, Anna Ulfstrand, the head of the documentation unit, said the focus has often been on children’s programming or contemporary collecting. “We have not worked very hard on it, although we are trying now with contemporary collections,” she said. “I want to find themes where the immigrant experience can be part of another theme, not special projects about how it is to be an immigrant. . . . I think it’s really important to say that immigration is a part of contemporary Swedish history, [that] it’s not something at the margins, it’s really something in the middle. In Sweden, the idea of immigrants has been talked about as a problem, as something that is not a part of the society, and I think after all these years we have to let that go.”

T H E B O G V E R S U S B O L LY W O O D

The Danish and Swedish museum communities responded differently to the demographic sea changes under way in their respective countries. While both countries took on the global, Copenhagen museums did so primarily to celebrate the national. Museums in Stockholm and Gothenburg saw creating globally minded Swedes as a valuable goal in and of itself and one that might ultimately benefit the nation. Both countries took on internal diversity reluctantly. Museums showcased the immigrant experience subtly, as part of larger exhibitions with broader messages or in separate institutions. Just as immigrants are residentially segregated in particular urban neighborhoods, so the representation of their experience is relegated to specific gallery settings. What explains these different locations on the cosmopolitan-nationalism continuum? Why do Swedish museums drive forward cosmopolitanism—values, skills, and political projects, like addressing climate change and human trafficking—while, in the end, Danish museums generally reference global ideas and values to celebrate Danishness? Why do both countries still display a rather monolithic nation, showcasing diversity in ways that somehow set immigrants and their children apart? For one thing, some curators feel strongly that museums are not places for creating citizens. Museums are not built to respond quickly or easily to current events but, rather, produce permanent exhibitions that last a long time. According to Håkan Wahlquist, curator for Asia at Etnografiska Museet in Stockholm, museums are bad at taking on current events. “During the first Kuwait war, we decided to do something about Kuwait. It took five or six months before we put it in place. It consisted of teapots and a Bedouin tent—that was the backdrop we had [in order] to talk about what happened in Gulf. We

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are not set up to respond quickly and with agility. Our exhibitions are too blunt. Museums are a slow medium.” Several curators simply did not see the “present” as part of their job description. They were trained to preserve and protect the collections under their care. They did not appreciate feeling pressured to take on social issues they were unequipped to deal with. “I am not philosophically against [taking on the present], but I am against killing all the other things,” Staffan Brunius, curator of the Latin American Collection at Etnografiska Museet told me. “Everyday, people email me from all over the world requesting information about the old things. I am afraid that when my time is up, there will be no one to take care of it. A curator for globalization is not responsible for collections; he or she is a person who is floating in the philosophical sphere. We are getting rid of everything that is the backbone of the museum.” Brunius’s comment speaks to a generational divide in curatorial training. While he cut his teeth mastering every detail about the objects for which he is responsible, many younger curators are trained as social scientists. While he used to have time to do research, he now feels forced to work on the “quick and dirty” in an environment that is anti-intellectual. He also has no patience for discussions about repatriation. Sweden should apologize to no one for its collection, nor should it think for one second about returning it. “I have no problem being associated with an ethnographic or anthropological museum that has its roots in the Academy of Sciences founded in 1739. I think that the whole discussion about identity that is going on in present-day museums is hype. Yes, in the Western world, the United States, Germany, Sweden, the fact that we collected them and they didn’t collect us, that can be interpreted as the devil reads the Bible. . . . It doesn’t mean you are always doing it to dominate; you are doing it for knowledge as such.” His curatorial responsibilities, Staffan said, include all the Americas, and that is plenty. Yet every day he is required to respond to cultural politics, and he is not impressed by what he sees and hears. “The Swedish taxpayer pays my salary, and that is who I am accountable to. I am responsible for the history of this museum and its place in Swedish history and, by extension, the history of learning in the Western world. That is not to say that I’m insensitive to other voices. But there is a generic public who can have a generic museum experience. I don’t want to discriminate or give privileges to anyone.” How can someone even be a curator of globalization when it’s so hard to keep up with developments in a single region? “They want us to speak about societies as part of global networks, something we have to add to our repertoire. Younger curators have been trained to do this, but not me. I am a regionalist. Now people learn about a country on the Internet. I spent two to three years in the field.” Younger curators, trained in anthropology or cultural studies, view people like Staffan as benign dinosaurs at best and obstructionists at worst. How can you possibly continue with business as usual, they say, as if museums did not have deep imperialistic roots? How can you refuse to turn up the volume on the “other’s” voice when he or she now lives next door?

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A second problem confronting curators of all ages, on all continents, is neoliberalism. Museums everywhere are facing major cutbacks. Even in countries like Sweden and Denmark, where the government supports the museum sector, complaints about performance measures and visitor targets peppered my conversations. Curators felt tremendous pressure to attract tourists. There is so much competition for people’s attention and there are so many other places to learn about the world. People interested in Native Americans, for example, can just stay home and watch the Discovery Channel. Philosophical differences about the kinds of punch lines museums should deliver, and how they deliver them, also abound. Often, these debates are about whether to treat objects as art or artifact; should something be showcased for its aesthetic values or because of what it can teach us about the people who made and used it? Also at issue is how hard curators should hit visitors over the head with the messages they want to get across. On the one hand, someone like Per Christian Hansen, director of the National Museum of Denmark, believes museums should give people the tools they need in order to think critically, not tell them what to think. Museums should make the information available that visitors need so they can take a stand. “In my opinion, the general public should be offered knowledge, teaching, and entertainment so they can become useful and critical citizens. I am not here to tell people what to think. I am here to help them form their own opinions. . . . I’m not so naive as to think that the very existence of these stone artifacts can change society. But giving people an idea of their roots, that we have a common culture, which has always been a mixture of things coming from the outside—it gives tools to native-born and immigrant visitors alike, tools to argue that Danes and Denmark are not so homogeneous. Immigrants can come to the museum and get the evidence to prove that Denmark always included immigrants. The museum’s job is not to hit people over the head with that idea but to make sure that it is there for the taking.” But, said Jette Sandahl, there are tools and there are tools. “There are chainsaws and there are spoons. The range of tools is huge, right? I think you have to be careful. You can’t be a demagogue, because that turns people off. You have to be pluralistic by showing multiple perspectives and shifting points of view.” She believes successful exhibitions draw on rigorous research that shows just how complicated the issues are. When people complained that the MWC’s show about HIV/AIDS was too hard on the pope, she told them to visit the section of the exhibition where curators highlighted Catholic monks’ work with AIDS victims. Karin Tybjerg, a former curator at the National Museum of Denmark, agreed. “I like histories of mentalities, cultural meeting points, tensions, borders. It’s really important that the National Museum doesn’t just cater to some kind of kilt-wearing, faux nationalism where you construct a false national identity to make yourself typical.” The stories about pluralisms she wanted to tell are hard to articulate and even harder to respond to. “You have to leave space for the visitor. You can’t make it all about questions, but you also can’t wrap things up into neat little packages.” One way to capture multiple voices is to have stakeholders help develop exhibitions. Even the “old school curators” at Etnografiska Museet did this when they updated their

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Native American exhibition. First, they debated what title to use—was it okay to include the term Indian? Ultimately, they decided that if the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., called its new museum the National Museum of the American Indian, they could use the term too. They also struggled with how to display sacred objects that some believe should be seen only by community members. Their best bet, the First Nation visitors they consulted said, was to place the objects behind a curtain, explain their spiritual significance, and let visitors decide for themselves, putting the moral onus on them. Convening these kinds of conversations, though, is not simple. If you partner with stakeholders, who do you invite to the table? Aren’t a minority group’s gatekeepers likely to be its most elite? Finally, in both countries, certain institutions play particular roles in the performance of difference. They were simply considered more appropriate places for exploring certain themes. Many agreed the Museum of Copenhagen was the right place to jump-start debates about national belonging, not only because Copenhagen is Denmark’s most diverse city, but also because the museum is owned, funded, and administered by the Copenhagen City Government, which tends to be more liberal than its national counterpart.74 In Stockholm, Mångkulturellt Centrum and the Stockholm City Museum fulfill a similar function. The city museum can showcase the experiences of different groups, while the National Museum, according to Per Christian Hansen, has to display what the nation shares as a whole. All too frequently, when it comes to immigration and integration policy, journalists and researchers simplistically depict Sweden as the progressive, generous “good guy” and Denmark as its conservative, demanding opposite.75 Of course, the story is much more complicated and the differences much more subtle. Ulf Hedetoft distinguishes between “practical convergence” and “discursive divergence.” Both countries, he says, do more or less the same thing, but they talk about it and justify it differently. There is, “well hidden behind the Danish idea of assimilation, a growing acknowledgement of the fact that the global challenge calls for more ‘diversified leadership’ in companies, a greater openness towards and recognition of minorities and a more flexible immigration regime.” In Sweden, he writes, “the liberal demos’ approach has not vaccinated the country against declining tolerance, ethnic segmentation and racism.”76 This book does not try to prove or dispel these stereotypes. What interests me is how their perceived salience and their impact on public policy inform and are reflected in the cultural institutional landscape.77 A good place to start looking for an answer is to ask how the nation is imagined and to consider the style in which national pride is expressed. The Swedish nation is defined civically; its citizens are seen as subscribing to the same political creed. Other nations are defined ethnically, based on shared ethnicity, primordial culture, or Volk. Denmark shifted from a civic to an ethnic idea of the nation during the mid-nineteenth century. Its transformation from a multilingual large state to a small, linguistically homogeneous one went hand and hand with an “ethnic” rethinking of the meaning of Danishness.78 It

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was also part and parcel of that turning inward, of a growing acceptance that Denmark is a small, homogeneous nation with a limited regional and global role. Therefore, even though Sweden and Denmark share many aspects of the Nordic welfare model, these different self-understandings, and the divergent policies that they produce, are reflected in museum practice. In his ethnography of a small town in Jutland, Richard Jenkins makes just this point: “The social and cultural homogeneity of the Danes is an article of national faith and fundamental to what we might call ‘the story of the Danes, and little Denmark.’ ”79 The basic national narrative, he says, combines three themes: that we are all the same, which is rooted in language; that we are all in the same boat, and that there is relatively little distance between the folk at the top and those at the bottom; and that we are all somehow part of a Nordic “race.”80 Although Danes do not like to think of themselves as nationalists, he finds flags everywhere: in official and private settings, on birthday and wedding cakes, and in the hands of people greeting their returning friends and relatives at Copenhagen’s airport. Pride in the nation is such a taken-for-granted part of everyday life it almost goes unnoticed. Sweden has also understood itself as a homogeneous nation. In 1967, Herbert Tingsten described a “happy,” politically stable Swedish democracy, thriving because of its high standard of living and shared nationality, language, and religion.81 Swedes, however, are allegedly reluctant nationalists. As one colleague put it, “Swedes can afford to act like we are not nationalistic because, deep down inside, we know we are the best in the world.” In fact, writes A. J. Heinö, a caricature of the good Swede today is someone who would define herself as “an individualized democratic citizen, living in an equal relationship, being tolerant towards minorities and rejecting nationalism, racism and homophobia.” One must realize, he goes on to say, that these are not uniquely Swedish but universal values. In other words, Swedish values are inherently cosmopolitan.82 “What makes Swedes different according to this perspective is that they appreciate and realize these values more than others” (i.e., Sweden is repeatedly at the top of rankings on gender equality).83 In fact, Sweden boasts relatively few national monuments, seemingly rejecting or repressing certain aspects of its past.84 Since Sweden never struggled for its sovereignty, nationalist demonstrations commonplace elsewhere were not needed. After the 1968 protest movements, patriotism became an embarrassment rather than a virtue and the political and cultural elite adopted an antinationalist stance. Sweden was a modern, forward-looking country that did not need traditions or symbols. Indeed, there was no national holiday until the 1980s. Antinationalism, warns Heinö, should not be equated with a lack of chauvinism, however; there are chauvinistic traces even in the most antinationalist rhetoric.85 Swedish discomfort with nationalism also stems from the country’s unwillingness to confront black spots on its otherwise “exemplary past.” Expressing guilt-free national pride would require coming face to face with parts of history that people would rather

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forget. The country’s complicity with Germany during World War II, its treatment of the Sami, and its experiments in genetic engineering and racial purity are just some of the things most people would rather not talk about. “We try all the time to keep it back. Not talk about it at all,” a political scientist told me. “That is the Swedish solution for many things. Social democracy educates people, but you are supposed to think only the right things.” Many people see nationalistic displays as intolerant and anti-immigrant, and as dredging up dark episodes best left alone. Throughout the 1900s, Sweden also had a clearer, more centralized political culture than Denmark. The Social Democrats articulated a compelling ideology that broad swaths of Swedish society supported.86 Prominent figures, like Olof Palme and the Myrdals, led diverse constituencies forward under that umbrella, enabling the government to use cultural institutions to pursue clear, widely accepted social goals. In contrast, while Grundtvig, too, was a towering figure, Denmark’s political ideology and structures are more decentralized. There is a Norwegian joke that goes: “The Swedes do what the state authorities tell them to do, the Norwegians do the opposite of what the state authorities tell them to do, and the Danes do whatever they themselves want to do.” Since the nineteenth century, but especially since the 1960s, many liberal and conservative popular initiatives have thrived, including “free schools” for children,87 cultural and leisure clubs, alternative theater groups, and antinuclear protests, creating a more expansive yet less united political canopy. Positive, creative developments have flourished, as well as ultraconservative ones, including the antitax, antistate, anti-immigrant “Progress Party” formed by Mogens Glistrup in the early 1970s, which was a precursor to today’s Danish People’s Party.88 Sweden’s more global stance also has to do with its more historically prominent role on the world stage. “Danes are a small tribe,” said Per Christian Hansen, “communicating with our backs to the world.” The remnants of pan-Scandinavianism, or the quest for a Nordic culture, are weaker in Denmark. While the traces of this movement still matter in Sweden, they became fainter in Denmark after World War I, just barely present in the “fossilized names of disciplines and organizations” and relevant only for art and religion. The nation and its people are less problematic because fewer competing identities challenge them.89 But if Denmark turned its back on the world, Sweden, as we have seen, always faced front, rather than turning inward, as its regional empire waned. Sweden’s historic prominence is integral to its self-understanding, fueling its enduring desire to be a global exemplar. Olof Palme championed the idea that “solidarity has no borders,” inextricably linking domestic and international appeals to justice and proclaiming them two sides of the same coin.90 Swedes, therefore, saw themselves as belonging to an outward-looking internationalist state whose commitments to justice and equality never stopped where Sweden ended.91 They were raised to feel a sense of cosmopolitan duty, not simply a duty to Swedes alone.92 The way the MWC was built, and its exhibition style, said Lars Amreus, reflects how modern-day Swedes think about their place in the world. “I think it reflects

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an openness, interest, and curiosity in the world around us, respect for other cultures, a sense of wanting to do good in the world outside, but also an annoying self-image of being somewhat the conscience of the world, the do-gooder of the world, perhaps.” “Sweden,” said MWC curator Klaus Grinnell, “came late to industrialization. We don’t have our own enlightenment thinkers. Secularization was created elsewhere. Swedes pride themselves in always being a bit careful at the beginning, in not being the inventors but in being the best adopters. . . . When we realize that multiculturalism is what is happening and that we are leaving behind the old kind of nation-states, then we go one step farther than everyone else. We’re not the first nation to not put national pride first, but we might be the first to be truly global.” The flip side of this is how internal diversity, within the nation, gets talked about and managed. Norwegian anthropologist Marianne Gullestad, writing about Scandinavia in general, argues that there are few words for expressing that something or someone can be different but equal. The Danish word generally used for “equality,” she said, is lighed, or “likeness,” “similarity,” “identity,” or “sameness,” meaning that people have to feel more or less the same to be of equal value.93 This kind of logic makes people interact in ways that emphasize their similarities and downplay their differences. It also implies that too much difference, whether between individuals or opinions, can be problematic. Open conflict goes against the grain, so “different” parties should avoid each other to keep the peace. Therefore, actively signaling ethnic or racial difference, various respondents on both sides of the border believed, can contribute to social marginalization. While from a U.S. or Canadian perspective, calling yourself a Pakistani Dane or an Iraqi Swede is a positive step forward, in Sweden and Denmark many fear such labels leave people out. Birgitta Svensson, professor of European ethnology at Stockholm University, told me, “The United States does a good job when it comes to this, but we have nothing like it. All the Americans you meet say ‘I come from India, my grandmother was from Italy.’ It’s natural; they are Americans, but they are proud of their heritage.” In Sweden, she went on to say, “outward expressions of ethnicity mark you as different and, therefore, somehow deviant. Once you are labeled, it is hard to escape the box—even if you don’t identify primarily as a Somali or as a Muslim, people may label you that way.” These subtle differences in immigration and integration policy sowed seeds that bear different fruit in museum practice today. While few exhibitions, to date, have put the immigrant experience front and center, it has been somewhat more prominent in Sweden than in Denmark. From the outset, Sweden treated immigrants as part of the welfare system, on equal footing with other citizens. But because newcomers faced special challenges, they needed special policies. Building on principles of equality, freedom of choice, and partnership, in 1975 the government declared the welfare state responsible for the special needs of immigrants and minorities, including their need and right to maintain their culture. The folkhemmet’s emphasis on uniformity, modernity, and progress took a back seat to immigrants’ right to preserve their cultural roots and group affiliations and

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to see something of their experience in a museum.94 These policies also reflected Sweden’s self-image as a world leader, particularly in foreign policy. If Sweden championed the rights of former colonial subjects around the world, it had to champion the rights of its own immigrants—a generous, progressive stance that bolstered its image abroad. In keeping with the Council of Europe’s Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, in 2000, Sweden also officially recognized five national minorities, including the Sami, the Swedish Finns, the Tornedalers, the Roma, and the Jews.95 In contrast, Danish policy reflected the belief that the problem of immigrants could and should be resolved through the normal welfare-state apparatus; the cultural rights and needs of newcomers did not merit special treatment. After World War II, Denmark developed a universalistic welfare state that provides health care, education, unemployment benefits, and old-age pensions to all citizens and legal residents. The Danish political system does not officially recognize minorities and only rarely acknowledges minority rights and cultural claims based on minority status.96 Interestingly, even the right-wing perspective in both countries varies. In Sweden, the Right argued that freedom of choice meant that immigrants should be allowed to create their own institutions, such as private schools. In Denmark, conservatives pressed for a higher degree of assimilation, expecting newcomers to become more like Danes. These policy differences, and Sweden’s “civicness” as opposed to Denmark’s ethnically defined nation, help explain museum practice.97 The political winds change quickly and often, which has important consequences for the cultural landscape. According to the 2012 International Migration Outlook, put out by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Denmark’s new left coalition government instituted wide-ranging migration and integration reforms that protect immigrant rights more effectively.98 The newly created Ministry of Social Affairs and Integration allows making distinctions between immigrants and their needs based on social context. The government announced that immigrants will no longer receive lower social benefits, and that it would lower barriers to family reunification.99 At the same time, in 2010, when the conservative Swedish Democrats entered parliament, Bloomberg News declared it was “time for the Swedes to get themselves a new national self-image.”100 The riots that have wracked immigrant neighborhoods throughout the country also tore a “hole in Sweden’s image as a beacon of social harmony.”101 While the left-leaning Swedish Social Democrats returned to power after a progressive bloc defeated the center-right government in a parliamentary election in September 2014, the anti-immigrant, Sweden Democratic Party also made strong gains.102

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2 THE LEGISLATOR AND THE PRIEST Cosmopolitan Nationalism in Boston and New York

Before he took the helm at the Brooklyn Museum, Arnold Lehman directed the Baltimore Museum of Art.1 When you’re in charge, he told me, you don’t get to spend a lot of time in the galleries, but it’s important to try because that’s how you keep your finger on the pulse of an institution. One day, he recalled, with some emotion, he was walking through what was then called the African and Non-Western Cultures Gallery. An older woman, whom he assumed to be a grandmother, and what looked to be her twelve-year-old granddaughter were stopped in front of a case of Inuit art. “I overheard the grandmother say to her granddaughter that those objects were ‘made by people from where we are from.’ What could be better than that? You look at them [the objects] and you understand that you have a culture; it’s important enough to be in a museum. You may not see it [happen] often—they may not refer to it a lot, they might not use all those words—but here it is. I stood there, and I was shocked and delighted. We must have had just one case of those materials, and she happened to find it. She transferred [this knowledge] to her granddaughter, who will, hopefully, pass it on to her daughter. That was momentous for me. I never saw the power of what we do demonstrated quite as tangibly. And it wasn’t a teacher talking to a class. It was a grandmother talking to a granddaughter, talking to her in a way that instilled pride.” Lehman’s recollection foreshadows some of the themes emerging for museums on this side of the pond, specifically in Boston and New York. The core of this chapter profiles how the Brooklyn Museum in New York City and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (MFA) reinstalled their American collections. In contrast to institutions in Sweden and Denmark, both museums are more comfortable with and more committed to show-

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casing diversity. In that sense, they teach cosmopolitan values and skills by engaging with difference next door. To varying degrees, they also tell stories about how outside forces affected American culture—about how trends and taste in Latin America, Europe, and Asia influenced the paintings and decorative arts created by American artists and coveted by American collectors. But how the global gets showcased in relation to the national is where Boston and New York subtly part company. Just as museums in Denmark and Sweden tell very different stories with their archeological treasures, the Brooklyn Museum and the MFA use their American collections to spin different yarns. In Boston, rewriting the history of American art does not translate into rethinking the nation’s place in the world. It is primarily about how outside influences changed what is within, not about what that means for looking out. In contrast, the Brooklyn Museum uses similar kinds of materials to connect to its diverse neighborhood and then links those connections to the world beyond. I develop my discussion of the Brooklyn Museum and the MFA in conversation with several other museums in New York and Boston, which are not comparable but nevertheless represent important alternative venues where the city, the nation, and the world are on display. The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), in Salem, Massachusetts, a city of fortytwo thousand located about twenty-five miles north of Boston, was founded by some of the same regional luminaries who founded the MFA. It, too, has an outstanding collection of American decorative arts. Yet the director, Dan Monroe, sees the PEM as “creating art experiences, ideas, and information that transform people’s lives by expanding their perspective and their sense of the world.” At the Queens Museum and at El Museo del Barrio, which I touch briefly on, the idea that people live transnational lives, and that museums should reflect this reality, is as taken for granted as the air we breathe.

A B R I E F L O O K AT T H E N AT I O N A L M U S E U M L A N D S C A P E

In the late nineteenth century, members of America’s nouveau riche, including the likes of J. P Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, bought their way to cultural legitimacy by filling their walls and closets.2 Their personal collections, and the objects they helped purchase, formed the basis for major civic and private cultural institutions in the industrial cities they called home. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, founded in 1872; the Detroit Institute of Arts, founded in 1885; the Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879; and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and the Brooklyn Museum were all born of this era. From the outset, the nation’s cultural riches were well distributed—almost every major city boasted great works of art that equaled if not surpassed the cultural riches in the nation’s capital. Washington, however, is no cultural desert. Pittsburg financier and collector Andrew Mellon conceived and bequeathed the National Gallery of Art to the nation because he believed that, like every other great nation, the United States needed a great art museum too. In 1936, he wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt, offering to donate his personal art collection and build a building to house it. The National Gallery, which includes paintings,

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sculpture, and works on paper and new media from Europe and the United States, from the late Middle Ages to the present, was established in 1937.3 James Smithson, an English scientist who died in 1829, bequeathed his estate to the United States to establish a research institution bearing his name for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.”4 Initially conceived as a university, the Smithsonian Institution officially came into being through a congressional act in 1846. By the following year, construction had begun on its first building on the National Mall. The Smithsonian has expanded continuously ever since. In 2014, it included nineteen museums and galleries, nine research centers and numerous research programs, and the National Zoological Park, open free to the public everyday except Christmas.5 Among its most celebrated treasures are the Columbia command module from the Apollo 11 mission to the moon, the flag that inspired Francis Scott Key to write “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz. The museum also holds important ethnographic and natural history collections, including John Wesley Powell’s research on Native Americans in Colorado, more than 4 million fossils, and the National Herbarium, which contains over 4.5 million plant specimens.6 G. Brown Goode deserves much of the credit for transforming the Smithsonian into the vast set of collecting institutions it is today.7 Between 1876 and World War I, staff created dozens of exhibitions for national, industrial, and international fairs. When these ended, the surplus displays were sent back to the Institution but there was never enough room to store or put them on view. Goode and his team, therefore, had the evidence they needed to argue strongly for more gallery space. In 1881, the Art and Industries Museum opened its doors, followed by the U.S. Natural History Museum in 1910.8 Goode believed that museums were tools for creating a democratic America, serving workers and professionals alike. These houses of ideas—organized, like their counterparts in Europe, according to a clear colonialist continuum from “savagery to civilization” and modeled after world’s fair displays—had an important educational role to play, particularly for adults. This approach, writes Robert Rydell, “would prove invaluable in the effort of the national government to craft model citizens, to win their consent to the existing political order, and to the essential rightness of the government’s growing interest in overseas imperialism.”9 Goode oversaw exhibitions designed to “weave and extend a cultural safety net” under the ever-widening fault-lines of class and race.10 Until the early 1960s, each museum building contained a hodgepodge of materials.11 While there was no single comprehensive museum, neither was any one building narrowly focused. That changed in 1964, when the Museum of History and Technology opened its doors. Its creators removed all the Euro-American historical and cultural materials from the natural history building. This sorting, writes William Walker, made the racial lines in the Institution’s physical geography clearer. “Although it is an exaggeration to say that History and Technology was a lily-white museum, the polyglot mixing of cultural exhibitions that had occurred in the spaces of the Smithsonian’s earlier museum buildings was greatly reduced.”12

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By the late 1960s, when the civil rights and antiwar movements were at their height, S. Dillon Ripley, then secretary of the Smithsonian, realized it had not kept pace with the changes outside its doors. Its anthropological displays were sorely out of date and it paid too much attention to European and U.S. history. To shake things up, he began organizing annual folklife festivals, celebrating several cultures each year through displays of music, crafts, and food.13 He also oversaw the creation of several culturally specific constituency museums, including the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, which set the precedent for the Museum of African Art and the National Museum of the American Indian, as well as what will be the National Museum of African American History and Culture, scheduled to open in 2015. Ripley also tried updating the Institution’s exhibitions to reflect the country’s increasing cultural pluralism, presenting, in 1976, the exhibition A Nation of Nations to celebrate the country’s bicentennial. Ripley dreamed of creating the Museum of Man to house collections from a wide range of peoples and bring the various cultural divisions of the institution under one roof. He conceived of the museum in universalist terms, hoping it would inspire visitors to embrace the idea that all human beings are one family in one world. Writing in the Smithsonian magazine in 1974, he called it “a museum of the Family of Man”—one that would emphasize the “interdependence” of all humanity across generations, races, and nationalities as well as offer solutions to global problems, such as the environment.14 The Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg epitomizes this ethos, but in the United States the idea never gained traction. Its supporters, in and out of Congress, could not agree on its mission or scope. Building sites on the Mall were highly coveted real estate— debates raged about how and what they should be used for. Smaller museums, more narrowly focused on particular themes or communities became the Institution’s priority.15 How the Smithsonian responded to the nation’s changing demography reveals a great deal about the diversity management regimes in place in the United States and how they differ from those in Sweden and Denmark. While Sweden and Denmark shy away from labels and have created few institutions dedicated to specific groups, in the United States embracing a racial or ethnic identity is a means of empowerment, a natural next step in a country that understands itself to be made up of hyphenated Americans. This same strategy has left its mark on the nation’s museological landscape. As the galleries of Boston and New York City reveal, the race, ethnicity, or nationality of the artist is more likely to be clear. There are a number of institutions showcasing the experience of particular groups, sending a loud, clear message that they belong at the American multicultural table, even if they are seated somewhere off to the side.16

THE CITY ON THE HILL

John Winthrop, the governor of the Association of the Massachusetts Bay Company, led a ragged yet determined group of disgruntled believers across the Atlantic Ocean to found what would become the city of Boston. They left in search of a moral community they

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could not create in Europe. Since saved souls were also wealthy souls, these Puritans stressed hard work, thrift, sobriety, and frugality. They valued education, intellectual achievement, and responsibility to the community at large. Their actions and ideology had far-reaching consequences for America as a whole. As early as the city’s twenty-fifth birthday, writes Thomas O’Connor, the “town of Boston, had developed certain basic themes that were not only characteristic of its colonial origins, but which also may be considered an essential part of its present-day distinctiveness.”17 These include Boston’s proud but provincial identity as a city of knowledge and the inbred history of its cultural institutions, which have sometimes turned a blind eye to its changing demography. Foreshadowing Olof Palme in Sweden, Boston’s founders believed they were creating a city that would be a model to the rest of the world.18 Their “city on the hill” would become the “hub” of the universe and inspire all of humankind, a veritable beacon that would attract “the eies of all people” upon them.”19 Although times might change, Boston would never be just any city, but instead be a place distinguished by its origins, history, and dedication to excellence—accomplishments achieved in God’s name for the benefit of humankind. Not all of the city’s original settlers were so pious. In fact, according to Samuel Eliot Morrison, unlike the Mayflower voyagers, who landed a little farther south, at Plymouth Rock, the 120 patentees of the original Dorchester Company were largely landed gentry, merchant adventurers, and “representatives of a thinking class.”20 In short, they were a generally welloff and well-educated group.21 They understood social stratification as a necessary and normal part of God’s plan, and they clearly enforced class distinctions—a man had to be worth a thousand dollars for his wife to wear a silk scarf.22 Although they knew their place, they also believed in political equality among the righteous no matter how much money you had in your pocket. Unlike those at other colonial trading posts, where settlers hoped to get rich quick and then return home, these New Englanders came to stay, and they established institutions, such as Harvard College and Boston Latin School, early on to prove it.23 But as early as the late seventeenth century, the straitjacket of Puritan ideals began to fray.24 During the early eighteenth century, long-distance trade bloomed. As the port towns of Boston and Salem grew, so did the influx of different cultures and, more important, different ideas. Sailors speaking foreign tongues and worshipping alien gods became parts of the landscape. Much of Massachusetts, and Boston, began to take on a cosmopolitan identity. A growing distance between church and state and a growing acceptance of the pursuit of individual wealth helped created a distinct Yankee culture. During the nineteenth century, men who had previously made money at sea turned to other industries, like textile manufacturing. By the late 1820s, a strikingly interconnected group of about forty Boston families emerged. Known as the Boston Associates, they slowly gained control of the quickly modernizing city.25 Like their Puritan forefathers, they created institutions not as individuals but as a community that shared economic interests as well as last names.26 Robert Dalzell determined, on the basis of surnames alone, that thirty-one members of the group came from just eleven families, with the

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Appleton’s, Lowells, and Lawrences among the best represented, followed by the Cabots, Jacksons, and Brookses.27 In fact, the Boston elite were so interconnected it was almost impossible to distinguish between family and business partner, student and teacher, friend and first cousin.28 By 1861, Oliver Wendell Holmes coined the phrase the “Brahmin Caste of New England” to describe what by then was the city’s well-developed upper class, if not a full-blown aristocracy. During the antebellum period, people sometimes called Boston the Athens of America.29 Residents felt the region represented and communicated the best the country had to offer. In August 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered a commencement address, titled “The American Scholar,” to Harvard College’s Phi Beta Kappa Society. He challenged American listeners to look beyond dusty archives, ancient lands, or foreign sources for inspiration and turn instead to the familiar and natural sources of beauty right around them.30 Author and Harvard professor Oliver Wendell Holmes, born six years after Emerson spoke, later called the speech America’s “Intellectual Declaration of Independence.”31 Boston’s population stagnated between 1740 and 1790 but then grew steadily for the next 130 years, driven primarily by fishing and trade. Coincidentally, the local shipping industry’s last gasp took place at the same time as the Irish potato famine. For those fleeing Europe, the cheapest fare and the closest port was Boston. The year 1845 stands out as a watershed: until then, poor Irish immigrants had only trickled into the city, numbering about four thousand in 1840. But by 1849, more than a quarter of Boston’s residents—at least thirty-five thousand—were Irish. By 1880, 64 percent of the city’s population was foreign-born, the vast majority of whom were Irish.32 Confronted by discrimination that sometimes turned violent, these newcomers settled in enclaves and established strong ethnic networks. “The Irish,” writes Dalzell, “were not just strangers, they were outsiders.”33 According to Thomas O’Connor, “Boston was a city that rejected the Irish from the very start and saw no way in which the people of that ethnic background could ever be assimilated into the prevailing American culture. . . . The generations of bitter and unyielding conflict between the natives of Boston and the newcomers from Ireland would forever mold the social and political character of the Boston Irish in ways not found elsewhere.”34 The Irish community eventually gained control of the city’s social and political landscape. The Kennedy family cut its political teeth in Boston. James Michael Curley, the four-term mayor and one-term senator, dominated city politics for the first half of the twentieth century, even after he spent five months in prison for mail fraud during his last term (1947–50).35 The logo of the Boston Celtics (the city’s basketball team), present on billboards, paraphernalia, and sweatshirts everywhere, is replete with shamrocks and leprechauns. These tensions still persist between cosmopolitanism and parochialism, tolerance and exclusivity, working-class roots and higher education, and triple-decker houses in down-to-earth neighborhoods, on the one hand, and Beacon Hill brownstones, on the

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other.36 Although some residents were slaveholders, Boston became, in the decades leading to the Civil War, a center of the national antislavery movement. In 1831 William Lloyd Garrison, “all on fire” for the cause, began publishing The Liberator, the country’s leading abolitionist newspaper.37 But the mid-nineteenth century’s anti-immigrant American Party—better known as the Know-Nothing Party because, when members were asked if they belonged, they were supposed to answer they “knew nothing”—had strong support in Boston. More than a hundred years later, throughout the 1970s, Boston was the site of violent school-desegregation struggles,38 whereas Massachusetts became, in 2004, the first state in the Union to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

T H E B I RT H O F T H E M U S E U M O F F I N E A RT S

Nineteenth-century America witnessed a sea change. An independent-minded, selfreliant middle class emerged that had money to spare. People embraced the idea that all white men, born equal, were by the same token capable of earning a living or being elected to office. Museums could help by morally uplifting and educating the public.39 After the War of 1812 and the burst of cultural nationalism it inspired, some Americans heeded Emerson’s call to reject European cultural supremacy and chart their own path. By the 1870s, a reverence for professionalism, science, and scholarly research set the tone for a modern American museum that would simultaneously discover truths and educate the public about them.40 By the end of the Civil War, Boston’s residents numbered close to a quarter of a million. In 1900, 30 percent of the city’s residents were foreign-born, and 70 percent claimed foreign ancestry. The city’s increased size, wealth, and cultural production went hand and hand with more poverty, infant mortality, and Catholicism.41 In response, the city’s elites created charitable institutions with two somewhat conflicting roles in mind. On the one hand, these “benevolent benefactors” wanted to grant art to the people as Puritan ministers had “granted” the understanding of the Bible to their followers. On the other hand, fears of losing the culture they held dear—and, along with it, their status—motivated them to create organizations preserving high art and social prestige. In February of 1870, the Massachusetts General Court incorporated the Trustees of the Museum of Art for the purpose of “erecting a museum for the preservation and exhibition of works of art, of making, maintaining, and exhibiting collections of such works, and of affording instructions in Fine Arts.”42 The textile and shipping magnates who founded the MFA wanted to create visually literate men and women who would design, produce, and consume goods that could compete with those coming out of Europe.43 Designers need art museums, said Martin Brimmer—former mayor and, for twenty-six years, the president of the MFA—just like learned men need libraries and botanists need herbariums.44 Early on, the MFA’s motto was “Art, Industry, and Education.” Its founders intended the museum, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts founded alongside it, to be a

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“resource whence artisanship and handicraft of all sorts may better and beautify our dwellings, our ornaments, our garments, our implements of daily life.”45 Its vision changed gradually, in large measure owing to its secretary, Benjamin Gilman (1893– 1925), also a prominent leader in the museum field. Gilman believed that museums were not merely about creating better technicians. They promoted democracy by providing workers with a respite from the pressures of daily life and helping them access the life of the imagination. While, at first, looking at plaster casts of original masterpieces was considered enough to inspire and transport, Gilman became convinced that people needed to see original works of art to be exposed to universal beauty and truth, “the best that has been thought and said in the world.” The museum’s utility lay in its inutility.46 Throughout the 1920s, most museums walked the line between these two contrasting philosophies, but ultimately Gilman’s views prevailed. The social activism, education, and inclusivity many institutions promoted during the 1920s and 1930s receded, along with their commitment to bring new audiences in.47 The MFA’s populist roots took a backseat to collecting, preserving, and displaying great masterpieces.48 The museum’s move from Boston’s Copley Square to its new home on Huntington Avenue, in what, in 1909, was the outskirts of the city, also signaled the museum’s intention to inspire and rejuvenate. From the outset, the MFA had strong ties to places around the world, which greatly influenced its holdings. It boasts one of the largest collections of Japanese art outside Japan, courtesy of a group of forward-thinking Japanophiles who lived in Boston.49 Their interests and connections grew out of the city’s long history of trade with Asia. Artist John LaFarge funded his visits to the East by taking photos and doing watercolors and illustrations. Edward Morse went to Japan to study brachiopods but fell instantly in love with the country’s art, architecture, and culture. Once he was there, the Imperial University hired him as a scientist after he jump-started the study of Japanese prehistory by accidentally noticing a shell mound next to the rail line between Yokohama and Tokyo and going back to excavate it. At Morse’s invitation, Ernest Fenellosa traveled to Japan in 1878; he taught at Tokyo University until 1886. He immersed himself in the region’s art, religion, and philosophy, later returning to tutor prominent intellectuals and collectors, such as Isabella Stewart Gardner and Arthur Wesley Dow. In fact, Fenellosa moved back to Boston in 1890 to become the museum’s first Asian art curator and to oversee the creation of what became its widely acclaimed Japanese collection. He lectured frequently to public audiences and, along with Morse and William Sturgis Bigelow, created a buzz about Japan, which extended the social imaginary of the city’s elite far beyond New England. The museum’s Japan connection remains strong today. Its sister museum, Nagoya/ Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which opened in 1999, regularly features important works from Boston’s permanent collection.50 Japan was not the only place outside the United States where the MFA had strong ties. Ananda Coomaraswamy, an eminent art historian and theorist, was another key figure who expanded its reach—this time to India. Coomaraswamy’s birth and childhood left

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him uniquely positioned to translate India to the West. He was the son of a Sri Lankan legislator, the first from his country to be knighted by Queen Victoria, for being “one of the most successful ‘Westernizers’ in the Empire.”51 The honors didn’t end there: the Archbishop of Canterbury married his father and English mother.52 But by the midnineteenth century, the empire looked down on intercultural marriages. The couple returned to Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, where Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy was born in 1877, his middle name bestowed in honor of his mother’s home country.53 Ananda grew up not on the subcontinent but in England. When he was only two, his mother brought him back to England to await his father, who hoped to return triumphantly to the metropole and stand for Parliament.54 But his father never arrived. On the day of his departure, he died in Ceylon, at age forty-six.55 Although Ananda grew up with his widowed mother, aunt, and grandmother in England, he never severed his ties to India. His mother’s love for Indian culture equaled his father’s enthusiasm for Westernization. After completing his graduate studies, Coomaraswamy returned to South Asia to work as a geologist. As he traveled deeper into the remote reaches of Sri Lanka, he became increasingly enamored of the vanishing life and culture of the people. So began his fierce and lifelong indignation at the impact of Westernization.56 With the help of his first wife, Ethel, an accomplished photographer, Coomaraswamy switched from documenting Sri Lanka’s mountains and plains to recording its traditional arts and crafts.57 By 1908, his first art historical book—Medieval Sinhalese Art—had been published in England. Between 1910 and 1915, Coomaraswamy traveled across northern India searching for a kind of art he believed existed but which no one had studied: Rajput painting.58 His project, a great success, single-handedly put this work on the Western cultural map. Ten years later came another personal turning point and a turning point for the world as well. By then, Coomaraswamy was thirty-nine, a full-fledged art historian, distinguished collector, and public intellectual. But his public stance against forcing Indians to fight for the British Empire left him vulnerable. He had also become disillusioned with India, especially after its leaders rejected his proposal to create a national art museum that would, among other things, house his outstanding collection.59 In 1917, when the Museum of Fine Arts offered to buy it and make him the first curator of the Indian Art Department, he jumped at the chance.60 He stayed in the position, and in Massachusetts, for the rest of his life.

A RT O F T H E A M E R I C A S

In 2010, with great fanfare, the MFA opened its new Art of the Americas Wing. The addition, which cost nearly $504 million and took nearly ten years to complete, includes four floors with fifty-three new galleries (fifty-one thousand square feet) filled with paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, crafts, and furniture.61 The exhibition is designed so that visitors can grasp the story line whether they enter the wing on what the museum calls

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its foundation level (and others call the basement) or on the ground-floor level—the idea that American art was never just made in the United States. “The first thing you see when you walk into the new Art of the Americas Wing,” Elliot Bostwick Davis, the John Moors Cabot Chair, Art of the Americas, told me, “are five spectacular K’iché burial urns, produced by the Maya in the southern highlands of Guatemala in about a.d. 750.” On one earthenware vessel, which stands nearly four feet high and measures more than two feet across, a jaguar stares menacingly from the lid, his right front leg raised and his claws opened in an intimidating gesture (plate 5). In another urn, even taller and wider, a lid shaped like a female cat sits atop what looks like babies in a mother’s belly. “These were produced,” said Bostwick Davis, “by a highly sophisticated culture with its own court rituals and portraiture. We wanted people to see ancient American art and Native American art on their own terms.” The museum also wants people to see that American art never took shape in a vacuum. From the outset, cultural connections to other parts of the world influenced what the nation created. American art, visitors learn, did not start with John Singleton Copley, or with New England furniture and paintings.62 Indigenous American materials are its foundation, literally and figuratively in this display, but you have to descend a flight of stairs to reach these “beginnings.” Older and contemporary Native American objects are showcased in a separate gallery in the back. Most visitors enter on the ground floor, into the Revolutionary period, greeted by Paul Revere’s iconic Sons of Liberty bowl from 1768. Revere created this silver masterpiece to honor the ninety-two members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives who protested the Townshend Acts (1767) which taxed tea, paper, glass, and other commodities— an important first step toward the American Revolution. Along with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, the Liberty Bowl is one of the country’s most important treasures. Over seven hundred Boston schoolchildren donated their pennies to help fund its purchase. What few people know is that the Liberty Bowl is modeled after a Chinese punch bowl. In the second half of the eighteenth century, as North American colonists grew rich from international trade, they also acquired art and artifacts from the East, including Chinese silks, porcelains, and wallpapers. These status symbols found their way into the portraits of prominent colonists. In one of Benjamin Franklin, he wears a fashionable dressing gown called a banyan, reflecting Persian and Arabic influences and meant to impress viewers with his intelligence and gentility. While Paul Revere did not wear a banyan when John Singleton Copley painted him in 1768, he is holding a teapot that also reflects Chinese influences. In fact, said Dennis Carr, assistant curator of decorative arts and sculpture, almost any piece of silver in the last half of the eighteenth century would have been Chinese inspired. “There are very few objects [from this period] that are purely American or purely Chinese. We are trying to tell a complex story. Great nationalistic objects actually tell a global story.” Another radical change for the museum is its Spanish colonial gallery.63 Boston is, after all, located in New England. Many of the museum’s most important donors are

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from the region, and the paintings and living room furniture they donated overwhelmingly reflect the New England experience. So, how does the MFA gently break it to Paul Revere fans that accomplished silversmiths also lived south of the border? How can it realistically beef up its Spanish colonial holdings so they are not completely overshadowed by its stellar New England colonial collection? The curatorial term adjacencies is key to the answer. Objects are placed near each other so visitors can grasp the connections between them. After Revere’s Liberty Bowl come exquisite, intricately decorated silver chalices and liturgical objects made in sixteenthcentury Bolivia and Peru. Just as the Pennsylvania legislator Timothy Matlack stares out powerfully and majestically from the canvas, so does Don Manuel José Rubio y Salinas, the archbishop of Mexico, painted by the mestizo Miguel Cabrera in 1754—the “legislator” and the “priest” of this chapter’s title (plate 6 and plate 7). The archbishop’s frank, don’t-mess-with-me gaze, his regal posture in his thronelike chair, and his elaborate red robes worn over a finely embroidered white gown resonate with Charles Willson Peale’s painting of Matlack—a soldier, lawmaker, and Quaker—that hangs in the neighboring gallery. Displays of colonial power and authority, whether symbolized by crucifixes and communion wafers, legislation and legal briefs, have a lot in common. A row of chairs, which graced eighteenth-century homes from Boston to Venezuela, also drives the story forward. “During the 1700s,” the wall text reads, “artistic styles crossed political borders and jumped oceans like never before.” This gallery, the viewer is told, puts these places and styles side by side. “Can you tell the difference between Boston and Philadelphia, New York and Barbados?” the wall text asks. “The point is,” said Dennis Carr, “that all of the Americas was going through a colonial experience at this time. It could be Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German. . . . Their governments might differ radically, their cultures might be different, but there were also lots of similarities; they were all participating in a new kind of globalized market for goods for the first time. . . . I think there is a lot more connection throughout the Americas than the average person realizes or fully understands.” “What is interesting to me,” said Erica Hirshler, senior curator of American paintings, who has worked at the museum for more than thirty years, “is to see what kind of real estate is being given to different kinds of art. When I first came here in the 1980s, when we talked about colonial art we were talking about New England and Anglo culture. We were talking about Copley and his relationship with England. . . . In the new wing, for the first time, we have a Spanish colonial gallery, and that is a huge change for us. It sounds like it shouldn’t be, but it is for Boston, a kind of bastion of Anglo culture—to acknowledge that there was a huge colonial presence somewhere else.” The story of American art’s porous boundaries continues on the third floor, where visitors are greeted by John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Boit. But Sargent, they soon learn, while born to American expatriates in Florence in 1856, spent his childhood traveling throughout Europe. He did not visit the United States until 1876. Sargent’s teacher Carolus-Duran admonished his students to study the Spanish painter

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Diego Velázquez, and Sargent did just that. He made the requisite pilgrimage to Madrid’s Museo del Prado, copying Velázquez’s Las Meninas, which, Hirshler believes, served as a model for his portrait of the Boit daughters.64 Even the way the next main gallery is laid out, in a salon style, hints at America’s connections to the outside world. It tips its hat at this mode of displaying paintings—hanging from floor to ceiling—that was popular in elegant European homes and at public art exhibitions. All the works are by painters who were, in some way, influenced by European art. “It is an outward-looking space,” said Hirshler. “It is about America at that time having almost as much of a cosmopolitan culture as we think we do now.” It’s not that the omnipresent Hudson River School is not represented. It’s simply not center stage like it would have been in American galleries of the past. “This is huge,” she said. “We are looking for connections with other places and more and more willing to acknowledge them. We are more willing to see how American art fits within the context of European art, instead of only talking about what is American about it.” The story of two prominent collectors, Maxim and Martha Karolik, and the important works they contributed to the MFA is also a tool for rewriting the American art narrative. Heiress Martha Catherine Codman possessed impeccable Brahmin breeding—she was the great-granddaughter of Elias Hasket Derby, one of the richest of the very rich postrevolutionary Salem merchants—and allegedly one of the wealthiest women in America. In 1928, spinster Martha, then seventy-two, led a quiet but busy life as a philanthropist, patron of music, and socialite in Newport and Washington, D.C. Otherwise, the epitome of decorous behavior, the modest Miss Codman seemed to wait her whole life to make one outrageous decision: to marry Maxim Karolik, a thirty-five-year-old Russian-Jewish tenor, while the two vacationed in Nice. Although the scandal of their marriage persisted, Boston’s elite and the press eventually warmed to Karolik, at first cautiously, then ever more effusively, as he embarked on a second act as a generous and influential art patron. His growing admirers praised him as one of the first to recognize and advocate for the appreciation of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American art, then denigrated as uninteresting, derivative, and not worthy of serious museological or scholarly attention. “Gifted with a vivid turn of phrase,” the gallery text reads, “Maxim Karolik was always happy to hold forth. He had strong, frequently stated beliefs in the power of art and the importance of museums.” As he put it, “What is the purpose of a museum? You come to a museum to feel finer, not better. To feel better, we need only a good steak, to feel finer we need more than that.” For many, the Karoliks’ tale is what America is all about—that an immigrant and a blue blood can marry, become major art patrons, and leave their indelible stamp on a museum’s walls.65 “One of the messages of the new Art of the Americas Wing,” Bostwick Davis told me, “is that the art of the United States and the colonies of New England are intimately connected to the art of the Western Hemisphere. This wing is very different from every other wing of American art—and there I am referring to the art of the United States, because it displays the art of the ancient cultures of the indigenous Americans [ancient and Native

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American art] extending back to 900 b.c. and the prehistoric period for the Native American collections. From there, we situate the art of the United States, which reflects our major strengths in the art of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century New England, within a far more global context. It is a case of both the art of our region, colonial Boston at the core, and that of the broader nation and the Americas.”66

WHY HERE, WHY NOW?

Part of the idea of telling an “Art of the Americas” story grew out of an institutional restructuring orchestrated by Malcolm Rogers, the Ann and Graham Gund Director, when he arrived at the MFA in 1994.67 To promote communication across mediums and between the people in charge of them, Rogers combined American paintings and decorative arts and incorporated some of the Latin American materials previously “included” in Europe. He also folded in a collection of ancient American materials, including the K’iché burial urns I described earlier, which had never had a home of its own. Staff slowly came to see these holdings as the basis for their retelling of the American art story, because the objects come from where it begins. These shifts also resonated with the changing demographics of the museum’s visitors. It behooved the MFA to showcase minorities, and Latinos in particular, given their growing numbers in the city and the country at large. The MFA is not alone in seeing demographic shifts on the horizon. In 2008, the American Association of Museums launched its Center for the Future of Museums project. Its first report, Museums and Society 2034: Trends and Potential Futures, included a striking graphic. Between 1900 and 1970, minorities made up between 10 and 13 percent of the U.S. population. By 2008, the figure rose to 34 percent, and it is predicted to reach 46 percent by 2033. At the bottom of the chart, a stark line stopped short—only 9 percent of museums’ core visitors were minorities.68 The report, according to founding director Elizabeth E. Merritt, “went viral.” It “painted a troubling picture of the ‘probable future’—a future in which, if trends continue in the current grooves, museum audiences are radically less diverse than the American public, and museums serve an ever-shrinking fragment of society.”69 Findings from the 2008 National Endowment for the Arts’ Survey of Public Participation in the Arts also produced a collective gasp.70 It revealed a persistent overall decline in participation at traditional “high culture” activities and a strong connection between attendance, ethnicity, and race. Art museums (the only kind on which data were collected) fared only slightly better than the symphony or ballet.71 Not surprisingly, the American Association of Museums’ report came chock full of recommendations. It called for more data and research and for museum professionals to use it. It stressed the need for museum staff to become as diverse as their visitors— that curators, educators, and management should look more like the people who come through the door. It encouraged museums to broaden how they define their mission and who their constituencies are.

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These challenges also concerned some MFA staff as they worked on the new wing. They believed that to attract a new, more diverse generation of donors and visitors, people of color needed to see themselves inside their walls and to see and hear stories that reflected their experiences. The set of tools that encyclopedic museums have with which to do this differs from the set used by museums solely devoted to American art. If people see a painting they like that is influenced by Japanese art, you can direct them to the Japanese collection. That, in itself, helps people see American art in a broader context. In fact, the MFA now actively helps visitors make those connections by including texts that orient visitors toward related works. Handheld multimedia guides even show visitors pictures of the works and help them find them—a precursor to what may someday become a customized museum GPS system. But the MFA is in the United States and in a particular region of the country. Because it has such a strong colonial New England collection, and because people come to Boston to learn about American history, they expect the objects in the Art of the Americas Wing to tell a particular story. “European art,” said Erica Hirshler, “is not being asked to tell a story about European history in this context.” Where the MFA is located, who its donors were and what they collected, and the museum’s unique role in the national and urban institutional distribution of labor, all mean that, as in the case of the National Museum of Denmark, there is only so much retelling the MFA can do. “The MFA,” said Hao Sheng, Wu Tung Curator of Chinese Art, “is as global as a museum in New England can be. It still has to meet the expectations of Euro-American visitors.” The takeaway message for visitors to the Art of the Americas Wing, then, is that both outside and indigenous forces have always influenced American art, whether ancient Mesoamerican, Native American, European, or Asian. The foundations of American art lie in what indigenous artists created, whether pre-Columbian burial urns or ceramics made by Native Americans. The colonial era took place in Spanish America as well as New England. The new country’s artistic and cultural production grew in active conversation with Europe, Asia, and the Americas. International influences strongly shaped national art, although European influences clearly predominate. But the nation-state still plays the starring role in this story. The resulting portrait is somewhat more diverse but not always physically integrated. Visitors come to understand more clearly what constitutes America—they gain a more nuanced view looking inward. But they don’t learn much about how that changes things when they look out— about how these influences shaped the country’s place in the world. Unlike in Sweden, the global is not a valid goal in and of itself. “The Art of the Americas,” said one museum professional who asked to be quoted anonymously, “is a peculiar thing to do in thinking about the future. While it may sound trite, the community we live in now is not bounded by space and time; cultural boundaries are all merging together. There is little homogeneity, and much more crossover and exchange and the creation of new kinds of cultures everywhere. The old categories still hold, but geography does not map onto culture in neat ways.”

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Naturally, the new wing met with criticism and acclaim. Many applauded the museum for its courageous broadening of the American story and were thrilled to see the ancient and Native American materials so prominently featured. Holland Cotter of the New York Times lauded the MFA for asking the question “What does ‘Americas’ mean?” up front and for doing the “big, inclusive term justice” by bringing all of the Americas together, “hook[ing] them up, and seat[ing] them as equals at a hemispheric table.” He concludes, “In the present political climate[,] . . . opinions about what America was, is and should be are so polarized and proprietarial. And maybe this is where art itself comes to the rescue. So much about the new Americas Wing is so startling, stimulating and beautiful that you just want to lay down your arms.”72 But others felt the new wing came up short. “In another city, like Los Angeles,” remarked one curator, “the Latin American and ancient American materials would have been on the top floor, but Boston is a northern European city, not a Latin American one. Greg Cook of the Boston Phoenix, while impressed overall, highlighted significant gaps in the wing’s representation of war and social conflict, noting wryly, “After the American Revolution, social critics need not apply.”73

C O S M O P O L I TA N C O W B OYS

The Peabody Essex Museum has always been open to the world and, at the same time, regionally focused. Readers might recognize Salem as the home of the 1692 witch trials. Nowadays, modern-day witches, New Age devotees, and vendors of macabre kitsch support a robust tourist industry built around the myths and realities of three-century-old horrors. This siphons attention away from the swashbuckling triumphs of Salem’s golden age almost one hundred years later. During the early years of the new United States, Salem was a crucial seaport and the sixth-largest city in the Republic. After making their fortunes privateering during the Revolutionary War,74 Salem’s sea captains and merchants settled into respectability—and often great wealth—as participants in the China trade. Because the British blocked their access to the Atlantic even after the war ended, Salem’s elite set their sights on the more distant but more welcoming shores of China, India, and other parts of Asia. American consumers, as Paul Revere’s portrait reveals, coveted the goods they brought back in the hulls of ships.75 These merchants returned not only with Asian luxury items—porcelain, indigo, tea, lacquered fans, cinnamon, and exotic furniture—but also with unusual objects from all over the world that some believed were better preserved and displayed than sold. In 1799, a number of like-minded sea captains, who had all sailed around the Cape of Good Hope or Cape Horn, joined together to establish the East India Marine Society. Its charter provided for a “cabinet of natural and artificial curiosities,” souvenirs from all those trips to the East. This cabinet of wonders developed into the more professionalized and less adventurous-sounding Peabody Academy of Science and eventually became the Peabody Museum of Salem in the twentieth century.

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The East India Marine Society was a membership-only organization. Wealthy ship owners and sea captains, who paid to belong, had to bring back treasures to stock the hall’s display cases. Their vision was to change Americans’ sense of themselves and their place in the world. “They were, in essence, cowboys,” said the Peabody’s current director and CEO, Dan Monroe. “They would get on a ship a block away from where the museum stands today and risk their lives and families. If they hit it big by sailing around Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope, they could become extraordinarily rich; or they could lose it all, their lives and their fortunes.” These men belonged to a very small group of Americans who had firsthand experience with other cultures. Herman Melville, whose great novel, Moby-Dick begins in nearby New Bedford, also recognized how cosmopolitan these spaces were. At one point, Melville casually compares the streets of New Bedford, New England’s whaling capital, to those of similar cities across the globe: “In thoroughfares nigh the docks, any considerable seaport will frequently offer to view the queerest looking non-descripts from foreign parts. Even in Broadway and Chestnut Street, Mediterranean mariners will sometimes jostle with affrighted ladies. Regent Street is not unknown to Lascars and Malays: and at Bombay, in the Apollo Green, live Yankees who have often scared the natives.”76 “These guys,” remarked Monroe, “had a global perspective. They were more familiar with Canton or Calcutta than they were with Philadelphia or New York.” That experience changed them—they were not colonials. They did business on equal terms with people around the world. When they arrived in China, they didn’t ask for the ancient bronzes. They didn’t get to Africa and say, “Where are the Benin sculptures?” Instead, they collected the art and culture of the time, during a period when there were few distinctions between art, history, and science; their overflowing trunks were jam-packed with everything from extraordinary works of art to chipped teacups. Meanwhile, the Salem-based Essex Institute, created by a merger between the Essex Historical Society and the Essex Natural History Society in 1848, gathered together artifacts from the region’s historical and natural environment.77 While the travels of Salem’s distinguished residents were an important part of its story, the institute was primarily concerned with what these men did at home—a provincial celebration of self and identity. It was a kind of athenaeum, with a library and the occasional exhibit, said Dean Lahikainen, the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of American Decorative Art, which expanded its focus in the late 1800s to include decorative arts and historic houses. Since social history trumped art, the collection grew large with portraits of historical figures, no matter what their quality.78 The region’s leading luminaries and gentlemen scholars sustained the two institutions for more than a century by the sheer force of their collecting, education, and research. The institutions were situated across the street from each other but barely spoke. By the time Monroe arrived in 1992, both needed major overhauls. Marriage was the only way forward, and he was hired to tie the knot. He wanted, he said, to create a new kind of art museum, one that went beyond the standard mission of collecting,

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preserving, interpreting, and acquiring. Instead, the new PEM would create artistic and cultural experiences, ideas, and information that would transform people’s lives. The transformation might come with a big or small T. It might happen not at once but over time, in a cumulative way, and through a variety of activities that went way beyond what was in the display cases. Art, Monroe believes, has the capacity to bridge time, space, and cultural boundaries by helping people imagine themselves and their places in the world differently. But art is best understood, and has its greatest impact and meaning, when it is connected to the world in which it is made. For most museums, that means putting up large photographs of artists creating objects, or piping in dance music—a type of contextualization Monroe dislikes. He wants visitors to recognize that in different cultures, people have different relationships with materials. All societies create art, but we should not relate to all art in the same way; each piece must be taken on its own terms. One way to reinvent the PEM was to go back to the museum’s actual history, not its mythical one. Most visitors thought of the Peabody as a maritime museum. But while the museum’s holdings include outstanding maritime arts, scrimshaw and ship models represent less than 10 percent of its holdings. Its founders were much more interested in celebrating contemporary art from around the world than in paying attention to what happened at sea. They collected the art of their times with an eye toward teaching Americans about the world. “We want,” said Lynda Hartigan, the James B. and Mary Lou Hawkes Chief Curator, “to show the commonality across fields, to create experiences that suggest the art of connectivity rather than separateness.” In essence, that means creating cosmopolitans by showcasing objects, ideas, or feelings we can all relate to—the shared stuff of human experience. It’s a challenge, Hartigan admitted, because art history is so nationalistic. For so long, Western viewers glossed over all non-Western art, perceiving it as equally exotic and enticing. Curators had to fight to get people to recognize that Chinese, Korean, and Japanese art are not the same. Right now, she said, there are fans from different countries in every gallery, but someday, she hopes, they can all be displayed in one room. “All these cultures made fans, but people don’t want to acknowledge how they influenced each other, because the Japanese conquered, the Koreans hate the Chinese, and so on. The curators say they’ve worked so hard to make the differences between Korean, Chinese, and Japanese art clear that stressing their similarities would be a step backward.” The PEM, said Monroe, is not really an institution that is particularly about America. “A large part of the collection is American because Americans made the objects and they were incredibly important for the evolution of American art and industry. A lot of the objects were used in America but made elsewhere. Some parts of the collection were created well before there was an America.” The museum uses them not to tell an American story but to help visitors grasp how the objects are connected to people near and far away. No one expected the PEM to attract large numbers. “Everything we do,” said Monroe, “brings in fewer people than it would in Boston simply because the PEM is in Salem. That

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is liberating.” Monroe is keenly aware of the nearby institutions he competes with. But when he thinks strategically about the future, he thinks not only about the region but also about the nation and the world beyond. His audience, he said, is not merely the 260,000 visitors who come through the door each year but also the 500,000 or so who visit exhibitions organized by the PEM at major art museums around the world or who visit the website. The museum will not, he said, do exhibitions on the horrors of forced migration. And hammering people over the head about climate change or poverty is not the role they are trying to play. What people often forget is that every group creates its own art and culture; we all share basic desires that tie us together as human beings. “What I want to do is brain flexing: to encourage people to be more exploratory, to take accepted ideas and test them, to learn to think creatively, and to accept that there are a lot of values around the world other than one’s own. No one has a corner on the market. We can’t turn to ethical relativism. You have to draw the line somewhere. We’re not going to say it’s okay to mutilate women’s bodies. But the number of things that are actually not okay is not that large.” This is, in essence, Monroe’s version of cosmopolitan values and skills, without the cosmopolitics.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN BOSTON

Despite its more populist roots, creating citizens of any kind is no longer part of the MFA’s official mission. According to its statement of purpose, in addition to collecting, preserving, and researching, its “ultimate aim is to encourage inquiry and to heighten public understanding and appreciation of the visual world.” The emphasis is on the art that stimulates “a sense of pleasure, pride, and discovery which provides aesthetic challenge and leads to a greater cultural awareness and discernment.”79 If the visitor adapts a new identity or skill, it is by engaging artistically and visually, not socioculturally. According to Elliot Bostwick Davis, “Our first appeal is a visual and aesthetic one. . . . We hope that the nearly five thousand objects on view in the [Art of the Americas] Wing offer what Stephen Greenblatt describes as a successful balance between the resonance these objects have—and here I would add: ‘[and their ability] to engender a global perspective’—and the wonder they inspire.”80 In other words, if visitors leave with any kind of cosmopolitan leanings, it is because they have joined in the collective experience of being awed and inspired by what is on view. How the MFA deals with ancient and Native American art, she says, does “not ‘speak for the other’ but rather places these objects into a continuum of artistic expression created throughout time and space.” This will not always be the case, said Erica Hirshler. “One might hope that a discussion of world citizenship could happen. But we have been thinking more about helping everyone from every kind of background feel comfortable in an institution that has always been upper class and WASP. So we are still in that phase of wanting a broader community to feel that this is their museum. If they do, then we will create global citizens. Because they will find things about themselves and find things about the other people who are here too.”

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Clearly this work is already under way. Fresh Ink, an exhibition mounted in 2010 by Hao Sheng, Wu Tung Curator of Chinese Art, linked the immigrant experience to the world. He asked five Chinese artists and five artists of Chinese ancestry in the United States to make work in response to objects from the MFA’s collection. Meanwhile, Laura Weinstein, the Ananda Coomaraswamy Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art, redesigned the MFA’s South Asian galleries. The installation, bringing together materials from South and Southeast Asia, is filled with references to trade and connection. “Covering an area of more than 3 million square miles, South and Southeast Asia have been home to innumerable societies throughout history,” the wall text reads. “This gallery explores how, over the course of 2000 years, those societies were brought into contact with one another—a story told through the remarkable art they made. Trade, culture, and politics fueled interaction and exchange between South and Southeast Asia.” The physical clustering of materials is meant to reflect contact—to show how power and money traveled, as did ideas and iconography. “I’m from a generation that is interested in talking about exchange and intercultural contacts,” Weinstein said, “so it is natural for me to tell a more global story.” When Malcolm Rogers reopened the museum’s Huntington Avenue entrance, closed since 1990, and its Fenway Entrance, closed for nearly thirty years, he sent a clear architectural signal of greater openness to the surrounding community.81 The museum also mounts special exhibitions and borrows proactively to fill gaps in its holdings. In 2014, Permission to be Global: Prácticas Globales, which included works from the Ella Fontanales-Cisneros Collection, showcased “powerful contemporary voices across the Americas [that] offer critical understandings of what it means to be global.”82 Many galleries now include statements by and photos of the curator. “When you start exhibitions with these personal statements,” says Chris Geary, Teel Senior Curator of African and Oceanic Art, “it’s not the anonymous voice of the museum speaking but people who have ideas that not everyone agrees with. Doing an exhibition is an interpretive act. That is important. Exhibitions don’t come out of nowhere.”83 In fact, because visitors wanted to know more about how curators make decisions, the Art of the Americas Wing includes two “Behind the Scenes” galleries, where they can watch videos about topics such as the pros and cons of different conservation approaches. Important collectors, like the Karoliks, are showcased. And perhaps most significant for the purposes of this book, there’s a mea-culpa reflection on why the museum’s Native American collection is so weak—and for which the museum has been criticized. In discussing the museum’s collection of Native American materials, Gerald W. R. Ward, Katharine Lane Weems Senior Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture, tells visitors, “This institution was interested in those materials from the time of our founding in 1870 until about 1900 or 1905, when we amassed a collection, particularly of ceramics but of other things as well. . . . Then we lapsed into a hiatus of well over fifty years, during which there was relatively little interest in Native American or Indian materials. And, really, for the better part of fifty years, the emphasis was on colonial American art and art

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from France, Britain, and Italy. That was the way the museum tried to acculturate its visitors over the years, [until] there began to be an expansion of the canon of what is considered ‘beautiful.’ Beginning in 1984 or 1985, we began to be much more interested, and pursued objects with much more vigor. And now five different curatorial departments collect Native American materials.”84 But when it comes to showcasing Boston’s diversity, or the diversity of the nation at large, one curator admits, “the museum is still behind the curve.” You still have to look hard to find it. How much progress is made, and for whom, can depend on how vocal a particular community is and how much money it has. Some complain, for example, that the MFA does more on contemporary South Asia than other regions because that community is relatively wealthy and politically savvy. Still, some recent acquisitions include a 1965 painting by Argentine avant-gardist Cesar Paternosto titled Staccato and a 1943 painting, Untitled, by the Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam. In November 2011, the MFA took an important step toward filling one of its most conspicuous gaps when it acquired sixtyseven works by African American and Afro-Brazilian artists.85 According to Bostwick Davis, such works “greatly enhance the MFA’s ‘Art of the Americas’ holdings, allowing us to tell the broader story of American art.” So where does the MFA fall on the cosmopolitan-nationalism continuum? According to Barbara Martin, Alfond Curator of Education, the museum is changing and, taken together, the changes add up over time. “If we effectively communicate the human dimension of the art from each culture, and if, cumulatively, that leads you to those clicks—‘Oh, that’s what I do,’ or ‘That’s what my grandfather used to say’—then that leads you to [recognizing] resonance across cultures.” In other words, she believes the museum is slowly moving toward the cosmopolitan end of the spectrum. “We are of course limited by the collections, those we care for and the many we acquired to begin to express the art of the Americas in the wing—about thirty-five hundred pieces in all,” Bostwick Davis said. “But the wing is really a statement of our ambitions, because we all realized it would not be possible—within the decade during which we worked steadily on the project—to represent the full breadth of the rich artistic expression of the Americas. That said, the galleries reflect a greater range of artists, from those who were indigenous Americans to those unknown to us today—a greater representation of women artists; both young and old; so-called folk artists; those who were self-taught; Latin American artists: and artists of color, to name a few.”86

B R O O K LY N A N D B E YO N D : H E L P I N G P E O P L E M A K E S E N S E O F T H E W O R L D T H R O U G H A RT

In 1823, a group of civic-minded Brooklyn residents established the Apprentices’ Library Association so that working men and boys could learn trade skills, be exposed to the broader intellectual currents of the day, and stay out of trouble. As Brooklyn’s population grew from 15,000 in 1830 to 267,000 by 1860, civic-minded Brooklyn residents worried

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that the Irish, English, and German immigrants pouring into their city would be a bad influence. By the mid-1800s, immigrants made up nearly 50 percent of the borough’s population.87 The library’s art collection, which included just seventeen paintings, would later form the basis of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Augustus Graham, a prominent philanthropist, purchased some of its first holdings. Born in 1776, Graham emigrated from England to Baltimore as a young man. In the early 1800s, he met John Bell, a young Scot from northern Ireland. The two decided to “unite their capital, adopt a kindred name and relation”—to masquerade as brothers—“and proceed further north in quest of better fortunes.” Graham left his wife and two children behind, although he continued to provide for them, and eventually started the brewery that made them rich. Some believe that Graham and Bell were romantically involved, living together as a loving couple under the guise of brotherhood for many decades.88 In 1822, the now wealthy Graham retired from the alcohol industry—but not from business or public life. He and Bell decided to devote their fortune to public service, in what also proved to be a good business venture. When Graham opened a paint factory to give jobs to unemployed Brooklynites, the business took off, enabling him to become an even more active philanthropist. Because he disapproved of his young workers’ devotion to grog and gambling, the former liquor producer joined the nascent radical temperance movement and, in 1824, founded the Apprentices’ Library as an alternative to saloons and other dens of vice. Over the next two decades, the library grew into an institute, even offering evening art classes—an opportunity that young workers in the mid-nineteenth century rarely enjoyed. The institute also laid the cornerstone for the gallery that Graham endowed in his will, which would become the Brooklyn Museum.89 By 1890, the Brooklyn Institute of Art and Sciences was the parent organization of the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Botanic Garden, and the Brooklyn Children’s Museum. When fire destroyed its original building, the trustees built a great, new museum next to Prospect Park. The Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences was to be, according to its motto, a “museum for everything for everybody.”90 None, according to Augustus Healey, the president of the board of trustees, were “to be more welcome than the tired mechanic or the laboring man or domestic of our household who comes to the Museum for recreation or enjoyment, or to gain a little knowledge that is elsewhere inaccessible to him of the secrets of nature or the triumphs of art.”91 When the first wing of the new building opened in 1893, Brooklyn was still an independent city—in fact one of the largest and wealthiest in the world. Like the borough where it is located, the museum had great plans that competed with those of neighboring Manhattan. The proposed building, which was to be six times its current size, included a children’s museum, a natural history collection, and a botanical garden all under one roof. But the world had other plans. Brooklyn became part of New York City in 1898. The Great Depression came. The trustees felt they needed to sharpen the museum’s focus and let it do what it did best. In 1934, they deaccessioned its natural history collections,

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finally abandoning science for art. Most of the planned expansion remained uncompleted. Still, visitors came in droves. At its height, the museum welcomed over a million people each year. In the 1930s and 1940s, curator Herbert Spinden even became something of a radio celebrity, broadcasting popular segments about the museum’s collection to rapt audiences.92 In 1934, the board approved the removal of the grand staircase leading up to the museum’s Eastern Parkway entrance, to make it more accessible and welcoming—a decision for which it was widely criticized.93 These efforts reflected the museum’s populist past and institutionalized its populist future, foreshadowing the words, written in big block letters, greeting visitors in the main entrance hall today: “everyone enter here.” Up through the 1950s, the board of trustees still consisted of people from Brooklyn’s “royal” families—the Pratts, Voorhees, and other illustrious names. But by the time chief curator Kevin Stayton arrived in 1980, Brooklyn had seen better days. Declines in the manufacturing sector, the Brooklyn Navy Yard closure, the suburbanization of the United States in general, New York City’s financial crisis of the 1970s, and, some might say, the loss of the borough’s beloved baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, to Los Angeles were all contributing factors.94 Racial unrest during the 1960s destroyed many homes and businesses. Unemployment soared. Many white residents left the borough, and poorer minorities moved in. The museum lost not only many of its traditional donors but also much of its visitor base. Back then, the museum’s mission statement resembled those of most museums from the nineteenth century: “Collect, preserve, and present in that order.” By the time director Arnold Lehman arrived in 1997, everyone recognized big changes were needed. The museum had to rethink its relationship to its community. It redefined its constituencies as the neighborhood surrounding the museum, the Borough of Brooklyn, New York City, and the art community of the world, in that order. A new mission statement, approved about ten years ago, paraphrased here by Stayton, says that the museum “provides a bridge between the art we hold and the community we serve.”95 Lehman described this to me as the sweet spot on the tennis racket, where the collection, the interested communities, and vibrant major projects meet. “The sweet spot is when they all overlap, and they are all served, and we do it in such a fashion that people are pulled into the museum.” In the past, the Brooklyn Museum suffered from a full-blown inferiority complex. “We traditionally viewed ourselves as a poor sister of the Met,” said Stayton.96 But when Lehman arrived, he put an end to that no-win contest. Getting tourists to come to Brooklyn was another losing battle. But it was more than that. To survive and thrive, Stayton said, the museum had to think differently and reorder its priorities. “I had a traditional museum education and art history background. I came to the museum loving great design, aesthetics. I am, by nature, deeply acquisitive. I love collecting and amassing things. But then I began to think, why are we collecting fifty teapots when we can show only three? What is the meaning, as this institution marches into the future, of having all this stuff, as much as I love it? Arnold Lehman came along with a better answer. He

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said, ‘Let’s start asking these questions out loud and thinking about what it is we really need to do, where our place is in the future: what is it that we need to do for the community?’ ” The answer is as simple as “Everyone enter here.” And just as Brooklyn is seeing better days, as evidenced by its residents’ higher incomes, rising rents, and increased access to amenities, the Brooklyn Museum, too, is enjoying better fortunes.97 These shifts in the winds are also reflected in its permanent exhibition, American Identities: A New Look, Brooklyn’s equivalent to the MFA’s Art of the Americas Wing. In many ways, the creators of the two displays have similar goals. They both want to tell a different story about American art and to show how it has been influenced by a more diverse cast of characters and by forces beyond our national borders. In both cases, curators mixed mediums, combining paintings, furniture, and decorative arts, to drive the narrative forward. But there are also real aesthetic and ideological distinctions that reflect each institution’s historic relationship with its community, the role each city plays in the national cultural performance, and differences in how New York and Boston relate to the world.

AMERICAN IDENTITIES: A NEW LOOK

A quote from Booker T. Washington, from a 1886 speech to the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, greets visitors entering American Identities: “The study of Art that does not result in making the strong less willing to oppress the weak means little.” A statement by Walt Whitman, from his 1855 Leaves of Grass, follows: “Here is not a nation but a teeming nation of nations.” This is the story of America through a Brooklyn lens. But it is also a larger story. “In an effort to broaden conventional notions of what constitutes ‘American’ art,” the wall text reads, “we have also included Native American objects, as well as fine and decorative arts of the Spanish colonial era in Mexico and South America from the Museum’s equally stellar collections in those areas.” “We are defining ‘America’ as broadly as possible,” said Kevin Stayton. “North and South America, indigenous, immigrants, Europeans, and Americans; and we are hoping to show how diverse it is now but [also] how diverse it has always been.” An old photo of bathers at Coney Island, Georgia O’Keeffe’s 1949 painting of the Brooklyn Bridge, Ray Komai’s molded plywood chair made in Brooklyn using the latest technology, and an Alice Neel portrait of Jack Baur, the head of the museum’s Department of Paintings and Sculpture from 1936 to 1952, are merely some of the items this introductory section features. “This section is about Brooklyn,” Stayton said—“things that were made here—or sometimes about this institution. We are trying to say that we are local and in Brooklyn, but that this is a world-class collection and our vision is the world. American Identities is about America, but we also tried to connect with ideas about what communities make up that mix.” The reinstallation, which is all on one floor, cost around a hundred thousand dollars and took around fifteen months to complete; it opened in 2001. “We were,” said Terry Carbone, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art, “departing from the notion that

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there was a linear history in American art. We were bringing the objects together in new ways in order to show the multiplicity of narratives.” The staff, she said, saw themselves as breaking down barriers between mediums, time periods, and groups, and between self-taught and academically trained artists, in order to tell many different stories. Contemporary and older works stand side by side. Important objects from the American collection are displayed alongside major works of Native American and Spanish colonial art. “We weave Native American throughout the exhibit to create dialogue and juxtapositions that compel people to think differently,” said Carbone. “When we have a Zuni water jar from the mid-eighteenth century next to a kast from Dutch New York,98 you can read the exhibit as a conversation about indigenous cultures versus outside cultures. There is a much more fluid mixing of genres, media, and chronology, and that was very deliberate.” Curators also felt these kinds of displays would be more accessible to less-experienced museum visitors. They believed that people who rarely visit museums would not feel at home in formal galleries that required some background to understand what is going on. That’s why the galleries are lively, offering many different entrance points, and they focus on Brooklyn. That’s why some walls are painted in deep blues and greens rather than white. It’s also why there are four places in the galleries where visitors can relax in comfortable chairs and simply gaze at the art. So while both the MFA and the Brooklyn Museum rewrote the story of American art, the narratives they constructed and how they are expressed reflect their unique histories. That is, in part, because the Brooklyn Museum had a different set of tools with which to tell its tale. In the 1600s, it was the Dutch, not the British, who colonized Manhattan’s shores. Thanks to two curators, R. Stewart Culin and Herbert Spinden, the museum also boasts much stronger holdings in Native American and Spanish colonial materials. Stewart Culin came to the Brooklyn Museum in 1903 as the first director of the new Department of Ethnology. He was one of “the first curators to recognize the museum installation as an art form in itself and to display ethnological collections as art objects, not as mere specimens.” He saw the museum “not as a place of antiquities and relics, but as preserving the seed of things which may blossom and bear fruit again.”99 Like many of his contemporaries, Culin worried that Native American cultures were disappearing, and believed the museum should collect their artifacts before it was too late. By 1911, he had amassed over nine thousand objects from the Southwest, the Northwest coast, California, and Oklahoma—the core of the museum’s Native American collection.100 In 1925, Culin created the “Rainbow House,” in which “the art of different peoples [was] distinguished” by differently painted cases.101 The gallery’s vibrant colors and stunning objects are remembered by generations of visitors. Sadly, little was said about the provenance of many of these objects, which had been looted or obtained by force.102 While Culin was responsible for the museum’s impressive Native American holdings, his successor, Herbert Joseph Spinden, gets credit for amassing its pre-Columbian and

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Spanish colonial cache. Spinden came on as curator of ethnology in 1929 and stayed at the helm until 1950. He also served as director of education until 1935. The U.S. Government Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, set up to encourage cultural exchange throughout the region, sent Spinden on six speaking tours, during which he took time out to acquire Mayan ceramics from Honduras, Peruvian textiles, and ceramics and gold from Panama, among others, for the museum.103 Spinden then used these materials to organize traveling exhibitions that toured schools and public institutions all over the United States. “It’s not an accident that we sent an expedition in 1941,” remarked Kevin Stayton. “This was a last-ditch effort to weave together the Americas and ignore Europe during World War II, at a time we thought we could still get away with that. . . . And it is also no accident,” Stayton reflected, “that the collection disappeared into our storerooms when achieving hemispheric unity receded in importance.” What Spinden also cemented was the museum’s commitment to the masses. As director of education, he made the building more welcoming, not only through his radio broadcasts, but also by organizing Native American craft demonstrations and art workshops for local designers and manufacturers. On Saturdays, the Ethnological Hall filled with visitors who came to watch basket weaving, but who also, admitted Stayton, really liked the hot dogs. Spinden created the Brooklyn Museum School Service, which welcomed school groups free of charge. The program aimed to teach students about distant cultures but also to make Brooklyn’s ever-increasing immigrant population into Americans.104 So, let’s take a walk through American Identities and see what there is to see. In the “Colony to Nation” gallery, Copley portraits of important New Englanders and objects from the Anglo-Dutch era are displayed side by side with a table from Argentina and a Zuni water jug. These pairings are meant to show the connections between the art and objects produced at the time throughout the region. The Zuni water jug, “created at the same moment as many of the European-derived portraits and furnishings in the gallery, serves as a reminder of the independent continuity of Indian artistic traditions in North America throughout the colonial period.” The Chippendale-inspired table, which stands barely a foot off the floor, Stayton said, “was made for an English tea ceremony, which is itself an import from Asia to the West.” But much more mixing occurred in South America. The table is low because the Spanish who traveled to the New World brought their memories of Moorish times with them. In those days, men sat on chairs and women sat on cushions placed on low tables. In Argentina, though, the drawing-room drink of choice was not tea but maté, an infusion made from dried maté leaves, served in a hollow calabash gourd with a silver straw—a taste acquired from indigenous communities in Paraguay. “So right here, you have English, Spanish, Moorish and Native traditions combined,” noted Stayton. Another “colonial pairing” showcases William Williams’s portrait of Deborah Hall, daughter of the printer David Hall (Benjamin Franklin’s business partner), next to a

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portrait of Doña Mariana Belsunse y Salasar, a member of the criollo elite,105 which is attributed to either José Joaquin Bermejo or Pedro José Diaz (plate 8 and plate 9). Both paintings were completed in the 1760s, one in colonial Philadelphia and the other in colonial Lima, Peru. The paintings broadcast the elite status of their subjects in much the same way as European portraits of the day: both women stand in front of (probably imaginary) formal gardens. They are dressed to the nines, gazing out elegantly from the frame. The iconography is also familiar. The flowers, which symbolize love and beauty, may tell viewers the women are ready to marry. The timepieces probably indicate that time is ticking away.106 Next up is a Pizarro commemorative plate, made in Peru in the nineteenth century, created in response to Peruvians’ renewed interest in their colonial history, which coincided with a growing North American fascination with the indigenous cultures of Central and South America. Framed like a formal coat of arms are portraits of the last Incan emperor, Atahualpa, and the Spaniard Don Francisco Pizarro, his vanquisher. The inscription honors only the conqueror, however, suggesting that, even in the nineteenth century, Peruvians still viewed the Spanish invasion as an illustrious period in their history.107 Pizarro and Atahualpa hang alongside a silver tray first displayed at the Tiffany exhibition at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It is modeled after the Aztec’s famous sun calendar, an icon of Mexico’s pre-Columbian past. It reflects, the wall text reads, “the nineteenth-century search for America’s roots in its pre-European cultures.” This, said Stayton, is the United States spreading out and becoming more international. After the Civil War, people wanted to connect to an American past that did not involve only Europe, as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes had urged. After the exposition, newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst purchased the tray for his palatial home, San Simeon. If you look closely, American Identities also draws attention to the immigrant and African American experience. There is a richly carved staff commemorating the Emancipation Proclamation that ended slavery in 1863. In a section on the centennial era, which explores the creation of a unique national iconography, there is a tea set from around 1876, modeled after eighteenth-century rococo-style tea sets but decorated with flora and fauna. The handles of the teapot and the sugar bowl, in the shape of an Asian male and a Black sugarcane cutter, respectively, “would probably strike most contemporary viewers as racist, but the nineteenth century consumer probably considered them benign, clever shorthand for the content of each vessel.”108 Further down the showcase are a late-nineteenth-century kachina doll made by a Zuni Pueblo artisan, an early nineteenth-century shirt crafted with a Sioux needle, and a pipe bowl from the early-twentieth-century Plains Indians. A final, relatively recent acquisition, Agostino Brunias’s Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape, speaks to Brooklyn’s current collecting priorities. Just as the Dutch sent Albert Eckhout to Brazil, the British sent the Italian painter Brunias to the West Indies around 1764 to document one of its newest colonies, Dominica. The

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painting shows two elegantly dressed mulatto sisters, members of the island’s elite, out strolling with their aging mother, two small children, and three dainty lapdogs. Accompanying the well-appointed family are no fewer than eight African servants, among them children and mature men and women alike. “We have a large West Indian community,” said Richard Aste, the curator of European art, who oversaw its purchase. “When I first saw the painting, it just screamed Brooklyn. We were looking for something from the 18th century, and we didn’t have anything like this.”109 Another selling point was that the painting speaks to so many collecting areas—not just European but also the American and African galleries. And what probably appealed to Lehman is the possibility that some grandmother from Dominica would bring her granddaughter to see the painting, just as another grandmother had brought her granddaughter to see Inuit art in Baltimore. “The American gallery,” said Joan Cummins, the Lisa and Bernard Selz Curator of Asian Art, “positions our country in a global perspective.” And when it first reopened, many people strongly disapproved. Art critics, curators, and academics accused museum staff of “overprogramming” visitors by including such explicit narratives. The “inelegant” installations, with their bright blue and green walls, offended them. But most of all, Lehman recalled, colleagues complained the museum was shaking up categories. “They wanted to know why we were doing this. Why are you breaking established norms? Why show Native American with Dutch influences? Why bring Spanish American into the American galleries? Why are you making trouble?” But to serve the neighborhood and bring in younger and first-time visitors, that was exactly what curators felt they needed to do. The public loved it. In fact, over the next decade, the entire collection will be reinstalled along similar lines. “Our idea,” said Lehman, “is to look at all our collecting areas from a truly twenty-first-century point of view, bringing to bear the knowledge we now have, which is vastly different from the knowledge we had a hundred years ago, when most museums were established. Most of the methodologies, the hierarchies, the paradigms of presentation we still use were put in place about seventy-five years ago and have pretty much not changed since.” Part of this work has already begun. A new installation called Connecting Cultures: A World in Brooklyn opened in the Great Hall in April 2012. It is designed as an introduction to the museum—a sort of meditation on how the museum collected, interpreted, and grouped objects, as well as a general roadmap to its exhibitions. In some ways, it is Brooklyn’s response to the same questions posed in the MFA’s “Behind the Scenes” galleries. According to Kevin Stayton, who spoke to me during the planning stages, “The new introductory gallery will combine things from all of the museum’s collections. By framing things that way, we want to encourage people to go beyond their borders, whether this means the borders of their own interests or the borders of their national identity.” This is part of the museum’s effort to be more welcoming. “We want to introduce people right away to a range of collections that they might not understand are here if they just walked onto the first floor. We will frame it in a way that explains that our primary modus operandi is showing the connections between cultures.”

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This time, at least one critic was more than satisfied. Remembering the many Saturdays he spent wandering around the galleries of Boston’s MFA as a young man, New York Times critic Holland Cotter wrote that the Brooklyn Museum now offers visitors an immersion experience of their own. According to Cotter, the approximately three hundred eclectic and first-rate objects on display purposely shake up visitors’ expectations of “one-culture-per-gallery,” and they “get you shopping, with your magpie eye sharpened for odd and tasty things.” He sees Connecting Cultures as encouraging viewers to “play with art, with meanings and values and cultural interconnections, which also means to play with the Museum itself, to move its contents around mentally, to make friends where you ordinarily wouldn’t think to find them: to be at home in a large world.”110 But is the museum creating global citizens or simply showcasing the nation’s internal diversity? How do those things coincide? Right now, said Lehman, “they exist in parallel; but when you are really successful, they should collide. We are in the midst of a professionally led rethinking process, a rebranding, although I hate to call it that. And one of the things that has evolved after many months of talking is that Brooklyn should be the (or a) place where we can help people, through art, make sense of the world. That is a big, big goal, and it helps to take on these two sometimes parallel [goals]—showing diversity and showing the global—together. Right now, we are creating better New Yorkers, better Americans, but not yet global citizens.”

C O N S T I T U E N C Y A N D C O M M U N I T Y- B A S E D M U S E U M S

The Queens Museum, located on the edge of the 897-acre Flushing Meadows–Corona Park, completed a major renovation in November 2013. The building, which was first constructed as the New York City Pavilion for the 1939 World’s Fair, and which housed the United Nations between 1946 and 1950, used to have galleries on one side and iceand roller-skating rinks on the other. When the renovated wing reopened, the museum doubled its capacity, adding new galleries, studios, and classrooms in place of its former ice palace. Staff wanted the renovated building to clearly telegraph the museum’s relationship to its community. The new design includes two big sheets of glass on each side, so you can see right through. The bathrooms and drinking fountains are located just inside the door, before the point where visitors pay admission. Anyone enjoying the park, which, on warm days, is filled with immigrant soccer, baseball, and cricket players, can come in and use them. In Queens, “Everyone enter here” is proclaimed by the accessibility of the facilities. The Queens Museum of Art first opened its doors in 1972. In contrast to Brooklyn’s encyclopedic range, its permanent collection includes about ten thousand items, over six thousand of which are memorabilia from the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs. Also in its storerooms are over forty years’ worth of crime scene photographs from the New York Daily News, over a thousand drawings by the court reporter and political cartoonist

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William Sharp, and, since 1995, the Neustadt collection of Tiffany glass, once manufactured just down the street at the Tiffany Studios and Furnaces in Corona. The Queens Museum is probably most famous for its panorama—an enormous model of New York City commissioned by city planner Robert Moses for the 1964 World’s Fair—a 9,335-square-foot replica of 895,000 individual buildings in the five boroughs. It took nearly a hundred people—who worked for Raymond Lester Associates, an architectural model maker—to create the original replica. In March 2009, the museum announced it would allow individuals and developers to refurbish or add new buildings for a small (or not so small) fee. It costs $50 to “purchase” an apartment; $250 to adopt a private home; $500 to purchase a school, library, or firehouse; and $2,500 for neighborhood maintenance. Donors even receive a title deed. Staff said Tom Finkelpearl, the museum’s former president and executive director, who left in 2014 to become New York City’s cultural affairs commissioner, took context seriously. Queens is the most diverse borough in New York City. The museum’s surrounding neighborhood, Corona, teems with new and not so new migrants from Latin America and Asia. So-called outer-borough museums, or those outside Manhattan, can either hope to attract residents and tourists who normally do their museum-going in Manhattan, or can connect to the community around them. Like Brooklyn, staff embraced the idea of a community partnership, renaming itself the Queens Museum, rather than the Queens Museum of Art.111 “We have done way more for immigrants than any other museum in America,” Finkelpearl claimed. Museums should be catalysts for social and political engagement, which eventually also gets people in the door. In other words, after mobilizing the community, “we also let them know,” said community organizer Jose Serrano, “that there is a lovely free institution with open doors and great free art classes and exhibitions created with them in mind.” Yes, community organizer. This new model of museum work includes two community organizers on staff who work closely with local immigrant artists, event producers, and community groups. Serrano describes himself as a “cultural organizer who uses art strategies in service of community organizing efforts that are already under way in the community. . . . We lend our creative services to help social campaigns in the community that we do not lead but participate in.” How exactly? By supporting the community’s artists and social and cultural institutions, by creating art installations on neighborhood streets, and by inviting community members to use the museum as a place to hold events, celebrations, and political meetings. The New New Yorkers Program, for example, organized in partnership with the Queens Public Library, offers language and skill-based classes. The introductory levels are conducted in Korean, Spanish, or Taiwanese, but the more advanced classes are in English so that students from diverse backgrounds have to study together. The Museum Explorers’ Club, for families affected by autism, is part art class and part class in the social skills needed to enjoy a successful museum visit. Cinemarosa is the borough’s first and only independent video and film series organized by the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community.

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What unites all these activities is the belief in the transformative power of art, and in the artist’s role as translator and bridge-builder between immigrants and the broader community. When an art historian teaches English as a second language by having her students discuss female portraiture, she also teaches them about the creative spirit. “I think the programming we do,” said Nung-Hsin Hu, associate coordinator of the New New Yorkers Program, “is creating the community and [enlarging] its capacity to create.” To consistently capture new audiences in the “new Queens,” outreach takes a backseat to partnership and collaboration. “Reciprocity,” said Jason Yoon, director of education, “is the key paradigm shift.” Using art and culture to engage the community is a natural outgrowth of the museum’s curatorial priorities. According to Hitomi Iwasaki, the director of exhibitions, the Queens Museum was one of the first in New York to give space to non-American, nonwhite artists. Staff did this not by visiting artists’ studios and selecting the work they liked best but by welcoming artists into the museum, talking to them about its history and community, and inviting them to “suck in and digest all of that and see what came out in response.” The idea, said Iwasaki, was not to try to compete with the Guggenheim or the Whitney but for Queens to be a cutting-edge contemporary art museum in its own right. The idea was also to broaden the definition of American art by doing “cultural shows” that paired work by immigrant artists with work created by artists from their ancestral homelands. In 2002, the museum mounted its first Queens International, a biennial exhibition of artists from around the world who live or work in Queens. The show, now in its sixth iteration, “examines the boundaries of culture, tradition, heritage and nationality” and “addresses the relationship between ‘internationalism’ and ‘multiculturalism’ from a local standpoint. . . . Culture is the logic by which we give order to the world. No one stands outside of it. In Queens, one comes to recognize that nations are not walled fortresses but rather permeable containers for the fluid shifts of culture.”112 Helping people feel committed and comfortable enough to be socially engaged in their community and beyond is the overarching goal, whether the activities take place inside the museum or out. Participating in cultural practices makes people feel more creative, feel a greater sense of leadership and self-confidence, and feel a lot more connected to life in New York and the world—in essence, they help participants develop cosmopolitan ideas and skills that ultimately lead to cosmopolitan projects. Organizers try to ease visitors’ discomfort with “weird things,” said Serrano, “so if there is an outthere dance performance, it is paired with music that reminds people of home right away. At a festival, there is a tent where artists are doing something cool, but you also recognize where you are. We use familiarity as a bridge to get people in and then expose them to artwork too.” Because the museum’s policy is to open its doors to any group that asks, different kinds of people run into each other. When filmgoers attending the monthly LGBTQ film series, and the proud Taiwanese parent attending her child’s dance recital, bump

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into each other in the bathroom, “it is like a little kiss,” said Iwasaki. The encounter plants the seeds of transformation. “We have a Tower of Babel problem,” said Tom Finkelpearl. “When people from different groups are in the same audience, it doesn’t mean they can speak to each other. We have to proactively facilitate the translation.” Just as libraries have users who come in to find resources and make connections, museums should, too. In fact, the renovated building will eventually house a branch of the Queens Public Library. Staff members see themselves as creating citizens who are active in their local neighborhoods and their communities back home. They recognize that traveling back and forth is second nature to many immigrants. Take the case of Ecuador. In 2009, the Ecuadoran Ministry of Culture hired someone to map its emigrant community in New York. That person, having learned of the museum’s strong community connections, approached the staff for help. Thus began a series of artistic and curatorial exchanges between Queens and Ecuador. To serve more diverse audiences, you need more diverse curators, so two curatorial fellows now come to work at the museum from Ecuador each year. Even artwork crosses borders. One of the first pieces the museum supported was by a New York–based Ecuadoran artist who created an installation by collaborating with truck drivers who parked nearby. Since many of the drivers were undocumented and could not visit their families, she helped them write “video letters” to send home, which the museum then showed publicly. “I always joke,” said Prerana Reddy, director of public programs, “that there might be more people in Ecuador who know about this museum than there are in Brooklyn.” “We can’t just wait for cultural change to happen,” said Reddy. “We have to actively combat the idea of assimilation, or that the only way is either/or, or that if you don’t speak English, you are not a loyal American. . . . The world is a much more complicated place. We are at the limits of what a 250-year-old idea of liberal democracy looks like, and I don’t know what is coming in the future. Globalization means that money and companies can move freely, but we have not accepted that people can too.” Queens, said Jose Serrano, represents the whole world we live in. “There is a constant dialogue between here and home. We do not have an agenda for political engagement in a strict, narrow sense; but more generally, we are about helping people find their voice in a civil and international dialogue. We want to create a more creative and capable user of this institution and the world.” Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, the exhibition on display for much of 2012, grew out of a collaboration between the Queens Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and El Museo del Barrio. Its message was that the Caribbean has always been a site of encounter. Its residents understand what it means to live transnationally and to be part of the constant movement of people and traditions that blends beliefs and realities.113 New York City, as staff frequently repeated, is the largest Caribbean city in the world. The Caribbean, with its confluence of cultures, is the historical double of Queens and what the rest of the world is fast becoming.114

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The cultural convergence exemplified by the region is also a metaphor for El Museo del Barrio’s institutional journey. Raphael Montañez Ortiz created El Museo in 1969 to celebrate the Puerto Rican diaspora and to fill what he saw as a gaping cultural hole. “The cultural disenfranchisement I experience as a Puerto Rican,” he wrote, “has prompted me to seek a practical alternative to the orthodox museum, which fails to meet my needs for an authentic ethnic experience.”115 The Studio Museum had just created educational materials designed for African American students for the New York City Board of Education. When the board asked Ortiz, an artist and teacher, to do the same for Puerto Ricans, he proposed creating a museum instead. According to Deborah Cullen, former chief curator, “It started in a classroom, actually. He collected a box of materials on a trip to Puerto Rico and sort of dragged it around.” In fact, the Queens Museum and El Museo have a lot in common. They both grew out of the civil rights struggles in the 1960s and 1970s that sought to win equal access for people of color to all kinds of institutions, including cultural ones. Their founders felt underrepresented in traditional museums and were convinced by art’s transformative power. As the communities they serve have grown more diverse, they have had to reinvent themselves and their relationship to their neighbors. El Museo’s history exemplifies these tensions. It began life as a culturally specific museum, located in what was an overwhelmingly Puerto Rican neighborhood, but which is now home to people from all over North and South America and to increasing numbers of U.S.-born whites. As early as 1978, director Jack Agüeros stated that the museum was not just about Puerto Ricans. “We are too culturally rich to force ourselves into ghettoes of narrow nationalism. El Museo now wants to embody the culture of all of Latin America.”116 By 1994, the museum’s mission statement read, “El Museo del Barrio’s mission is to establish a forum that will preserve and project the dynamic cultural heritage of Puerto Ricans and all Latin Americans in the United States.” The words “all Latin Americans” reflected a tremendous, controversial shift. Critics argued that a museum devoted solely to the cultural accomplishments of Puerto Ricans was still needed. Supporters believed that adopting a pan-Latino stance filled an important cultural hole and was a necessary next step to ensure the institution’s survival. Today, the website reads, “The mission of El Museo del Barrio is to present and preserve the art and culture of Puerto Ricans and all Latin Americans in the United States.”117 Caribbean: Crossroads of the Worlds broadened the museum’s frame even more to include not only Puerto Ricans, Latinos, and Latin Americans but also their Dutch-, French-, and English-speaking neighbors. To do that, the museum had to tell an ethnic story that it then clearly linked to larger experiences, said Rocio Aranda-Alvarado, the museum’s curator. This narrative is culturally specific and global at the same time. “The objects themselves do that work. You might have a photograph of a beautiful idyllic beach with garbage in the foreground,” she said. “The photo might be from Puerto Rico or from Thailand. Modern and postmodern paintings by Latino or Latin American artists are part of larger artistic movements.”

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Former director Margarita Aguilar took this even further. For her, the message was: “Be engaged with us. This is about New York. This is a Latino story. This is an American story. I want people to be members of the museum, whether their name is Paul Smith or Paul Schmidt or Pablo Lopez.” Aguilar told me that the tag line for the ad campaign she would have liked to plaster on the city’s bus stops would read, “El Museo es tu museo” (El Museo is your museum). “Think of the German immigrants in a city like Milwaukee, she said. “They are not Germans anymore. In one hundred years, given the changing demographics of this country, we will all be American. “There is a history that needs to be told” she went on, “but don’t call yourself Puerto Rican or Caribbean, because people don’t know what to expect and they won’t go near you. You are an artist who happens to be from the Caribbean.” El Museo has to have the confidence to open up its borders, which it has to do to survive.118 And while El Museo sees itself as creating cosmopolitans, it does not particularly matter where these cosmopolitans claim their rights or fulfill their responsibilities. “I guess the end goal of our programming,” said Deborah Cullen, “is to make you a more active and empowered citizen, whatever kind of citizen you want to be.”

B O S TO N A N D T H E B O R O U G H S

Both the MFA and the Brooklyn Museum rewrote the American art story, but they did it using different syntaxes and with different goals in mind. The Brooklyn narrative, told on one floor with comfortable chairs and bright blue and green walls, is directed toward new or inexperienced museumgoers who need a special welcome before they will come in. “Stunning” takes a backseat to “accessible.” That’s not to say that the objects on display are not beautiful. It is to say that they are chosen, grouped, and exhibited with the neighborhood in mind. They convey a strong, purposeful message about America’s internal diversity and about how that connects us to the world. Deborah Hall and Doña Mariana Belsunse y Salasar hang next to one another, while Timothy Matlack and Don Manuel José Rubio y Salinas are in neighboring rooms. Native American and Spanish colonial materials are integrated throughout American Identities. And all this from an institution that hosts an extremely popular Target First Saturdays program, when the museum remains open for free until 11 p.m. on the first Saturday night of the month, sometimes attracting thousands to its dance parties, lectures, and musical performances. The MFA tells a subtler story of connection within more subdued walls. It is a story about how the nation changed as a result of these ties, not about what Americans need to do in response. It is pitched higher and more elegantly; one has to look and listen harder to see and hear the artworks and stories of minorities, which are fewer and farther between and, in the case of ancient and Native American and Spanish colonial materials, stand alone in separate galleries or on separate floors. The MFA opens its doors on the first Friday of each month, inviting visitors to come “for fine art, music, cash bars featuring signature cocktails, and delicious tapas available for purchase”—in essence a mixer for twenty- and thirty-year-olds, not a multicultural community celebration for all ages.119

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In fact, the nation and the world are wrestling with each other in all the museums profiled here. The compromise each institution achieves reflects its own unique response to broad cultural globalization trends and cultural politics on the ground. As in Sweden and Denmark, each museum incorporates selective elements of the global museum assemblage—its restaurants, shops, public programming, and blockbuster exhibitions and biennale shows, but always in conversation with urban and national cultural policies and politics. The Queens Museum is closest to the cosmopolitan end of the cosmopolitan-nationalism spectrum, articulating a message of cosmopolitan values, skills, and politics by putting an inherently diverse nation on display. Not surprisingly, El Museo follows close behind: it wrote New York’s diversity into its bricks and mortar, so that its Puerto Rican residents and, later, the Latino community at large, would feel that they are part of its social fabric. The Brooklyn Museum and the PEM encourage visitors to feel part of the world, and they help them develop the critical thinking, curiosity, and openness needed to do so. These museums rewrite the American story while stressing how much it is connected to, and connects visitors to, people around the globe. The two museums vacillate between showcasing art and showcasing artifact—sometimes displaying objects because they are beautiful and sometimes because they have specific stories to tell. But while the Brooklyn Museum is no longer the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the MFA is still very much a museum of fine arts.120 Its story is about how national art has always been international, which means featuring more immigrants, minorities, and women. The emphasis is on the art and on the nation. If visitors depart feeling something akin to cosmopolitanism, it is because they shared in the collective appreciation of the beauty of the objects or because they grasped how much traditions and objects from across the globe resemble each other. Many, although certainly not all, the curators I spoke to at these institutions want to tell a more global story. They strongly believe museums need to do something different. So, it’s not for a lack of trying or for a lack of goodwill on their part that some things stay the same. But each institution is constrained by its history and holdings; its architecture; whether it began life as an art, cultural history, or constituency museum; and by its city’s cultural armature. The Cabots and Saltonstalls created a different kind of city than the Grahams and Voorheeses built, a different demographic mix came to live there, and the institutions and policies serving them are managed and funded in a different way. And, finally, these museums are located in a nation that has not felt compelled to know a lot about other nations. When you see yourself as the global superpower, you expect the world to come to you. One obstacle preventing the MFA, the Brooklyn Museum, and the PEM from adopting a more cosmopolitan stance is the historical role each museum has played in the institutional distribution of labor. In the same way that people want to see colonial America on display at the MFA, many still want to see ship models and maritime artifacts at the PEM and Egyptian materials in Brooklyn. In particular, the MFA’s role in New England, and in the country as a whole, makes change, as one respondent put it, “like

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turning a natural gas tanker in the Boston harbor. It takes a really long time and you have to take it really slow.” The Queens Museum and El Museo are caught in different kinds of boxes. One of the reasons El Museo’s history has been so tumultuous is that different factions cannot agree about whom it serves. A second issue shaping the question of whether and how museums create citizens, and what kinds, is their funding. While they get occasional government support for special exhibitions and projects, the museums profiled in these pages are largely privately funded. They have to change as their visitors change—although the deeper their pockets and the better the surrounding real estate, the less pressure they are under. Brooklyn curators readily admit they had to undergo a radical transformation to survive the borough’s economic downturn. Nearly fifty years later, they are contributing to and reaping the benefits of the comeback they helped bring about.121 To survive Salem’s declining fortunes, the PEM redefined its target audience to include art and cultural devotees everywhere. And while art and encyclopedic museums, with their deeper collections and budgets, clearly have more tools than newer, poorer, less well-endowed museums, they also face greater constraints. Museums at the cultural periphery, like El Museo and the Queens Museum, can take more risks—the public expects and demands less. Even the PEM when Dan Monroe first arrived, and the Brooklyn Museum before “Brooklyn came back,” enjoyed a greater degree of freedom than the MFA, because they were somewhat out of the limelight. New York City, according to Nancy Foner, is an exceptional American immigrant city. The composition and diversity of the immigrant groups who live there, and the city’s unique institutional response, created a melting pot that differs from the Latinization of other immigrant gateways, like Los Angeles, Miami, and Houston. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the foreign-born made up at least one-fifth of New York City’s residents, reaching as high as 41 percent in 1910 and 36 percent in 2000. Large numbers of African Americans, too, came to live there between World War I and the 1960s, followed by large numbers of Puerto Ricans after World War II. As a result, the vast majority of residents have immigrant roots, and no one group dominates. Between 1990 and 1996 alone, as many as twenty countries sent more than five thousand immigrants to the city. In 2000, the top three groups—Dominicans, Chinese, and Jamaicans—made up just under 30 percent of all the foreign-born. These individuals also varied by class and occupation, nearly equally divided between high- and low-skilled workers. “Multiculturalism,” Foner writes, “has evolved there in what one might call a particular New York way. . . . As a major cultural capital of America, what happens in New York has the potential to affect the shape of change elsewhere in the nation.”122 Boston too is a diverse city, and increasingly so, but in slightly different ways. First, New York is just much bigger, so anything it does, including getting diverse people to get along, happens on a much larger scale. In 2013, New York boasted nearly 8.5 million residents, compared to Boston’s 636,479 in 2012.123 Between 2009 and 2013, 37 percent of New York City residents were foreign-born, compared to 27 percent in Boston. Forty-nine percent of New Yorkers spoke a language

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other then English at home, compared to Boston’s 36 percent.124 Boston’s diversity is more heavily concentrated among fewer groups. In 2014, close to 50 percent of Boston’s immigrants came from Latin America, followed by 25 percent from Asia, meaning that fewer colors make up Boston’s ethnic palette.125 Differences in how culture gets supported also explain what happens in Boston and New York. In New York, thirty-three organizations form the Cultural Institutions Group, which is part of the Department of Cultural Affairs. The city owns the land the organizations’ buildings are built on, and the buildings, and it helps members with basic security, maintenance, administration, and energy costs. In return, the institutions are considered publicly owned facilities that provide cultural services to all New Yorkers.126 For the Brooklyn Museum, membership in the Cultural Institutions Group means that the rent and electric bills are paid. It also means the institution is accountable to the city and to taxpayers in a way the MFA is not. While the city cannot tell the museum what to do, it can weigh in when it doesn’t like where things are headed. These tensions became particularly apparent in the 1999 Sensation exhibition fiasco. This show of works by members of the Young British Artists movement offended the then mayor, Rudy Giuliani, so much that he ordered the museum to cancel its upcoming show or lose its annual $7 million grant. Giuliani was particularly incensed by Chris Ofili’s mixed media work The Holy Virgin Mary, which included a lump of varnished elephant dung (a trademark of the artist) and cutout pornographic images of female genitalia. The museum, Giuliani said, did not “have the right to a government subsidy for desecrating somebody else’s religion,” which Ofili’s spokesman called “totalitarian and fascistic.”127 Giuliani not only cut off funding, but he also filed an eviction suit, which the museum contested on First Amendment grounds. Ultimately, Giuliani lost and the show went on.128 “It matters very much to us whether the city supports what we are doing. Even though the amount of money has declined over the years, it is still the tipping point in our budget,” said Kevin Stayton. “We are so close to the bone.” What’s more, New York City supports the arts and artists more than Boston does. In 1982, Mayor Ed Koch signed a “Percent for Art” law mandating that 1 percent of the budget for all city-funded construction projects support art in city facilities. Since it began, more than 228 projects have been completed. The Department of Cultural Affairs gives out grants to nonprofit arts groups that support programs and projects, sometimes funding as many as nine hundred organizations per year, according to the former chief of staff, Katie Dixon. Its budget for 2015 is $148 million, including $108.5 million for the Cultural Institutions Groups and $28.5 for cultural programs.129 Funds like the Percent for Art fund in New York City, to which developers must contribute, are how many cities in the United States support public art, but Boston is not among them. In fact, many people characterize Boston as having no cultural policy. Former mayor Thomas Menino, who was in office for over twenty years, did not make the arts a priority. While he supported affordable housing for artists, promoted open studios, and organized art fairs in the early 1980s, the fiscal crisis later that decade, and

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the current recession, decimated much of what little municipal support there was. A small public trust, the Edward Ingersoll Brown Fund, is the only consistent funding stream. The Boston Cultural Council gives out grants of up to $5,000 for cultural programming and subsidizes tickets to cultural events for students; in 2014, it distributed $144,419 to fifty-five grantees, which pales in comparison to New York’s numbers.130 A 2010 Citizens’ Committee report warned that the city’s support for the arts comes up short and stressed the need for Boston’s cultural institutions to offer more innovative programs, initiatives, and services.131 Major changes may be on the horizon, however. During a March 2014 speech to the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, new mayor Marty Walsh told his audience, “We are making culture a priority,” and announced the creation of the new post of arts and cultural affairs commissioner.132 But while the MFA is not accountable to the mayor’s office, it is to its donors, which strongly influences what it can and cannot do. According to Brooklyn’s Terry Carbone, one of the many reasons the American story gets told differently in Boston and New York is because “you have different masters. You have different funders. The people who funded Boston’s galleries funded something very important. There is a level of tradition embedded in those galleries that was important to those funders, and to the director, I’m sure. I think because we weren’t doing something so grand and public, we had a little more flexibility. I think there are a lot of funders who wouldn’t be interested in underwriting what we did. Most funders of American art are very conservative. Yes, Brooklyn’s role in the division of labor in telling the American story is different. We are expected to tell a story that is more indicative of the community in which we reside. We have embraced our situation and our location, and we are responsive to our audience in the way we frame our collection. This is not the chronological history of great white men.” Differences in museum practice also reflect how each city has traditionally seen itself in relation to the rest of the world. Some things come into focus on the banks of the Hudson that are not always clear on the banks of the Charles. At about the same time that Boston’s founders were creating their “city on the hill,” the Dutch settlers who established the trading post that would become New York City, write David Halle and Louise Mirrer, saw themselves as part of a cultural “mixing bowl,” attracting people and goods from across the globe.133 According to Halle and Mirrer, these early beginnings set a precedent for a particularly New York definition of culture, which to this day often means the public expression and display of the customs and artifacts of others. It also meant that, from the outset, culture has been regulated, constrained, and promoted through official policies. In the nineteenth century, New York’s leaders believed that transforming their city into the world’s cultural center was as much a part of its manifest destiny as westward expansion was for the nation. The city would equal, if not surpass, the cultural centers of Europe.134 The unique public-private partnership exemplified by the Cultural Institutions Group model “was driven by the desire to promote institutions displaying prized artifacts from selected

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foreign cultures. In so doing, it combined American values of independence and enterprise with European traditions of public support for the arts.”135 By the 1960s, a new kind of diversity influenced the city’s cultural institutions: the foreign origins of New York’s newest residents. As more and more people from Latin America and Asia arrived, the cultural institutional panorama looked more and more one-sided, representing the cultures of the privileged few. One result, as we have seen, was the emergence of constituency museums, like El Museo or the Studio Museum in Harlem, which were no longer seen as “self-interested” but as reflecting the increasing power and visibility of the city’s newest residents. Politicians jockeyed to get credit for establishing these new institutions, hoping to be rewarded at election time. These new museums also made it possible to see the world without ever leaving New York.136 Boston, too, clearly has its foundational myths, which reflect deep cultural roots that continue to bear fruit. As curator of education Barbara Martin so eloquently put it, from early on the city saw itself as an intellectual city led by universities, thinkers, and writers who were thoughtful and discriminating. She remembers, she said, a story in a 1980s membership brochure from the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicagoans, the brochure read, decided theirs would be the biggest, richest new city, and they went to Europe and brought back the best art. “That is Chicago’s myth: we bellied up to the bar, we slapped down our money, and we brought back our Seurats. That is so not Boston’s myth. Ours is: we studied at Harvard, we got interested in Eastern philosophy, we went and lived in Japan for three years, and we brought back huge collections of paintings and prints that everyone knows we have even if we can’t put them on our walls that often. We don’t simply collect objects; we study and think and learn from them. . . . One of our top myths is that Martha Codman, who descended from generations of Boston Brahmins, marries upstart Russian Jew Karolik and together they collect the art of America—the founding generation and the immigrant story coming together, the old Boston bloodline and the new force. You could say that informs the Art of the Americas Wing at this point in time, that we feel it is absolutely intellectually, morally, and politically correct to expand the definition of what is American. That might be part of the Boston character. But we have also been conservative artistically, and that plays into what we collected in the twentieth century. We were not at the forefront of collecting African art, for example.”

AMERICA AND THE WORLD

What museums do in New York and Boston also says something about how the United States sees itself in the world. Long ago, Gunnar Myrdal described Americans as clinging tightly to what they think of as the American creed or the American ideal—which he defined as “the cement in the structure of this great and disparate nation.”137 These deeply rooted assumptions about the nation and its global role are also a piece of my puzzle. People interpret and take responsibility for the global through the lens of the nation, believes Michael Ignatieff. Would we care about universal human rights, he asks, if they

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were only universal, or are we committed to these universals because we are also committed to national rights, rooted in the traditions of a flag, a constitution, a set of founders, and a set of religious and secular national narratives that give them strength and meaning?138 That is why cosmopolitanism and nationalism are part of the same continuum. They generally go hand in hand, even if ever so slightly. So how might a closer look at Americanness and American values help explain how the nation and its place in the world get represented in the galleries of Boston and New York? Exploring the “American ideal” was one of the central goals behind the founding of the Atlantic Monthly, a journal of politics, business, and culture that celebrated its 150th anniversary in 2007. In fact, some of the same Boston superstars who founded the MFA also created the magazine. Picture the aftermath of a five-hour, multicourse dinner at Boston’s still well-known Parker House Hotel. Brandy spills and breadcrumbs litter the tablecloth, and cigar smoke clings to the air. The luminaries assembled include Ralph Waldo Emerson; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of America’s most popular poets; and James Russell Lowell, poet, editor, and diplomat.139 The term the American Idea comes from the Atlantic’s inaugural issue.140 Its founders wrote at a time of heated debates about national identity. Westward expansion, growing tensions between the centralized federal government and its unruly decentralized states, and bad blood between the North and South thwarted attempts to arrive at a national consensus. They committed themselves to exploring, monitoring, and promoting “the American idea,” which included figuring out what it actually was. To celebrate its 150th anniversary, the Atlantic compiled a volume of its “best”—“a 150 years of writers and thinkers who shaped our history.”141 Editor Robert Vare selected poems, short stories, and some of the long-form pieces for which the magazine became famous. He also inadvertently helped me with my homework. What better place to get a snapshot of the American idea than in the last section of his volume bearing that name? What runs throughout these excerpts is a tension between seemingly competing imperatives: the desire to be a world leader and to preserve the country’s isolated, insular stance; to put the group before the individual and to deify the rugged, self-reliant pioneer; to care for those less fortunate and to leave it to the market; to defend the rights of minorities and newcomers and to abuse them; to celebrate equality of opportunity and outcome and to thwart them; and to embrace cosmopolitanism while at the same time celebrating American exceptionalism. These tensions have not gone away. They are still at the heart of the country’s electoral choices, its domestic and international policy debates, and its museums. What does Vare put in this section? Among other things, “The Ideals of America,” includes the address that Woodrow Wilson wrote in 1902 in response to the Spanish-American War. In it, he urges leaders to abandon George Washington’s call to stay out of other countries’ business and to assume a more prominent international role instead. Until then, the country had been too busy expanding westward and warding off continental competitors and external threats. Now, said Wilson, Asia was ripe for the economic picking, Cuba was

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boiling over just to the south, and the United States’ self-confidence soared after its easy victory over Spain in the Philippines. Why not build an empire? A decade later, though, Wilson did an about-face from his presidential seat in the White House. Unrepentant Filipino insurgents, Mexican revolutionaries, and the human cost of World War I convinced him that imperialism impeded democracy, making him a die-hard internationalist. Then comes the idea of westward expansion—that the wide-open, uninhabited spaces of the American West evoked a frontier mentality and fiercely independent personality that still marks the country today. In his 1893 speech at the Chicago World’s Fair, University of Wisconsin history professor Frederick Jackson Turner tells listeners that taming those inhospitable, lonely expanses required staunch individualists who could only rely on themselves. Achieving the American dream became an individual rather than a collective accomplishment. Randolph Bourne put his finger on the multinational roots of America. Writing in 1916, at a time of large-scale immigration and heightened xenophobia, he rails against calls to transform America into a homogenous bastion of Anglo-Saxon culture, proposing instead a “cosmopolitan vision” that allowed each group to retain its customs and character because they added up to a richer whole. So many Americans were foreignborn or the children of immigrants; why make social distinctions based on nativity? The United States was in a unique position to model cosmopolitanism to the rest of the world because “only the American—and in this category I include the migratory alien who has lived with us and caught the pioneer spirit and a sense of new social vistas—has the chance to become that citizen of the world. American is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other land, of many threads of all sizes and colors.”142 Nearly twenty years later, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr chastised his fellow citizens for being anything but visionary and tolerant. In his essay The Perils of American Power, he warns that America had become too powerful too quickly and that, as a result, it was not exercising its influence effectively or ethically. “America is at once the most powerful and politically ignorant of modern nations.”143 Despite its achievements, he says, the U.S. was still made up of powerful businessmen and engineers who had wealth and position but lacked a moral compass. The last piece Vare includes is also emblematic of one thread of Americanness—the country’s optimism and its abiding, sometimes naive, belief in progress. Writing about September 11, essayist William Langewiesche says, “Despite the apocalyptic nature of the scene, the response was unhesitant and almost childishly optimistic: it was simply understood that you would find survivors, and then that you would find the dead . . . and that you would work night and day to clean up the mess, and that this would allow the world’s greatest city to rebuild quickly, and maybe even to make itself into something better than before.”144 To this cultural knapsack, as Anders Björklund would call it, I add the idea of civil religion. Robert Bellah defines civil religion not as a real religion or simple patriotism

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but “a collection of beliefs, symbols, and rituals with respect to sacred things and institutionalized in a collectivity,” including a belief in a transcendent being called God, the idea that America is subject to God’s laws, and that God guides and protects the United States. These ideas, Bellah believed, underlie national values of liberty, justice, charity, and personal virtue.145 They also underlie a sense of special calling, of being chosen to carry forth God’s plan and to be judged accordingly. I also add the idea of American exceptionalism, a term that dates back to 1906, when Werner Sombart was asked why one of the largest, wealthiest industrialized nations devoted so little money to the welfare of its citizens? Why was the government so “handsoff ” when it came to managing the economy, and why were trade unions and class-based activism so weak? The answer, Sombart and others later argued, was that because the United States never had a landed aristocracy or an established church, its citizens never needed to rise up and rebel against them. The country’s vast open spaces allowed potential class antagonists to walk away from each other rather than fight it out. The same people who sought their fortunes in isolated areas became strong-minded independent farmers, not collectively organized workers. Americans became successful by being independent, autonomous, sovereign, and rational actors in a free market.146 American exceptionalism, some argue, explains all kinds of things: what Ignatieff and John Ruggie call American “schizophrenism”—that no other country spends so much time promoting human rights and democracy while also supporting rights-abusing regimes, opting out of treaties, and insisting that domestic law always trumps international accords.147 Andrei S. Markovits and Steven Hellerman even say it explains why soccer is the sport of choice all over the world but has only recently become popular in the United States.148 Taken together, these values add up to a messianic charge, a nation destined to spread democracy and be a role model for other nations. Boston’s self-image as the “hub of the universe” that would inspire mankind has the same genealogy as the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny and Woodrow Wilson’s call to make the world safe for democracy. “It is something more than the ordinary narcissism and nationalism that all powerful states display,” writes Ignatieff. “It is rooted in the particular achievements of a successful history of liberty that U.S. leaders have believed is of universal significance, even the work of Providential design. For most Americans, human rights are American values writ large, the export version of its own Bill of Rights,” and America is “the last imperial ideology left standing in the world, the sole survivor of imperial claims to universal significance.”149 It is not a surprise, then, that museums in the United States are pretty quiet about the global. With so many Americans still holding fast to a vision of the world with the United States at its center, they cling to the belief that the world still needs to come to America rather than the other way around.

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3 ARABIA AND THE EAST How Singapore and Doha Display the Nation and the World

When I asked Emin Mahir Balcıoğlu, who is in charge of overseeing the construction of the new National Museum of Qatar, what museums teach people about their place in the world, his answer took us halfway across the globe. “We need to ask those questions of the people of Bilbao, which was once an obscure provincial city in Spain. How do they feel about their museum right now, and what it has done to literally put Bilbao on the map? . . . People may not realize it now, but this building will put Qatar on the map.” In fact, anywhere from twelve to sixteen new museums are on the drawing board in Doha, depending upon whom and when you ask. They are part of a strategic master plan to use cultural institutions, along with various other tools, to reposition Qatar as a regional, if not global, player. Some accuse Qatar of trying to accomplish this by “buying up half of London,” accumulating staggeringly expensive real estate in one of the world’s richest cities at an unprecedented speed.1 But there is much more behind Qatar’s ambitions than a global investment plan. By hosting world-class sports events, providing generous disaster relief, mediating international conflicts, and building stunning, stateof-the-art museums designed by world-renowned architects, Doha is signaling to its neighbors and the world that it has arrived. It is saying it can bring together the East and West—charting, much like Sweden, a third way—and hold its own at any party while still preserving its core values and traditions, particularly Islam. Qatar gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1971. Not-so-old photographs of Doha, dating from the 1980s, reveal lots of sandy beach but only a single hotel. As one twenty-something member of the royal family’s inner circle told the CBS News

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reporter Bob Simon on 60 Minutes, “It was my father’s generation who went from living in a tent to living in an urban environment, from commuting by camel to commuting in a 747.”2 Now, the city feels like one massive construction site, including the West Bay with its spectacular skyline, several enormous luxury malls, and the Pearl, a man-made island stacked high with elegant condominiums and yacht moorings. How does a country barely forty-five years old hold on to its identity in the face of such rapid social change? It turns out that the master plan to rescale Qatar geopolitically is also a plan for creating and solidifying its national identity. Hosting the FIFA World Cup in 2022 and opening the world’s newest Islamic art museum says something to the world about Qatar and to Qataris about the world while communicating clear messages about the daily life of the nation. This is a nation defined in conversation with the world. Citizenship in this context means everything and nothing. Qatari citizens, who make up only about 12 percent of the country’s residents, are entitled to free education and land. The gross national income, adjusted for relative purchasing power, was $87,478 in 2012.3 Qataris do not pay taxes.4 Noncitizens fall into two broad camps: elite professionals brought in to help Qatar realize its social and economic vision, and the hundreds of thousands of construction workers, taxi drivers, nannies, and maids who build and staff it. Noncitizens enjoy few rights and protections; many work under difficult, if not deplorable, conditions. So while citizenship means everything, it also means very little. Few people clamor for political voice, because all their needs are met.5 In fact, His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, who handed power over to his son His Highness Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani in June 2013, firmly solidified his family’s position by spreading the wealth and power around to ensure his people’s continued support.6 So what kinds of citizens are all these museums supposed to create, and what kinds of values are those citizens supposed to embrace? So far, it seems that museums in Doha are trying to express a strong national message that, according to some, reflects the country’s rich, though previously untold, history, but which, to others, is as empty as the many unoccupied buildings that crowd Doha’s skyline. The story of the nation goes hand in hand with a vision of selective connection to something larger—not the entire Western package of rights and freedoms, but the parts that fit with Qatar. Critical thinking, questioning, curiosity, and being comfortable with difference, yes. Full equality for women, democracy, and workers’ protections, no. In other words, the cosmopolitan parts of the national are carefully selected. Unlike in the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, we will not see exhibitions about human trafficking or climate change. What we will see are exhibitions about camel racing, falconry, and dhows, the traditional boats used for fishing and trade. We will see displays about women athletes, some dressed in Western athletic wear and others dressed in so-called burkinis, or swimsuits deemed appropriate for observant Muslims. We will see Tea with Nefertiti, an exhibition that critiques museology by revisiting how Egyptian collections were amassed and displayed. We will see a Damien Hirst exhibition, which opened in London in spring 2012 and was adapted for Qatari audiences by leaving

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out some of the more overtly sexual and political works. The challenges of creating this massive cultural infrastructure from scratch get even more interesting because an army of expatriate professionals, with their own views about women’s rights, labor protections, and free speech, is charting the way forward. Singapore affords a fascinating comparison. In fact, officials in Doha often look to Singapore as a model. Another relatively new, small city-state and entrepôt,7 Singapore too is using cultural policies and institutions to solidify its place as a regional, if not global, economic power. Although the largest opposition party won six out of eightyseven legislative seats in 2011, Singaporeans, like Qataris, have limited political rights.8 Like the legion of expatriates living in Doha who are unsettling many Qataris, new immigrants from India and China are prompting Singaporeans to rethink who they are. Both governments are concerned about their economic futures. Because Doha worries what will happen when its natural gas reserves run dry, it wants to become a knowledge-based economy. Art education and museums are among the tools it is using to get there. In Singapore, too, where the government wants to ensure that its economic miracle will continue, museums, open free to the public since May 2013,9 are part of a package of strategies to attract the businesses and create the citizens it needs to get the job done. In Singapore, as in Doha, political identities are decoupled from rights. Because the government generously provides and skillfully represses, most people have not complained. Here, museums tell a clear story about the nation, its place in the region, and its connection to the globe. They do so, some say, in a uniquely Singaporean way, by reinforcing the identities of the city-state’s four official demographic groups and their history of hybridity and mixing, and, at the same time, by promoting a regional list of allegedly universal values. What gets left out, as in Doha, is a discussion of the assumptions underlying the diversity management regime in place and of the absence of human rights. This part of cosmopolitanism would challenge the government and the status quo.

G R E AT A RT T O AT T R A C T G R E AT TA L E N T

When the Singaporean government decided to make Singapore into a global city, attracting the world’s best and brightest was a key piece of the plan. To recruit transnational corporations and their high-powered executives, you needed to offer economic incentives: lower taxes, custom duties, and rent. And to get those high-powered executives to stay, you needed to guarantee they would continue to enjoy the lifestyle to which they had become accustomed: good roads and public transportation, top-quality schools, wellgroomed golf courses, and state-of-the-art cultural institutions. A symphony, theaters, and museums were merely some of the basic amenities these global capitalists would expect. And their wives? How would the government keep them happy once their children were busy with school and soccer practice? “One way to make Singapore a more attractive place to live,” said Dr. Kenson Kwok, the founding director of the Asian Civilizations

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Museum (ACM), “was to bring water to what was a cultural desert. The government wanted big companies to come to Singapore. For that you needed good transportation, good infrastructure, and schools. And male executives have wives; wives like to go to museums, they like to become volunteers, they like to go to the theater. I remember they were trying to recruit a very big medical name from Stanford University, and they came to us and said, ‘Please look after Mrs. So-and-So; show her around, tell her about the volunteer activities.’ And we did. And these people did come.” Dr. Kwok is right. He and his colleagues created all kinds of volunteer opportunities at Singapore’s museums. As I waited in the lobby for the “Highlights Tour” at the ACM, a friendly young Asian American woman approached me and asked where I was from. “Me, too,” she replied when I answered “the United States.” Hannah Wong had relocated from Cleveland with her husband and two children about three years earlier. While she had worked as a management consultant, in Singapore she was taking time off to focus on her family. Once everyone was settled, she started looking for things to do and found the Friends of the Museums. After attending a training course for docents, she began giving weekly tours. Today, she confided as she shuffled a stack of index cards back and forth, she was particularly nervous. She was taking a group through the new special exhibition, Patterns of Trade: Indian Textiles for Export 1400–1900, for the first time and she was afraid she would forget her script. The Asian Civilizations Museum is located in the Empress Place Building, which overlooks the mouth of the Singapore River. It was built by convict laborers from India serving out their sentences in Singapore in the mid-1860s.10 Before it became a museum, the building housed government offices; it was renovated and expanded so many times it eventually grew big enough to accommodate the entire colonial administration. In contrast to Doha, where world famous architects are creating breathtaking new buildings, in Singapore, converting old colonial buildings into cultural institutions is all the rage. In fact, the new National Art Gallery, scheduled to open in 2015, will be housed in the former city hall and Supreme Court buildings. When enough visitors gathered for the tour, Hannah Wong welcomed us and led us up a long staircase to the second-floor galleries. She stopped in a narrow hall just outside the gallery door. A map of the region extending from Japan and Papua New Guinea in the east to Lebanon and Yemen in the west adorned the wall. The upper left-hand corner of the map was labeled “West Asia.” “I majored in international politics,” Wong began after welcoming us, “so I like using maps to get grounded.” This is the Museum of Asian Civilizations, she continued, and Asia extends from the Middle East to the islands of the South Pacific. But what we call each part of the world depends upon where we are standing. In the West, the Arabian Peninsula is the Middle East, but from the perspective of Singapore and Asia, it is western Asia. “A stark reminder,” she said, “of how where you are colors what you see.” And Singapore is all about location. At some point during almost every conversation I had during my stay in the country, the talk turned to how geography shaped Singapore’s

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destiny, located, as it was, at a crossroads between the East and West. Up until airplanes and the Suez Canal changed things, almost every ship traveling from India to China passed through the Singapore Straits. As far back as Vasco da Gama, sailors rode the monsoon winds, which change direction every six months, in and out of Singapore’s harbor. And that is at the heart of the message visitors get in all the ACM exhibitions—connection, connection, connection. According to Michael Koh, the former head of the National Heritage Board, which oversees the country’s principal public museums,11 the ACM is part of an organizational ecology of museums; each does its part to create citizens. The Raffles Library and Museum, the country’s most important cultural institution at the time of independence, has evolved into a community of museums that creates Singaporeans who have deep regional ties and who are now staking claim to the world. In fact, as in Doha, museums here are one piece of a sophisticated plan that uses cultural policy to create national art and a public who can appreciate it, and which ensures that citizens know who they are and where they stand in the world, all the while driving economic growth forward.12

THE LION CITY

Sailors knew about Singapore as far back as the third century a.d. By the seventh century, it had grown into an important commercial crossroads and supply point for Malay, Thai, Javanese, Chinese, Indian, and Arab traders. A Javanese chronicler in the fourteenth century called the island Temasek, while a seventeenth-century Malay chronicle referred to the city of Singapura (“lion city”), founded in 1299 and named for the strange, lionlike animals seen roaming its countryside. When Portuguese explorers captured Melaka (Malacca) in 1511, the reigning sultan fled south and established himself in a new kingdom, which included Singapura. But after these aspiring colonists burned down a trading post at the mouth of the Temasek (now Singapore) River in 1613, the island remained sparsely populated for nearly two centuries. In 1818, a Malay official from the Johor Sultanate and his followers resettled the island, accompanied by several hundred Orang Laut, or sea nomads,13 and a group of Chinese planters. Everything changed in 1819, when Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, an agent for the British East India Company, arrived, looking for a place to establish a British stronghold. Though the powerful governor general of India approved his mission, when Raffles set foot in Penang its governor, James Bannerman, was far less enthusiastic about trying to stake a claim and antagonizing the French, who controlled the island. Nevertheless, Raffles dispatched his subordinate and fellow officer, Colonel William Farquhar, to survey promising sites. Although Bannerman ordered Raffles to stay put pending further instructions, the latter and his crew slipped quietly away in Farquhar’s wake.14 Born off the coast of Jamaica on his father’s trading ship in 1781, Sir Thomas Raffles was a child of the British Empire in every sense. A canny and multilingual diplomat,

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self-educated historian, explorer, amateur scientist, and bold administrator, Raffles became a tireless booster of British power in Southeast Asia—one whose ambitions for the empire often exceeded those of his superiors. Despite Raffles’s adventurous beginnings at sea, his childhood suggests little of the energy and audacity that would shape his adulthood. Strained financial circumstances and the early death of his father forced him to leave school at age fourteen. He found work as a clerk at East India House, the headquarters of the British East India Company, which was then at the height of its powers on the subcontinent. Ten years later, in 1805, after his diligence earned him a stunning raise and a post as an assistant secretary in Penang, Raffles married his sweetheart and the couple set sail for Malaysia. With the passion of a true self-educated man, Raffles taught himself Malay and plunged into what would become a lifelong study of the region. He earned a reputation not only for his expertise but also for his aggressive proposals to expand Britain’s regional footprint. After the thirty-year-old former clerk helped win control of Java, Lord Minto appointed him as the island’s first British lieutenant-governor.15 Raffles had big plans. He instituted a full program of expansion and administrative reforms: he seized two nearby islands rich with tin, dismantled restrictive trade policies, reformed the judicial system, abolished forced labor, and dispatched scientists to study the island’s flora. Characteristically, he traveled widely, soaking up as much as he could about the island’s history, cultures, and resources. Bolstered by his success, in 1814 Raffles recommended to his superiors that Britain begin an ambitious scheme to extend its influence throughout Southeast Asia. Instead, the following months brought personal and professional disappointment. His wife died suddenly, soon after the death of his patron Lord Minto. The appointee who replaced Minto did not share Raffle’s grand ambitions. Raffles spent most of 1816 and 1817 in England recovering. Gradually, his troubles eased and he reinvented himself as an authority on Java, a remarried man, and a soughtafter high-society guest. Buoyed by these triumphs, Raffles took a new job, at Bencoolen, Sumatra, in 1817. Finding his new post plagued by a chaotic administration, gambling, and slavery, he set out with his characteristic energy to reform its ills. Meanwhile, he still found time to journey into the central Sumatra jungle, discovering an enormous pitcher plant that he named, not surprisingly, Nepenthes rafflesiana.16 When he finally stepped onto its shores, Singapore far exceeded Raffles expectations: it had a protected harbor, abundant drinking water, and most important, no sign of competing foreigners.17 Raffles arrived on the island in the midst of a dispute between two half brothers, who each claimed to be its rightful sovereign. Because the Dutch sided with the younger sibling, Raffles sided with the elder, Hussein, who allowed Raffles to establish a British trading presence in exchange for his support.18 In the early 1820s, illness struck again, killing three of Raffles’s children. At forty-one, tragedy having transformed him into “a little old man, all yellow and shriveled,” he headed home from Penang to retire in England. Along the way, he made what was intended to be a brief stop in Singapore that changed his legacy and the history of the

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region forever.19 When he arrived at what he poignantly called “this, my almost only child,” its economic vibrancy filled him with as much pride as its administrative chaos dismayed him. The “bereaved father” was furious at his former friend Farquhar for ceding too much control to the sultan and for tolerating slavery and gambling, anathemas to Raffles’s lifelong conviction that the East India Company should model modern liberal values and moral rectitude. Abandoning his retirement plans, Raffles took control of Singapore, leaving Farquhar to appeal his “wrongful dismissal” at the faraway headquarters in Calcutta. Raffles wanted to preserve Singapore’s laissez-faire trade policies while avoiding the anarchic governance and vice that plagued so many free-trade ports. The reforms he instituted sowed some of the seeds of the cultural armature that still shapes life in Singapore today: free trade, purposeful town-planning, clearly bounded ethnic groups relegated to clearly demarcated residential areas, bans and heavy taxes on vice, and a strong emphasis on education. As C. M. Turnbull explains, Raffles, like many well-meaning but chauvinist colonialists, “saw Britain’s mission” as raising “the people of the eastern archipelago from ignorance and poverty, not by means of territorial expansion but a combination of commercial and moral preeminence: reviving old cultures and spreading European enlightenment through economic progress, liberal education, and the rule of law.”20 Thus, one of Raffles’s last acts as the founding father of modern-day Singapore was to establish a college for the sons of the region’s elite, one that would revive Asian cultures in combination with the best of Western traditions.21 From 1826 to 1867, the British ruled the Straits settlements—including Singapore, Penang, Malacca, and several smaller dependencies—from the East India Company’s headquarters in India. But in 1867, when dangerous fevers spread through Hong Kong, and displeased company employees lobbied for more direct ties with the head office, British officials converted the settlements into a Crown colony governed directly by London. By that time, Singapore had grown into a bustling seaport with nearly ninety thousand inhabitants—the most important settlement in the region. After the Suez Canal opened in 1869 and steamships became the principal means of ocean transport, even more ships passed through Singapore’s harbors. Hundreds of thousands of laborers from China, India, the Dutch East Indies, and the Malay Archipelago also passed through on their way to work in the tin mines and rubber plantations north of the port. As its institutions and infrastructure grew to support Britain’s booming trade and industrial empire, Singapore prospered. While it was largely unaffected by World War I, the Japanese occupied Malaya and Singapore during World War II. They renamed Singapore Shōnan (Light of the South) and dismantled much of the British colonial infrastructure. After the war, high crime, corruption, disease, and rising anti-British sentiment ran rampant. In 1953, after a British commission recommended partial self-rule, Singaporeans formed their first political parties. The Labour Front, led by David Marshall, supported independence and a merger with Malaya, as did the People’s Action Party (PAP), established by Lee Kuan Yew. Marshall, acting as chief minister, formed a

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coalition government in 1955. In 1957, the British parliament granted Malaya independence and, in 1959, elevated Singapore from a colony to a self-governing state (though one still under British rule), thus paving the way for local elections. The PAP won by a landslide, and Lee Kuan Yew became Singapore’s first prime minister. A fourth-generation Singaporean of Chinese descent, Lee Kuan Yew was born in 1923 as a subject of the British Empire. In his book From Third World to First, he writes that, as a Singaporean of eighty-nine years and counting, he had sung four different national anthems during his lifetime. The first was Britain’s “God Save the Queen”; the second was “Kimigayo,” the anthem of the occupying Japanese forces; the third was “Negaraku,” sung during two years of Singapore’s unity with Malaysia; and finally, there was “Majulah Singapura” (Onward Singapore), adopted by the independent nation in 1965 and still sung today. Together, these four anthems served as a soundtrack for the four key stages of his life.22 Born into a middle-class, English-educated family, Lee grew up speaking English (he later described his efforts to learn to read Chinese in his thirties) and answering to the name “Harry.” A brilliant student, Lee earned a spot at the Raffles Institution, which its namesake established for Singapore’s most promising young scholars. There, he lived a life like other British schoolboys across the empire: striving for good grades; joining the scouts; playing cricket, tennis, and chess; and occasionally getting caned by the headmaster for tardiness. Young Harry Lee was poised to attend what is now the National University of Singapore when the Japanese invaded (1942–45).23 During the war, Lee learned Japanese and took a job transcribing and translating Allied radio broadcasts for the Japanese propaganda office.24 After the war, although he could once again freely sing “God Save the Queen,” it never felt the same. Nevertheless, Lee, then in his early twenties, set off for the empire’s metropole to study law at the University of Cambridge, where he married fellow student Kwa Geok Choo. In 1949, they returned to Singapore with plans for legal careers. But Lee came back with more than a Cambridge degree and an equally ambitious, accomplished bride: he also returned as a passionate supporter of Singaporean independence. The bitter experience of the Japanese occupation and Britain’s failure to protect Singapore during the war convinced him of the need for self-governance. Once back in Singapore, Lee abandoned his English name. From 1954 on, Lee strove to make self-government a reality. He called for the colony’s union with Malaya, which became independent in 1957. In 1963, along with the former British territories on the island of Borneo, Singapore became part of the independent Federation of Malaysia. But the new federation failed to achieve the economic progress it hoped for, and political tensions escalated between Chinese-dominated Singapore and Malay-dominated Kuala Lumpur. Fearing that Singapore would try to control the federation, and that tensions between the Malay and Chinese communities would become untenable, the Malay government expelled Singapore from the union, forcing it to become an independent republic almost overnight.25 The Chinese population became the majority in the new state, privileged within a region where it had been economically dominant but socially marginalized.26

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How would independent Singapore—a small island with few resources and little industry, surrounded by a sea of suspicious Muslim neighbors who feared it would become a third China, after mainland China and Taiwan—create a viable economy? How would it create a unified nation that, in addition to Chinese, also included Malays, Indians, and people of Eurasian origin, all of whom the British had purposely kept apart? The new government immediately set about building a strong multiracial, multilingual identity and attracting foreign investment. It cleared slums, established high-rise public housing, integrated schools, and battled corruption. The result was nothing short of an economic miracle.27 Over the next two decades, Singapore experienced sustained economic growth, earning the label of—along with Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan—Asian tiger.28 By instituting strong, centrally controlled economic and social policies, the PAP created a stable, business-friendly environment that easily attracted foreign investment. By providing for the needs of its citizens, the government won their support, despite its paternalistic and, often, repressive policies. For many, limited freedom seemed a small price to pay for the lifestyle Singaporeans now enjoyed.29 In 1990, Lee Kuan Yew stepped down and former deputy prime minister Goh Chok Tong took his place. Although Singapore rebounded fairly easily from the Asian economic crisis of 1997–98, the government acted fast to prevent future economic downturns. The 1991 Strategic Economic Development Plan began the process of repositioning Singapore as a global city and transforming it into a total business hub for Asia and the Pacific.30 A “regionalization drive” relocated Singaporean companies throughout Southeast Asia to enhance their competitiveness and extend Singapore’s economic reach beyond its national borders.31 Goh remained in office for fourteen years, until current leader Lee Hsien Loong, the former minister of finance and Lee Kuan Yew’s son, replaced him in 2006.

THE SINGAPOREANS

Immigration to Singapore reached its peak between 1867 and 1914.32 By the end of the nineteenth century, the seeds of the city-state’s four M’s—its multiracial, multilingual, multireligious, and multicultural character—were firmly rooted, and they still flourish today. The colonial authorities relegated each racial group to separate enclaves: Chinatown for the Chinese, Kampong Glam for the Malays, and Serangoon Road for the Indians. Their leaders and organizations tried to keep members either inwardly focused or looking toward their ancestral homes.33 The British classified each group according to stereotypical racial attributes, segregating them economically and geographically to minimize contact that, they believed, would inevitably cause conflict.34 The Malay Indonesians, or “children of the soil,” ranked above the “nonindigenous” or immigrant Indians and Chinese. Schools segregated along racial, religious, and linguistic lines further solidified these divides.35

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In 2005, nearly 77 percent of Singapore’s 4.2 million people were Chinese, 14 percent were Malay, 8 percent were Indians, and all the remaining ethnicities, including Eurasians and Armenians (to name two of the more prominent groups), were included under the “Other” label.36 All Singaporeans are assigned to a race at birth, based on paternal ancestry, as the famous (or infamous) Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other scheme dictates. These arrangements, said former prime minister Goh Chok Tong, create “an extended family forged by widening the common area of the four overlapping circles in our society. The four circles, each representing one community, will never totally overlap to become a stack of four circles. . . . The overlapping circles approach maximized our common ground but retains each race’s separate identity.”37 The government promoted national ideologies such as “racial and religious harmony,” “consensus, not conflict,” and “nation before community and society above self.”38 Singaporeans had to learn to be separate—to know themselves and their communities—before they could come together. In other words, the new country managed diversity by making sure its citizens first identified strongly according to race, which would serve as a springboard to identifying strongly with the nation.39 This multiracial national model of diversity management, which allegedly treats all races equally, is still in place today. Campaigns promoting cultural roots and values, public-housing-estate policies allocating apartments according to racial quotas, and government-supported “self-help” organizations persist. In 1965, leaders hoping to level the playing field by ensuring that no single ancestral language group had the advantage, declared English to be Singapore’s official primary language. Malay, Tamil, and Mandarin are secondary languages.40 This official bilingualism is yet another indicator that, in Singapore, social integration and strong ancestral roots are meant to go hand and hand.41 While admirers praise Singapore’s impressive economic gains, critics acknowledge they have come at a high social and political cost. The Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other scheme forces citizens into essentialized racial identities that gloss over enormous class, region-of-origin, and linguistic differences and impede contact between groups. Singaporeans have had little political voice; anyone openly opposing the government risks swift retribution. The PAP reigned without serious opposition for nearly five decades. Civil society is still quite weak. The PAP enjoys such dominance not only because of its remarkable social and economic achievements but also because it manipulated elections, intimidated opponents, and strictly limited the boundaries of acceptable political activism. The party maintains that the government can and should enforce social discipline even when individual liberties are compromised. Only in 2008 did Lee Hsien Loong institute modest reforms, such as easing film censorship and permitting peaceful outdoor demonstrations. He emphasized the need to make modest changes but also stressed that a multiparty liberal democracy was not appropriate for Singapore.42 Today, new diversity is being layered onto Singapore’s already diverse landscape. Between 2000 and 2010, the percentage of foreign-born workers in the Singaporean labor force rose from 28.1 to 34.7 percent.43 The majority come from Malaysia (386,000);

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China, Hong Kong, and Macau (175,200); South Asia (123,500); Indonesia (54,400); and other Asian countries (90,100). The government is actively recruiting foreign labor at the upper and lower ends of the skill spectrum to counteract perceived labor shortages and to promote economic development. As more newcomers arrive, more Singaporeans are moving abroad. In June 2011, nearly 200,000 Singaporeans lived overseas, in Australia, Great Britain, the United States, and China.44 Many are highly skilled workers employed in banking, high-tech, medicine, and engineering. Others go abroad to study. Since the 1990s, the government has encouraged temporary and circular migration for education, training, and work experience to make Singapore more competitive. People with overseas experience are seen as bridge builders who can link Singapore to the wider world.45 Integrating new immigrants has been far from smooth.46 The native-born blame foreigners for rising crime, deteriorating public services, and increased competition over jobs. Government officials constantly remind residents that Singapore is a country of immigrants; it was built on the backs of their ancestors. “But so many people are emigrating, and there is so much immigration,” one respondent said. “I don’t want to say there is an identity crisis, but there is an even stronger need to say who we are.” Like Qataris, Singaporeans need foreign labor but also feel threatened by the many foreigners in their midst.

E N T E R C U LT U R E

When Malaysia unexpectedly expelled Singapore from its federation, the government of the newly independent state bet on the economy to ensure its survival. Art and culture came into play only to the extent that they could help build the new nation or thwart communal tensions.47 In 1966, the minister of state for culture, Lee Khoon Choy, proclaimed, “The days of art for art’s sake are over. Artists should play an integral part in our effort to build a multi-racial, multi-lingual, and multi-religious society where every citizen has a place under the sun.”48 According to former deputy prime minister and minister of defense Goh Keng Swee, literature and theater should not simply foster multiculturalism by inspiring patriotism, optimism, and responsibility. “They must also help people discard the crazy, sensual, ridiculous, and overly materialistic style of the West. In the same way, the feudalistic, superstitious, ignorant, and pessimistic ideas of the East are also undesirable.”49 In other words, cultural performances should promote multiculturalism, counteract Westernization and undesirable aspects of “the East,” and reinforce so-called Asian values.50 They generally featured artists from one of the Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other categories performing a traditional ethnic dance or song that audiences would easily grasp as an unproblematic metaphor for racial harmony.51 By the 1980s, however, Singapore had gained enough economic and political confidence that culture could be used for other purposes. In its quest to find new ways to

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enhance its economic edge, the government singled out arts and entertainment.52 Once given the green light, the state began investing heavily in grants and scholarships to train what Benson Puah, CEO of the National Arts Council, calls cultural workers—arts administrators, artists, curators, and conservation experts. It reformed the education system to encourage artistic and creative talent, not simply the professionals and technocrats it had supported in the past. The 1989 Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts set forth the state’s first coherent arts policy and paved the way for the creation of the Asian Civilizations and Singapore Art Museums.53 More important, it laid the groundwork for the 1992 Global City for the Arts project, which depicted Singapore as an “international centre for the arts” that would become an “international exhibition centre and a market for works of art and a regular performing venue for world-class troupes.”54 The drafters of these documents had several goals in mind. First, because Singaporeans now consumed culture, the country needed more people and institutions to produce it, and the government needed to create the necessary infrastructure to accomplish the task.55 Second, arts and culture would help reposition Singapore geopolitically, moving it away from low-skilled industries that were particularly vulnerable to economic downturns to an economy based on higher-value manufacturing, research, and development, and high-tech and creative industries. And third, and relatedly, arts and culture would attract the foreign talent and investment Singapore needed in order to do so. As Dr. Kenson Kwok alluded to earlier, the country could no longer compete solely on the basis of its stable political environment and docile workforce. It had to augment “its talent pool through attraction and management of international talent.”56 World-class artistic and cultural activities would create an environment that investors and professionals would want to live in and tourists would want to visit.57 The Renaissance City Report, released in 2000, pushed forward this transformation. The term renaissance referred to the reawakening of Asia as a world economic power.58 A cultural renaissance would accompany the economic one, and the government wanted Singapore to be at its center.59 Singapore would re-create the innovation and cultural fertility of Renaissance Italy. While the 1989 report recommended creating institutions like the Asian Civilizations Museum and the Esplanade Theater by the Bay, the Renaissance City Report described the kind of citizen who would drive forward and benefit from this Asian reawakening. The “renaissance Singaporean is an individual with an open, analytical and creative mind that is capable of acquiring, sharing, applying and creating new knowledge” while remaining “attuned to his Asian roots and heritage.” He “has a strong sense of identity and belonging to his community and nation” that “gives him the confidence to pursue activities beyond our shores.60 Moreover, the renaissance Singaporean “is an active citizen who understands the balance between rights and responsibilities. He has a healthy regard for his fellow men, respects common property and is willing to make sacrifices for the greater good and to help those less fortunate than himself.”61 The renaissance Singaporean embraces these values and helps his country at home and abroad because he is

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cosmopolitan in mind but Singaporean at heart.62 In essence, these reports sketched a profile of an Asian cosmopolitan nationalist who is open and creative and able to engage beyond her own shores, but who also holds fast to national and regional roots and traditions. She reflexively decides what of the world should be embraced and what is not worth taking, what is good for the individual and the country and what would negatively challenge how things are done. Discussions about global Singapore go hand and hand with discussions about Singapore as a cosmopolitan city, which means both the people and the place.63 The government tells residents that becoming a cosmopolitan is the logical next step in their collective journey to conquer the global market and adapt to their nation’s ever-increasing diversity. But it also promotes the growing divide between cosmopolitan Singaporeans, who speak fluent English, listen regularly to international media outlets, and basically feel at home anywhere, and the archetypal “heartlander,” who is more parochial and inward looking, speaks “Singlish,” and is the guardian of Singapore’s core values.64 How new immigrants will become part of the mix is not yet really even part of the discussion. In fact, one of the starkest boundaries in Singapore today is the one between new immigrants and longtime residents.65 The stage, then, is set for what some see as an unresolvable tension between, on the one hand, being open to the world and, on the other, maintaining traditions of authority, deference, and putting the group before the individual, all in the context of limited rights. Critics claim that cosmopolitanism requires unsettling these racialized spaces and transforming them from “contact zones” into “comfort zones.”66 You cannot be curious or a critical thinker if you don’t have human rights and freedom of speech too. In contrast, supporters see Singapore as charting its own path and developing certain kinds of competencies and attitudes while consciously rejecting others, thereby creating an Asian cosmopolitan nationalism that is appropriate in this context.

POLICY IN PRACTICE

For Benson Puah, the CEO of the National Arts Council, cosmopolitanism “Asian-style” is the way to go. He described a recent article about Singapore’s quest to become a global city that referred to the government’s current Arts and Culture Strategic Review. The latter states that Singapore should become more like London and Paris, but it ends by proudly proclaiming, “We are Singapore.” Singapore is finally confident enough to say that it knows who it is, and that it is not trying to become something else. There is only so much a people can borrow or acquire. “What it means to be a Singaporean, we must sort out for ourselves,” said Puah, which means, for him, being open to the world but on your own terms. Puah is one of the key people responsible for figuring out how Singapore might accomplish this. You can’t become a global arts and culture hub, he said, if your own residents aren’t self-aware or don’t appreciate art. So the first thing is to teach people to

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engage with art and recover their heritage. Traditional arts and crafts practices are part of Singapore’s DNA, but “in Singapore, we have been so open to outside influences; we have borrowed so much, we are very Westernized. When you choose English as a working language and displace your mother tongue, you have actually lost a lot of your cultural heritage. You lose the tool that connects you with your practices.” Part of becoming cosmopolitan, then, means rescuing and reinforcing forgotten heritage. It means defining it in an Asian way. In fact, Tan Boon Hui understood part of his job, when he was director of the Singapore Art Museum, as cosmopolitanizing Singapore residents—as helping them develop a taste for the arts and the necessary skills to enjoy them. Whereas curators in Scandinavia and the United States worry about bombarding their visitors with overdetermined story lines or too much information, he feels people need and want to be taught how to become museumgoers. Just like the businessman who learns to play golf because deals are made on the golf course, Singapore’s aspiring middle classes have to learn to spend their leisure time wisely; they must be able to talk about art at dinner parties. In fact, his staff creates directors’ and educators’ guides for many exhibitions that explicitly orient, and interpret for, visitors. “Why such long labels?” Tan explains, “We get a lot of feedback [telling us] that visitors want to know more. Regional art is not so well known. It may be the first time that people are seeing it. It has a particular aesthetic. Every work has a history behind it. Visitors need a context. We are trying to teach visitors how to read works of art, not just labels.” The cultural architecture that is needed to accomplish this is complicated; it has many moving parts. It needs new indigenous art produced by new national and regional artists. It needs cultural workers and the institutions of marketing and display. It draws heavily on pieces of global-museum and global-art assemblages, relying on world-renowned and newly emerging art galleries and auction houses as well as museums. It depends on artistically literate citizens who appreciate art from all over the world because it helps them understand themselves better and provides them with a respite from the pressures of daily life.67 The cultural architecture also relies on other tools, such as the Singapore Arts Festival, the Singapore Biennale, the Singapore Grand Prix, and the inaugural Youth Olympic Games, to draw the world’s attention to Singapore’s shores.68 The Singapore Arts Museum, which opened in January 1996, is on the front line of this battle. Its mission is to preserve and present the art history and contemporary art practices of Singapore and the Southeast Asian region. Its holdings include one of the world’s largest public collections of modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art.69 Former director Tan Boon Hui, who is now group director of programs at the National Heritage Board, described his job as, in addition to creating art appreciators, “growing indigenous talent.” Parents have only recently begun to allow their children to consider careers in the arts. Just as Singapore had to achieve a certain level of economic and political self-sufficiency before it took on culture, so families had to achieve some level

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of financial security before they allowed their children to pursue their creative dreams. Not only were there few art schools in Singapore, but also there were very few young people who went abroad to study art. As a result, Singapore had barely any artists it could claim as its own. Part of Tan’s job is to nurture young up-and-coming artists and encourage new artistic practices by giving people the time, money, and space to work. Tan explained, “We don’t say directly that we are about national identity, but we are—by being about young artists working today and working with them, commissioning, supporting and looking at how artists are responding to the ideas and tensions that are swirling around us.” Tan said he is essentially in the business of nurturing talent in a metaphorical hothouse. “We try to get artists to produce higher quality, more sophisticated work than they would if they were working on their own. We don’t leave them to fend for themselves in the gallery world. Instead, we commission art, so they have the opportunity to work on something over a long period. We give out art prizes, residencies, and awards. We use curatorial power to anoint certain people. It’s controversial, but it would be more controversial if no one cared.” Singapore, he reminded me, is not alone in this approach. Germany, Australia, and Vietnam all invest systematically in artistic production. Korea has a whole state bureaucracy for this—the popularity of Korean soap operas in the West is no accident. And he is confident that a unique Singaporean aesthetic that is clearly connected to the region is emerging. “You can’t understand art in Singapore without looking at the Southeast Asian context. Inherent in our understanding of identity is the ability to be multiple.” Tan pointed to The Singapore Show: Future Proof as an example of an exhibition that was uniquely Singaporean.70 One quality that sets this work apart is its allegorical character: “It has a way of dealing with ellipsis that is very peculiar.” After 2000, many young artists who had studied abroad started coming home. They returned with technical training that allowed them “to explode creatively.” Their technique is unique. They play with the material. They have more confidence. “There isn’t that ridiculous debate about West versus East,” says Tan. “Binaries don’t matter. Instead, we are building a canon of Southeast Asian art. The global is always refracted through the local.” In 2008, the museum displayed a large work, called Raw Canvas, by Jane Lee, an artist trained in textile and fashion design (plate 10). She uses the skeins of paint as if she were weaving fabric. It is unusual, said Tan, for such a monumental work, or such breadth of imagination, to come from a small place like Singapore. But Lee’s work has clear roots in the indigenous textile traditions and weaving of the region. She uses her paint unconventionally and innovatively to recall the work traditional weavers have long done. Meanwhile, artist Charles Lim—a former competitive sailor and 1996 Olympian— filled a room with photographs of buoys surrounded by a soundscape of a ship’s radio. The buoys mark the invisible aquatic border where Singapore ends and begins. He took the photos from inside and outside the border, although the viewer does not know where

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the border actually lies or which photos were taken where. The island looks the same from either place, though only Singaporean nationals can come in.71

T H E A S I A N C I V I L I Z AT I O N S M U S E U M

Like most of the museums in Singapore, the Asian Civilizations Museum began its life as the Raffles Library and Museum in 1849.72 In 1823, Sir Raffles convened a discussion about preserving the region’s cultural heritage. The Singapore Institution, established in response, became a place to display items of historical and ethnological significance. One of its most iconic artifacts, a blue whale found in Port Dickson, delighted visitors from 1903 to 1969.73 Responses to my questions about how the ACM engages with the global often had something to do with technology. The museum, several curators wanted me to know, uses some of the most sophisticated museology techniques in the world. This should come as no surprise. Singapore is one of the world’s most digitally connected countries, so it’s natural that it would use technology to claim its place on the global stage. According to David Henkel, curator for Island Southeast Asia, Singapore “wants to be good at stuff. When we see an area we can be good at, we go for it. We wanted to be the best museum in Southeast Asia. Now we want to be a global museum. From an infrastructure standpoint, we are on the cutting edge. We have some of the most forward-thinking museology.” Many of the ACM’s galleries feature “talking heads” smiling out from computer screens perched atop lecterns that “guide” visitors. Each speaker offers a brief introduction, followed by a menu of additional questions from which visitors can choose, every layer digging deeper into the material. I pressed the screen to “activate” Dena. “My colleagues and I are here to help you enjoy your visit,” she told me. “Welcome to Southeast Asia, a land of many gods, languages, and cultures. I like to think of Southeast Asia as a rojak of different cultures. Oh, you don’t know what rojak is? It’s the exciting mix of fruits and vegetables topped with a thick, sweet, and spicy sauce. The sauce gets everywhere, but you still taste the flavor of the original fruits or vegetables. In the same way, the major foreign cultures [in Singapore] are like the rojak sauce, seasoning the local cultures, but in the end each culture keeps its unique identity. Let’s explore this region and see for ourselves, shall we?” In Malaysia and Singapore, the rojak, explained David Henkel, is a colloquial expression for an eclectic mix, the multiethnic character of Malaysian and Singaporean society. The idea of rojak captures the self-perception so many have expressed—that Singapore is all about staying discrete and coming together under the rubric of the nation. Each ingredient retains its uniqueness in the context of overlaps and intersections. This metaphor also captures how the ACM is organized: into four discrete but interrelated regions. Southeast Asia, China, West Asia, and South Asia each has its own story, but the narratives stress what they have in common and how they are connected to South-

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east Asia and beyond. Singaporeans can easily find themselves in “their” exhibition, but they are also repeatedly told how much they share with each other and the region as a whole. These connections are clearly expressed in the many objects on display: the modern baby carrier adorned with traditional Hmong embroidery, or the bridge cloth that comes from the Minangkabau in West Sumatra in Indonesia. While they are Muslims now, the Minangkabau still observe many older local traditions. When a couple marry, the families of the bride and groom each bring to the wedding a piece of cloth they have woven according to very specific instructions, using specific motifs. The two sides then get sewn together, as an icebreaker. “If they don’t line up,” said Hannah Wong, “it means there has been some miscommunication.” In another gallery, the wall text describes the diverse jewelry, weapons, and textiles found across island Southeast Asia. The objects speak to the enormous range of designs, shapes, and motifs that are used, but also to what they have in common—how the same type of object is crafted in similar but slightly different ways, and how techniques and aesthetic styles have circulated through the region. As with everything in Singapore, it simply made sense to organize the collection this way. “As you know,” said Benson Puah, “Singapore is a pragmatic country, and that is reflected in the way it runs its various institutions. We are unlike most other postcolonial societies. Where others are shouting about neocolonialism, we have very down-to-earth strategies, like adopting English as a kind of working language, which might have been unthinkable in any other place.” Unlike in Doha, mostly “homegrown” talent has accomplished these tasks. Only recently have museum professionals been hired from overseas, including the director of the Singapore Art Museum, Dr. Susie Lingham, from England, and the ACM’s director, Alan Chong, who came via the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum in Boston. The message the ACM tries to convey, said former National Heritage Board director Michael Koh, is that “Singapore is young, but beyond that each one of us has a history, heritage, and tradition that goes back much longer. We are all part of the world at large. Although we live here, each of our histories reaches out way beyond Singapore. We have different roots, but we are all Singaporean.” In other words, Singaporeans can understand themselves better through their links to their ancestral past, which, in turn, connect them to their global future. The nation is effectively cosmopolitan from the outset, articulating its identity in conversation with the world. A second takeaway message is about Singapore’s place in Asia. Singapore was a trading hub in the past, and it is an economic and cultural hub now. Because it is an entrepôt, people are accustomed to change and being changed. “We want people to understand,” said David Henkel, “that cultural purity, the archetypes, are not the standard or the norm. Intermingling and interstices are. That’s what is interesting.” Cultural purity is dead, he declared, and today’s cultures are produced through mixing. The museum would be a real success if it could “help people get their heads around that,” because that is what polyglot societies must do to survive. “When you swim in this pond, this is what the water comes out like.”

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And finally—which by now should come as no surprise—the ACM’s emphasis on connection is also part and parcel of the government’s global strategy. “Most other countries talk only about their own cultures,” Dr. Kwok said, “but if you have global ambitions, you have to talk about the world beyond your door.” If they play their cards right, and if they are lucky enough to make some stellar acquisitions, several curators predicted, the ACM could be a “one-stop shop,” a world-class collection of Asian art. Tourists already use the museum this way, stopping in Singapore on their way to somewhere else and using this “window on Asia” to begin learning what the region is about.

T H E B R O A D E R O R G A N I Z AT I O N A L F I E L D

The ACM and the Singapore Art Museum form part of a citywide organizational ecology. Each institution plays a unique, though complementary, role in reflecting Singapore and its global place, in creating national citizens with an Asian global outlook. The Peranakan Museum is one piece of this puzzle. Peranakan means “child of” or “born of.” Many of the early travelers who passed through Singapore simply kept going, but others settled down and intermarried; their descendants are called the Peranakan. The Peranakan Chinese are the descendants of Chinese traders who came to Malacca, coastal Java, and Sumatra as far back as the fifteenth century.74 In the nineteenth century, many Peranakan Chinese migrated to Penang and Singapore, attracted by their bustling ports and commercial opportunities. “The Peranakan culture they created,” visitors learn, “is a unique hybrid culture that is still part of Singapore’s living heritage.”75 The museum’s permanent exhibitions showcase the cultural practices and lifestyle events of this cultural mix: its food, rites of passage for marriage and birth, and its religious rituals. The introductory gallery greets visitors with larger-than-life photos of smiling mixed-race Singaporeans. During my stay, a special exhibition showcased the sarong kebaya, an elegant outfit that combines a Southeast Asian–style skirt with a Chinese–style blouse. During colonial times, the Peranakan functioned as middlemen. Because they spoke English and Malay, they acted as cultural and economic brokers between the colonizers and the locals. But their power and status declined with independence. Some even considered them second-class Chinese, because many could not speak Mandarin. In the early years, following independence, when pressure was particularly strong to fit into a single racial category, cultural mixes like the Peranakan were barely acknowledged, let alone celebrated. But by the time Lee Kuan Yew announced his Peranakan heritage publicly, when he spoke at the museum’s opening, dramatic changes had occurred. “Right now,” said one respondent, “all things Peranakan are considered ‘where it’s at.’ ” “Peranakanmania,” as some call it, is the invention or resurrection of tradition—a special blend that is distinctively Singaporean. It is a central piece of Singapore’s heritage, once ignored but now embraced, that resonates with knowing who you are and actively acknowledging how that connects you to other pasts and presents. That Singapore hosts the world’s only Peranakan museum furthers its ambition to become a portal for discovering Asia.

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Government-sponsored heritage centers for each community are another piece of the organizational field. These institutions, much like constituency museums in the United States, also drive forward Singapore’s narrative of unity in diversity. While Indians, Chinese, and Malay can all find themselves in the ACM and the Singapore Art Museum, the takeaway is about their equal contribution to the common cause. Heritage centers showcase each community’s unique contribution. These institutions, said Gauri Krishnan, who is in charge of creating the new Indian Heritage Center, are meant to be more grassroots style. Community members help create the stories they tell and gather the objects they display. The Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall functions as the Chinese community’s heritage center. It hosts lectures on Chinese theater, screenings of classic Chinese films, and an annual New Year’s celebration. But even here, the message is still about regional connection. The permanent exhibition traces Dr. Sun’s revolutionary activities in Southeast Asia, stressing how China’s 1911 Revolution affected Singapore, and how Singapore contributed to the revolution. Finally, and not surprisingly, the institution that showcases nationalism most prominently is the National Museum of Singapore. The museum’s two main galleries almost make it feel like two separate museums. One is the Singapore Living Gallery; the other is the Singapore History Gallery, a large permanent installation where visitors can explore the country’s history chronologically by tracing key events or by listening to the stories of people whom official history usually leaves out, including convict laborers, gangsters, and sex workers. In the Singapore Living Gallery, visitors “celebrate the creativity of Singapore society through time.” The film section explores the movies that Singaporeans made and watched from the 1950s through the 1970s, using films as windows for looking at how they spent their leisure time. Another gallery showcases daily life in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Malaya using photographs and videos recorded by the well known and the anonymous. The visitor can listen to a young Englishwoman’s memories about the day she arrived in Singapore to begin life with her Chinese husband. She can view portraits of a polygamous family or listen to a middle-aged man affectionately recall the amah who raised him.76 On a certain level, said Vicky Wong, manager of school programs, these galleries are about multiculturalism. They lend themselves easily to teaching schoolchildren about getting along, living together, and maintaining social harmony. In the food gallery, she said, “we talk about the emergence of street food and the ubiquitous hawker centers that are so popular and cheap in Singapore. We can talk about how Malay and Chinese food mix. Satay is Malay but probably came from India. We get kids to talk about what they eat at home. They realize that although there are differences, there are also a lot of similarities.” The museum is a platform upon which people can engage with history, to share their own interpretations. Of course, it is also about nation building, admitted Wong, but how you use that tool is another thing. “We struggle with this. To be honest, there is a set

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expectation about what the national museum needs to do. That is, to display a particular kind of Singapore history that people want and need to know. We do that in the history gallery, but we also try to introduce other perspectives and provide other platforms. . . . Singapore has been successful because we’ve been open, culturally, economically. It’s not the case that the local and the global are at odds with each other. They seem to run in parallel; you can’t have one without the other. Right now, people are becoming more mobile. I think the government wants to make sure that even people who go out feel deeply rooted in Singapore. That is what they are seem to be gunning for.”

THE GLOBAL DANCE

The global in Singapore is clearly on the museum community’s mind. It is a way to showcase Singapore’s national origins and its deep connections to the region and beyond. It is the stage upon which Singapore wants to triumph economically and culturally. And it is a source of the values Singaporeans want to selectively embrace. But while Singapore’s cultural armature has always been about trade, exchange, and hybridization, it has also always been about boundaries: between ancestral groups, between Asia and the West, between heartlanders and cosmopolitans, and between ideas and values that safeguard the greater good and those that challenge the government. In essence, Singapore’s leaders want their city-state to become an important global economic and cultural player that practices its own version of global politics. They want Singaporeans to feel part of the Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other scheme and part of the rojak salad at the same time. Singapore, said Tan Boon Hui, “wants people who are open and able to meet the outside world with strength and grace, but who choose carefully what they bring back. In other words, it wants its own brand of cosmopolitans—people who can engage with and compete on the global economic and cultural stage, but who do not introduce values that challenge the status quo.” Indeed, most curators felt that what they did helped create identities but not the rights and responsibilities associated with them; they spread specific cosmopolitan ideas and skills but not political projects. As one curator reflected, “In Singapore, museums tend not to mix political identity and political issues.”77 Museums have not been sites for calling into question the received wisdom. “The business of museums has been solidifying the local and the regional,” said Dr. Lily Kong, vice president for university and global relations at the National University of Singapore. “They have not taken on disrupting these categories or the even trickier issues of global values and so forth.” That is because moving from a global economic and cultural strategy to being politically global is not where the government wants to do. Not only would it challenge social and political limits, but it might also unearth conflicts the government has, until now, successfully repressed. While it can do something about trains that run late, the government is less confident that Singapore’s social glue can withstand racial or religious conflicts. “There is a rumbling underneath that is part of our DNA. It arises from our

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genesis,” said Benson Puah. “Our neighbors have always threatened us. Malaysia said they would turn off our water. Indonesia said they would flood us with a million immigrants. Taiwan calls us a little snot.78 . . . We need to build on certain strengths. Social resilience is a strength that comes from people who want to stay together. So you don’t introduce issues that could create rifts. There are no alternative lifestyles here. Most Singaporeans are conservative. This is like a Midwestern state. In the United States, you have New York and California. We don’t have the same latitude.” Critics say you cannot talk about cosmopolitanism in this context. Cosmopolitanism is based on certain fundamental and allegedly universal values, which include free speech, meaningful political participation, and human rights. Others say that Singapore encourages cosmopolitanism, but only for a select few. “Singapore was trying to reinvent itself— to become something other than a cultural desert,” professor of geography Brenda Yeoh told me. “It has made great strides. But the rhetoric has not gone hand and hand with political will. For that, we would have to recognize the rights of domestic workers, foreign wives, and construction workers. Cosmopolitanism stretches upward but not sideways.” By that, she means that highly skilled professionals and international hires, as well as elite Singaporeans, get all the benefits. But for people on the bottom rungs, it’s a different story. There cannot be, says Kenneth Tan, “a new society without new politics.”79 The government infantilizes and underestimates its citizens. The heartlander is an ideological construct it uses to sustain its old politics of fear, materialism, and conservatism. The PAP deploys this age-old divide-and-conquer strategy by appealing to “the moral and patriotic sentiments of the ideologically constructed heartlanders, and warning the ideologically constructed cosmopolitan that heartlanders cannot handle change. At the same time, it hopes to reap the economic gains from a more open and liberal elite workforce that is clearly separated from the heartlands.”80 That museums stay out of politics is clearly a political choice, because politics cannot be sidestepped altogether. What’s more, while the government may want people to believe that clearly defined ancestral groups coexist easily with rojak salads, that is not how the average citizen feels. “If you take as your starting point the idea of ancestral cultures,” one critic said, “you have not asked what culture actually means. How these are treated at the ACM is not that far removed from the old colonial ideas of race—that all Indians or all Chinese can be lumped into one category. It perpetuates old, politically unacceptable stereotypes that conflate biology, culture, language, and identity. This is what the old generation and the political elites are comfortable with, but it seems to me to be a major form of social control.” Singapore needs real critical thinkers who are allowed to make their own choices about who they are and with whom they want to mix. Becoming more global economically, he said, must go hand in hand with adopting more global values that often look a lot like those of the West. These critiques echo in the art world. “Money cannot buy creativity,” one art critic proclaimed. “You must allow people free reign and reform censorship policies that limit artistic expression. Right now, artists in Singapore enjoy only bounded creativity.”81 If the

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government truly wants to reap the economic benefits of creative industries, Petrina Leo and Terence Lee write, then the “existing ‘paternalistic’ and authoritarian modes of rule must eventually give way to more liberal and permissive political exchanges.”82 Singapore needs a real public square, where ideas are shared, discussed, and debated freely, openly, and among equals.83

F R O M T H E L I O N C I T Y TO T H E B I G T R E E

“I come from a small country,” said Jean-Paul Engelen, head of public art at the Qatar Museum Authority.84 “I am very proud and aware of Dutch history. And I think that what Doha is going through is much like what the Dutch went through in the 1620s and 1630s.” What he referred to is the unintended consequences of Spain’s “sacking” of Antwerp in 1585. When many of the city’s non-Catholics hightailed it up to Amsterdam because they refused to live under repressive Catholic rule, they ushered in the Dutch golden age. By 1630, Amsterdam had grown from a small port into a major cosmopolitan center. “To be honest,” Engelen said, “as I look back, I think the analogy with seventeenth-century Holland is stunning: two really small countries, punching above their weight. . . . Every freethinker, every Jew, every Protestant, every tradesperson left and went up north. Every scientist who thought the earth was round. You had a culture of freethinking, combining science with art and culture, that created a renaissance in Holland and produced incredible art, the best mapmakers in the world, and a university that created Spinoza.” That the Dutch brought that same commitment to free trade and freethinking to the New World, he teased, is why New York is what it is today. “Eventually, you lose it. No country stays at the top of its game forever, but by the time it’s over, your psyche has changed. . . . This is a model we are using here a lot.” The emir and his family have brought talented professionals from all over the world to help usher in what they hope will be Doha’s golden age: another modern-day renaissance, but this time in Qatar.85 The word fun comes up a lot when Engelen talks about his job. Europe and the Americas are burdened by five hundred years of history; as a result, he argues, there are a million reasons to say no to any new idea or project. In contrast, Doha is charging full speed ahead. A few people with amazing vision are driving these changes. A cartoon he saw captures that ethos. Four people are sitting in the desert drinking tea, he said. “It’s 150 degrees, and one of the guys says to his companions, ‘Do you want to organize the World Cup? Let’s organize the World Cup.’ It’s sometimes frightening,” he observed, “because you get given these incredible tasks.” But as he sees it, there is an incredible can-do spirit. Nothing is too big or too difficult. “You want to build a museum of Islamic art? Let’s get I. M. Pei. Well, he’s retired. So what? If that doesn’t make you laugh . . . ! It is so crazy, but if you want change, it has to be that crazy, and that makes it fun. And that is why you want to be here, because you go, ‘Are we really doing that?’ ” In fact, His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani convinced ninety-one-yearold I. M Pei to come out of retirement to build the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) on its

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own manufactured island. Its location was chosen to ensure that MIA stands alone, unimpeded, and positioned between the old and new parts of the city. The flagship museum, which opened in late 2008, was the first of a number of museums proposed by the Qatar Museum Authority (QMA). Plans include, among others, the National Museum of Qatar; a children’s museum; an orientalist museum, and the Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum. At this writing, only MIA and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art are open. MIA’s architecture and setting are spectacular. The 376,740-square-foot museum consists of two cream-colored limestone and granite buildings, a five-story main building and a two-story education wing, connected by a central courtyard and linked to the shore by a pedestrian and vehicular bridge. The building juts out about 195 feet into the sea and is surrounded by a sixty-four-acre park. Its angular volumes are set back as they rise, resembling the layers of a wedding cake. The top layer has two oval-shaped window slits, which many say look like the eyes of a woman peering out from behind her veil. Inside is a five-story-high domed atrium topped with an oculus that captures and reflects patterned light. A five-story window opposite the entrance opens onto a spectacular view of Doha’s West Bay (plate 11). I. M. Pei wrote that MIA was one of his most challenging projects. For inspiration, he toured important Islamic architectural sites: the Grand Mosque in Córdoba, Spain; Fatehpur Sikri, a Mughal capital in India; the Umayyad Great Mosque in Damascus, Syria; and the ribat fortresses at Monastir and Sousse in Tunisia. He found what he was looking for in the thirteenth-century sabil, a domed public fountain, at the Mosque of Ahmad Ibn Tulun in Cairo, which itself dates back to the ninth century. In the “austerity and simplicity” of the sabil, Pei said, he found “a severe architecture that comes to life in the sun, with its shadows and shades of color.” The sabil offered “an almost Cubist expression of geometric progression” that helped him create an abstract vision of the key design elements of Islamic architecture.86 The museum galleries, which wrap around the atrium, are intimate, windowless, quietly lit rooms of varying sizes and heights that flow seamlessly into one another. On one level, they are organized thematically; on the other, chronologically. Former director Oliver Watson, who made these curatorial choices, wanted to showcase the collection’s extraordinary scope, to emphasize the importance of international trade, and to use the materials to tell personal stories. He chose calligraphy because of its importance in transmitting the messages of Islam; chose figures and animals to teach people that these were often featured in secular art; and chose scientific instruments, which, although part of the world of science, are also works of art. The chronological galleries show visitors that there is no one “Islamic art,” because so many different kinds of work were produced by diverse cultures from far-flung lands.87 Aesthetics dominate. The galleries include relatively little text and few interpretive materials, because the staff who planned them wanted visitors to appreciate the objects: their details, patterns, and colors. French designer Jean-Paul Wilmotte created the spaces in a way that gives each object sufficient room and adequate lighting, to avoid provoking

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visual fatigue. These goals reflected two aspects of the museum’s philosophy. For one thing, said former QMA director Roger Mandle, now senior advisor to the chair of its board of trustees, Bedouins retained only what they could carry. They did not own many things of extraordinary value. But when the objects the royal family collected are displayed like jewels, to inspire reverence and awe, it makes people feel proud of their culture. For another, said MIA director Aisha al-Khater, “objects need room to breathe and express themselves to be truly appreciated. You need to give them proper respect.” Wilmotte even created galleries with particular objects in mind, like Gallery 17, where the seventeenth-century Indian Kevorkian Hyderabad carpet, one of the longest in the world, fills the entire floor of a two-story hall. “Islamic art is a broad term,” said Dr. Thalia Kennedy, deputy director for education. The collection spans the seventh century to the nineteenth. It includes works made in countries ranging from Spain to China, emphasizing to visitors that the cultural landscape the museum captures extends far beyond the Gulf. It includes works made by people living in Islamic contexts throughout history, which could be objects made for a Muslim patron by a Christian artisan or by a person working in an Islamic community without a specific religious interest or purpose (plate 12). MIA is not a museum about Islam or a center for the study of Islam. It is a place, I was told, for using art to explore the diverse visual cultures of the Islamic World. So, instead of explaining the religious significance of the Hajj to visitors, the exhibition, Hajj: The Journey through Art, showcased artistic objects associated with the pilgrimage. Staff often described their mission as looking to the past to understand and illuminate the future. Much like Fresh Ink at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston or the Queens International, the special exhibition Ferozkoh: Tradition and Continuity in Afghan Art, which opened in March 2013, made a direct link between the past and present. It showcased works by contemporary Afghan artists made in conversation with objects from the museum’s collection. Curators wanted visitors to leave the museum understanding that the Islamic world throughout history has included vibrant, thriving artistic communities. Islamic art, they said, had a global role back then and it has a global role now. They want visitors to embrace that diversity, its legacy of tolerance, and connect it to audiences around the world today. Islamic art, Dr. Kennedy said, “has always reflected diverse cultures. In the ninth and tenth centuries, for example, the Abbasid city of Baghdad welcomed thinkers, artists, musicians, poets, and writers from all over the world. This museum aims to replicate that welcoming atmosphere.” Everyone admits it’s not easy to get Qataris to visit museums. It isn’t the first thing families think of when they want to have fun. The grandparents and parents who would take young people to museums did not grow up visiting them. So instilling these habits and preferences in Qatari youth is a priority for everyone. MIA organizes activities for people of all ages, reaching out to local communities to encourage visits. Each month, the museum holds concerts by the Qatar Symphony Orchestra. Scholars from around the world are regularly in residence, the museum organizes academic conferences on

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topics such as the history of Islamic art, and there is an extensive on-site library. The requisite café, gourmet restaurant, and gift shop await the museum’s visitors. And MIA has an impressive portfolio of education and outreach programs that look a lot like the education programs at places like the Museum of Fine Arts, the ACM, or the National Museum of Denmark: school programs to enrich the public school curriculum, weekend drop-in programs for families, art classes and workshops, and special events and festivals to create a buzz around special exhibitions. During my stay, the museum hosted a kite festival in the park outside its building to draw people into the Afghan art exhibition, complete with traditional dancers, storytellers, an information booth about Afghanistan, and plenty of kites. Stalls where children could get their faces painted or color in intricate geometric tile designs suffered from the universal “great idea” problem—a wonderful concept that is really hard to pull off with so many kids and so few adults. MIA plays a unique role in Doha’s museum ecology and, like many things in Doha, fulfills multiple goals at the same time. It invites visitors to explore the arts of the Arab world and beyond. It puts Qatar on the map of superstar museum buildings, like the Guggenheim in Bilbao or the proposed Guggenheim and Louvre outposts in Abu Dhabi. Museums are only one piece of a broader master plan that uses culture, sports, media outlets like al-Jazeera, universities, and diplomacy to increase Qatar’s international presence. Each sector plays a slightly different role and speaks to a somewhat different audience. Taken together, though, they add up to an integrated strategy for engaging the West as an equal partner while remaining true to Qatar’s own culture and traditions. By now, the parallels with Singapore should be obvious. Both countries are using culture strategically to claim a more prominent, influential place in the world. Both are inventing or reinventing heritage to anchor themselves during a period of rapid social change. Both are riding the global art wave, drawing from and being driven by the proliferation of global art institutions, fairs, biennales, and museums that are taking shape throughout Asia and the Middle East. If Singapore expresses an Asian approach to cosmopolitanism, Qatar is defining its Arab counterpart.

B E F O R E D O H A’ S I M P R E S S I V E S K Y L I N E

Things were not always so bright. Qatar is a small country about the size of Connecticut.88 The vast majority of Qataris are Sunni Muslims, who follow an ultraconservative Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, although not quite as strictly as their Saudi neighbors (women are allowed to drive, for example). For at least four months of the year, the temperature hovers around 120°F. Scorching heat and scarce freshwater severely limit agriculture; while you can find almost anything in Doha’s supermarkets, it all comes from somewhere else, bestowing on Qatar the dubious distinction of having one of the largest carbon footprints in the world. Archeologists believe that people built coastal settlements in what is now Qatar as far back as the fourth century b.c. In the fifth century b.c., the Greek historian Herodotus referred to the seafaring Canaanites as the original inhabitants of Qatar. The geographer

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Ptolemy included “Gatara” on his map of the Arab world, a location believed to be the Qatari town of Zubarah, one of the most important trading ports in the region at the time.89 But the harsh climate, limited natural resources, and intense social conflicts that characterized the region meant that stable permanent settlements did not take shape until oil was discovered, in the mid-1900s. Instead, nomadic tribes from the Najd and al-Hasa regions of Saudi Arabia traversed the peninsula, setting up seasonal camps where there was water. People fished and pearled in temporary settlements along the coast as well. Al-Huwayla, al-Fuwayrit, and al-Bidda, which later became Doha, were the principal towns throughout the eighteenth century, populated primarily by nomadic and settled Arabs and slaves from East Africa. A variety of foreign powers controlled the Qatar Peninsula over the centuries. In the mid-seventh century, it was al-Munzir Arabs. When their king al-Munzir bin Sawi alTamimi converted to Islam, Qatar became part of the Muslim world. The Abbasid era (750–1258) saw the rise of several settlements. Before the Ottomans threw them out, the Portuguese even ruled briefly, between 1517 and 1538. Subsequently, Qatar, like the entire Arabian Gulf region, came under Turkish rule for the next four centuries. The Ottomans ruled only nominally, however. The real power and control lay in the hands of the local Arab sheikhs and princes, who battled one other.90 Violent conflicts continued throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.91 Owing to their growing interest in India, the British also got into the act. They needed peace in the region so their East India Company ships could easily pass through. The General Treaty of Peace of 1820 between the East India Company and the sheikhs of the coastal area established British authority. In effect, local leaders pledged to keep peace among themselves and with the British and to abolish slavery and the cruel treatment of prisoners in exchange for free entry into British ports. The British would act as a kind of “maritime police,” administering the treaty and resolving tribal disputes. The situation remained unsettled until 1867, when a large Bahraini force sacked and looted Doha. When the Qataris counterattacked, the British political agent, Colonel Lewis Pelly, intervened. His mission to Bahrain and Qatar, and the peace treaty he brokered, are national milestones because they recognized Qatar as separate from Bahrain and acknowledged Muhammad bin Thani bin Muhammad as the principal leader and spokesperson for the peninsula’s tribes; the royal family of today are his descendants.92 As the Ottoman Empire expanded, Qatar became vulnerable to occupation. While Muhammad bin Thani opposed the Ottoman rule, his son Qasim bin Muhammad AlThani willingly accepted Ottoman sovereignty. He hoped they would help him quell opposition from ambitious sheikhs and rebuff Bahraini designs on Qatar. But things turned sour when the Ottomans tried to arrest him in 1893 for refusing to establish a customs house in Doha. A battle ensued, and Qasim bin Muhammad won. The Ottomans officially withdrew from Qatar in 1913; and in 1916, Qasim bin Muhammad’s son Abd Allah bin Qasim Al-Thani signed a treaty with Britain, making Qatar an official British protectorate, entitled to the empire’s military and diplomatic protection.

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But Britain’s protection yielded limited rewards. Its imprint in Doha was nowhere near as deep or as far-reaching as in Singapore. Abd Allah bin Qasim faced threats from all sides: recalcitrant tribes who refused to pay tribute; disgruntled family members who plotted against him; and the persistent ambitions of Bahrain and other hostile neighbors. His constant appeals to the British for support fell on deaf ears until competition over oil rights between the United States and Great Britain rights heated up. Finally, in 1935, in exchange for the concession to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, Britain pledged to do a better job of protecting Qatar’s shores. While engineers found oil in Qatar in 1939, the country did not really begin to reap its benefits until after World War II. The war simply made a long period of economic hardship worse, precipitated by the collapse of the pearl trade when the Japanese invented cultured pearls, by the worldwide depression, and by a Bahraini trade embargo. But all of this changed when oil exports and payments for offshore rights began in 1949. Oil revenues dramatically transformed Qatar’s economic and social life but also caused innumerable domestic and foreign disputes. This became frighteningly clear to Abd Allah bin Qasim when several of his relatives threatened armed opposition if they did not receive increases in their allowances. Aged and anxious, he turned to the British, allowing them to establish an official presence if they safeguarded his family’s rule. While initially reluctant to share power, Abd Allah bin Qasim found himself beset by financial difficulties, striking oil workers, and obstreperous lesser sheikhs. During the 1950s and 1960s, he alternated between concentrating wealth and power in the hands of the royal family (seniority and proximity to the sheikh determined one’s share of the oil profits) and distributing it more broadly among other branches of the Al-Thani family and other Qataris. Things came to a head in April 1963, when the National Unity Front, organized by one of the sheikh’s nephews, called a general strike and demanded that the sheikh relinquish some of his privileges, recognize trade unions, and increase social services. Ahmad bin Ali jailed fifty leading individuals and exiled others, but he also instituted reforms, including the provision of land and loans to poor Qataris. In 1968, Britain announced it would withdraw from the region by 1971. Qatar became an independent state on September 3. That Ahmad bin Ali officially declared the country independent via long distance, from his villa in Switzerland, convinced many Qataris it was time for a change. On February 22, 1972, his younger cousin Khalifa bin Hamad— with tacit support from the Al-Thanis and Great Britain, and political, financial, and military support from Saudi Arabia—deposed Ahmad bin Ali. Unlike his predecessors, Khalifa bin Hamad cut family allowances and spent more on social programs. But economic development and political reforms faltered during the 1980s. Although the constitution called for a democratic transition, few reforms were actually put into place. The emir essentially told his advisory council what to do; its members were his close friends and allies. In 1995, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa led a successful coup against his father and remained in power until June 2013.

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According to historian Allen Fromherz, “More rapid development has occurred in Qatar since Sheikh Hamad’s bloodless coup in 1995 than in all the decades since the first major export of oil in 1949.”93 Today, according to the Qatar National 2030 Vision report, which details how the royal family plans to move forward, the country is at a crossroads. The revenues generated from oil and natural gas will not last forever. The country must plan ahead, move to become a knowledge-based economy, and follow a clear path based on four tenets: human, social, economic, and environmental development. “Social development,” it goes on to say, means creating a “just and caring society based on high moral standards, and capable of playing a significant role in the global partnership for development.” Effecting rapid social change and growth while maintaining core values admittedly poses challenges. But “modernization while preserving traditions, balancing the needs of present and future generations, managing growth, uncontrolled expansion, and the size and the quality of the expatriate labor force” is possible.94 Doha is a classic rentier state (a state with a highly valued resource such as oil and natural gas, reserve currency, or a strategic military base). Rentier states earn most of their income by exporting these resources or by “renting” them to other countries. Small states also need a niche. “Qatar has these huge ambitions,” said Mehran Kamrava, professor and director of the Center for International and Regional Studies at Georgetown University in Qatar. “Before, it wanted to carve out a place for itself on the map; now it wants to solidify it. My British friends don’t like it when I say that Qatar owns half of London, but they do.” Part of staking that claim is branding—niche-making. Whereas Dubai is the Middle East’s entrepôt, Qatar is its emerging cultural center. Education City, with its world-class universities, the museums, soccer leagues, the international news outlet al-Jazeera, and Qatar Airways, is “part of that niche identity that Qatar is trying to carve out as a power broker, agenda setter, and negotiator,” Kamrava told me. Small states also gravitate toward specialized fields. They become proponents of particular causes, or they try to transform themselves into hubs of trade and finance. The former emir, he believes, has been doing that ever since he seized power. Even before the Arab Spring, the Qatari government played a lead role as a mediator by intervening in Yemen, Darfur, and Lebanon.95 As the former emir became more confident, Kamrava said, echoing Jean-Paul Engelen, he was able to “punch more and more above his weight.” Who are these upstarts? How dare they jump their place in the geopolitical line? Can Qatar seriously be named the 2010 Arab Capital of Culture when the competition includes Egypt and Syria? “Until 2010, the Egyptians, Saudis, and Jordanians did not like this guy [the emir],” said Kamrava. “There was intense rivalry and competition. Now Qatar has capitalized Egypt’s central bank to the tune of $10 billion. Egypt would be bankrupt if it weren’t for Qatari largess. So these guys are in no position to argue.” When the Arab Spring began, Kamrava continued, the Saudi leaders, who were seen as the hegemonic power in the Gulf, did not have a plan B. In utter panic, they sent troops to Bahrain, trying to clamp things down. “But the Qataris said, ‘Let’s ride the wave; let’s be at the forefront of getting rid of

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PLATE 1 Several exhibitions at the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg and Etnografiska Museet in Stockholm have taken on global problems frontally. The subject of this installation, on view in Stockholm, from 2008 to 2010, was human trafficking.

PLATE 2 This 1643 painting from the National Museum of Denmark, one of nine by Albert Eckhout of the indigenous inhabitants of Dutch Brazil, strongly influenced how generations of Europeans imagined the “new world” and understood their own level of development in relation to it. Enlightened Europeans were destined to tame these uncivilized, cannibalistic beasts.

PLATE 3 The Sun Chariot, or Solvognen, made in the early Bronze Age around 1400 b.c. and discovered in a bog in 1902—on display at the National Museum of Denmark—became an icon of Danish nationalism.

PLATE 4 An installation shot from Destination X at the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2010. The exhibition explored the relationship between migration and power—who moves freely and who is constrained.

PLATE 5 This K’iché burial urn, from around a.d. 750, is one of five greeting visitors entering the Art of the Americas Wing at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. They are displayed on the foundation (or basement) level of the exhibition to communicate to visitors that artifacts such as these are at the roots of American art.

PLATES 6 and 7 Charles Willson Peale’s painting of Timothy Matlack (1882) and Miguel Cabrera’s painting of Don Manuel José Rubio y Salinas, Archbishop of Mexico (1754), are placed in adjacent galleries at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The visual and aesthetic similarities between the portraits, and their location near each other, are meant to convey to viewers the geographic and political connections between their subjects and creators. Displays of colonial power and authority, whether symbolized by crucifixes and communion wafers or legislation and legal briefs, had a lot in common.

PLATES 8 and 9 In contrast to the “adjacencies” Boston’s MFA creates in its galleries, similar pairings at the Brooklyn Museum, such as William Williams’s portrait of Deborah Hall and José Joaquin Bermejo’s portrait of Doña Mariana Belsunse y Salasar, are placed next to each other. Although these paintings from the 1760s were created worlds apart—in colonial Philadelphia and in colonial Lima, Peru—they have a lot in common. They reflect the elite status of their subjects: both women stand in front of (probably imaginary) formal gardens. They are dressed elegantly and stare out regally from the frames. The iconography is also familiar, thus communicating to viewers that mores in colonial New England and colonial New Spain, and their visual representation, shared many features.

PLATE 10 According to former Singapore Art Museum director Tan Boon Hui, this painting by Jane Lee, Raw Canvas, on display at the Singapore Biennial in 2008, is emblematic of a uniquely Singaporean aesthetic that the government is trying to hothouse and cultivate. Lee uses the skeins of paint as if she were weaving fabric, recalling the indigenous textile traditions and weaving in the region.

PLATE 11 The royal family and the people they hired to build I. M Pei’s iconic Museum of Islamic Art, which opened in 2008, hoped that the building would put Doha on the global architectural map, in conversation with other remarkable museum buildings designed and built by a select group of “starchitects” around the world.

PLATE 12 Portrait of a European Gentleman. This fascinating painting of a European man in Turkish dress by an unknown artist from late-seventeenth-century Iran is one of the few paintings on display in the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha. It is also an example of the wide range of work that curators include under the “Islamic art” umbrella, including objects by Christian artists made for Muslim benefactors and by people living and working in an Islamic context without a specific religious intent.

Qaddafi. Let’s help carve out a new Middle East consistent with the vision we want to project.’ ” Its neighbors are by no means Qatar’s only detractors. Criticism also comes from the West. To some, the Qataris look like the titular (very, very) nouveau riche family from the 1960s American television show The Beverly Hillbillies. They have lots of money but no class. They are inventing their heritage. They spend all their time driving around the desert in Land Cruisers. Everyone has diabetes because they never exercise. Michelle Dezember, the former acting director of Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, attributed these easy stereotypes to Western anxiety about the world being revolutionized by forces outside Europe or North America. It’s easy to laugh at the Land Cruisers, the malls, and the obesity, she said, and to point fingers at labor issues. There is some truth behind all these stereotypes. But the West is so anxious about its own weakened economic and political state that “we quickly jump to these tropes because it allows us to feel some false sense of stability and security.” Still, Qatar cannot travel its path alone. It needs help from the Jean-Pauls, Michelles, and Mehrans of the world. In fact, only two out of the twenty-eight people I interviewed in Doha were Qatari nationals. At the same time, Qatar is greatly ambivalent about employing so many foreigners to tell the national story. There is strong pressure to nationalize labor across the Gulf, to “Emiritize,” “Saudize,” “Kuwaitize,” and “Qatarize.” Companies are encouraged to institute quotas they cannot always meet—there are simply not enough qualified locals to go around. So how to move ahead? How to give people a sense of rootedness and tradition so they can charge confidently into the world? How to rely on expatriates to help steer the course without giving away the keys to the car? Most people agree that the answer to all these questions is the royal family. The former emir was ambitious, energetic, and astute, surrounding himself with like-minded individuals and creating new means of institutional patronage, so that a lot of young Qataris, who are now extremely wealthy as a result, supported his vision. Hopefully, his son will follow in his footsteps. “They have bought into his notion of Qatar as the premier Muslim nation that is also highly advanced,” said Emin Balcıoğlu of the National Museum. “They want to be role models. The emir not only set the tone and vision but also created the environment in which a lot of people who supported him benefit as well.”

IMPLEMENTING THE GRAND PLAN

Qatar’s master plan for creating Arab cosmopolitan nationalists consists of several strands. Just as the objects in museums can tell multiple stories to multiple audiences, so the World Cup, Education City, and Qatar’s cultural institutions each do different kinds of work in the nation-making and nation-positioning project. The plan is being carried out with help from a massive expatriate workforce. In 2010, 1.74 million people lived in Qatar. While the national census makes no distinction between native and foreign-born

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residents, an estimated 85 percent of the population are expatriates, which means that approximately 250,000 residents are Qataris. About 10,000–15,000 are members of the extended Al-Thani family.96 In 2011, there were nearly five poor, unskilled workers, primarily from South and Southeast Asia, for every Qatari.97 While these foreign workers currently make up 94 percent of the labor force, an estimated 1 million additional workers will be needed to build the nine new stadiums, the hotels, the player camps, and the $20 billion worth of roads needed for the World Cup in 2022. And although Qatar desperately needs these expatriates to make its dreams come true, many natives feel, as one respondent described, “like they are living in an occupied country.” The majority of these migrants work under near-feudal conditions as what Human Rights Watch calls “forced laborers.” Most workers enter the country under a sponsorship system known as kafala. Qatari employers assume legal responsibility for their employees and provide them with a job, visa, housing and often food. In exchange, employees work for a fixed length of time.98 The employee cannot change jobs, leave the country without authorization, get a driver’s license, rent a home, or open a checking account without permission from his or her sponsor, who often holds the employee’s passport and can withdraw support at any time.99 The government has repeatedly promised to institute new protections against labor abuses.100 Its 2030 National Vision report describes Qatar as trying to recruit “the right mix of expatriate labor, protecting their rights, securing their safety, and retaining those who are outstanding among them.”101 Critics accuse the large cadre of white-collar workers, like those working at Qatar’s museums and universities, of enabling the system: they reap its benefits but ignore the deal with the devil that makes them possible. As in Singapore, Qataris and the more privileged foreigners do not do much to challenge the powers that be, because their own lives are so comfortable and financially rewarding.102 People raising their voices politically risk severe punishment. The poet Mohammed alAjami (also known as Mohammed bin al-Dheeb), for example, was arrested in Doha in November 2012. Authorities accused him of “inciting to overthrow the regime” and “insulting the Emir,” because his poem “Jasmine” was interpreted as criticizing regimes across the Gulf.103 Before handing over power to his son, the former emir had approved a national constitution in 2003, set up a constitutional court, and presided over four municipal elections, symbolic gestures creating a narrow political opening. But he repeatedly reneged on his promise to hold advisory council or parliamentary elections, each time pushing back the date. What makes all this possible is the country’s extraordinary wealth. Qatar is one of the richest countries in the world, which takes the logic of supply and demand off the table for most projects. When the former emir came to power, he partnered with Exxon Mobil and Royal Dutch Shell to modernize and expand the country’s liquefied natural gas installations, transforming Qatar from a relatively small producer to the world’s dominant liquefied-natural-gas power, with financial surpluses of between $30 and $40 billion a

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year.104 Qatar’s holdings in Western companies like Shell, the German construction giant Hochtief, and Volkswagen, along with its liquefied natural gas contracts in Japan and China, allow it to throw its economic weight around and make its global political influence felt.105 But the country’s investments extend way beyond oil and natural gas and those few Western companies. For example, after purchasing the soccer team Paris Saint-Germain in 2011, Qatar recruited David Beckham for a price tag of approximately £100 million. He signed on the dotted line, as did a long list of other high-profile recruits, including Sweden’s Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Argentina’s Javier Pastore and Ezequiel Lavezzi, and manager Carlo Ancelotti, catapulting the total price tag for bolstering Qatar’s sports profile to more than £400 million.106 This is, in part, why I. M Pei came out of retirement to design MIA and why Qatar can attract a transnational class of visionary museum and university professionals from across the world. As Jean-Paul Engelen implied, no other country offers so much “fun.” Education City is another venue that Qatar is using to stake its political claim. Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, the new emir’s mother, chairs the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development, “a private, nonprofit organization that serves the people of Qatar through education, science and research, and community development programs,” nurturing the “future leaders of Qatar” and contributing “to human development nationally, regionally, and internationally.”107 The 5.4-square-mile campus, founded in 2001, houses eight international universities, mostly from the United States. Each does its part. Georgetown University trains the next generation of diplomats; Northwestern University, its journalists and communication professionals; Virginia Commonwealth University, its designers; and the University College of London, its curators and conservationists. Achieving the kind of knowledge economy on which Qatar has set its sights is no easy feat. Sheikh Abdulla bin Ali Al-Thani, a member of Qatar’s ruling family and the head of Education City, told a London audience: “We need to educate our people. But a high-quality education system does not spring up overnight, so we have ‘jump-started’ with these overseas partnerships,” what will eventually become homegrown, high-quality institutions. “There is no way forward without putting education as a priority, especially in the Arab world.”108 Qatar also claims its global place by acting as an international mediator, taking advantage of disagreements between the major powers in the region to establish itself as a neutral, skillful go-between. It sometimes seems to support all sides, from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to George W. Bush and from the Muslim Brotherhood scholar Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi to the modernist Syrian poet Adonis.109 Sheikh Hamad built the alUdeid air force base, which has the longest airstrip in the region and is now used by the U.S. Central Command. At the same time, high-ranking members of the Qatari government and the royal family are said to have sheltered key al-Qaeda operatives, including Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the alleged mastermind behind the September 11 bombing. Critics claim Sheikh Hamad had no ideology or loyalty. When reporter Bob Simon told him that it seemed like the basis for Qatar’s foreign policy was to befriend everyone, he

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replied, “Don’t you think this is a good foreign policy for a small country?” “Yes, if you can pull it off,” responded Simon. “We are trying,” the emir retorted with a smile.110 Qatar also comes to the aid of those in need of relief. In April 2013, Sheikh Hamad announced he would purchase billions of dollars of Egyptian government bonds and explore the possibility of supplying Egypt with natural gas to bolster its failing economy.111 During a two-day Arab League summit in 2013, the emir proposed the creation of a $1-billion fund to protect the Arabic and Islamic heritage of Jerusalem, to which he would contribute the first $250 million.112 Since the early 1990s, Qatar Charity, the nation’s most prominent philanthropic organization, has funded an expanding constellation of development and disaster relief efforts worldwide, supported in part by leftover change donated by Qatari shoppers.113 The foundation partnered with the Gates Foundation to fight polio in Pakistan, provided major aid to Syrian refugees and Filipino typhoon survivors, and helped reconstruct Darfur.114 Sports constitute another arena that Qatar leverages to assert global leadership, not only by buying up soccer teams but also by competing in and hosting international sports events. The list, which keeps growing, includes the 2006 Asian Games, followed by the 2011 Asian Football Cup, the 2011 Pan-Arab Games, the 2012 Volleyball Club World Championships, and numerous other power-boating, motorcycling, and swimming events. Doha first competed in the Olympics in 1984. In 2012, four women were in its delegation; it was the first time Doha’s delegation had included women. In December 2013, Doha even hosted the Doha GOALS (Gathering of All Leaders in Sports) Forum, a riff on the Global Economic Forum in Davos and organized by its former producer, Richard Attias. Its preforum, held in January 2012, brought together athletes, business leaders, media personalities, and sports executives in preparation for what was billed as the “world’s premier platform for world leaders to create social initiatives through sport.” The vision of using sports to create global communities and spread global values could not be more explicit. “Sport,” the forum’s website says, “unifies us across borders, cultures, and beliefs. Sport is universal, an international language transcending language, race and religion.” It is “inclusive” by nature, equalizing the playing field, therefore making “it highly effective in addressing problems of global concern” through partnerships, constructive brainstorming, and focused collaboration.115 Again, Qatar’s focus on sports has a local agenda. Leaders worry about the country’s escalating preventable-disease rates driven by residents’ new wealthy lifestyle; they want to make Qataris healthier.116 The government invested heavily in new facilities, education campaigns, and sport leagues and clubs. It promotes “national sports” like falconry, archery, and shooting to get people moving and to signal that they are part of the country’s distinct national heritage. The emir even declared the second Tuesday of February the annual National Sports Day, an official paid holiday, during which Qataris participate in a range of athletic activities organized by public- and private-sector groups. Finally, perhaps Doha’s best-known, most influential international effort, and maybe one of its most controversial, is al-Jazeera, which was launched originally as an Arab-

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language news and current affairs satellite-TV channel and now broadcasts around the world. The al-Jazeera network includes seventy news bureaus accessible to over 260 million households listening in multiple languages.117 While it has earned a reputation for rigorous, increasingly objective coverage of world events, critics claim it has little to say about what happens in Qatar. In this case, the global agenda clearly trumps the local. Al-Jazeera enables Qatar to have a media presence on international issues without a local equivalent.

T H E R O L E O F H E R I TA G E A N D M U S E U M S

And then there is cultural heritage—the broad catchall category that encompasses museums, historical and archeological sites, and public art—another key piece of the government’s global stakes-claiming master plan. This sector poses particular challenges for a young country undergoing such rapid change, because so much of Qatar’s history is already on the “endangered species list,” disappearing each day at its many construction sites. It is, therefore, especially important to tell a clear story about who the nation is and where it has come from, so its members can better understand where they are going. But what is that story, given that there are so many voices and experiences in the region? And what tools should be used in telling it, given that so many Qatari traditions are intangible—oral or performed, passed down from one generation to the next—and not that different from those of its neighbors? Because the line between Qataris and non-Qataris is so salient, the internal differences within the Qatari category—with respect to tribe, denomination, or descent from badawas (desert nomads) or from hadaras (village dwellers)—are downplayed in official policies and discourse. Internal social differences also get glossed over because, writes Allen Fromherz, the royal family “has used historical myth and heritage to maintain their rule.”118 As in Singapore, the official national narrative reinforces and reflects the country’s nation-building goals and its global aspirations. And, as in Singapore, the government is investing in art making and collecting to achieve its objectives. It is opening art schools, instructing curators and conservationists, and “hothousing” an art scene. Museum art educators are training the next generation of museumgoers. Art education in public schools is also getting a lot of attention because, according to Jelena Trkulja, director of education at the QMA, the royal family understands that it too can play a role in creating a thriving knowledge-based economy. One teaches critical thinking through philosophy, she said, but also through art. Her goal is to create lifelong learners who learn in and outside the classroom—art classes encourage cosmopolitan skills too. In addition to the Museum of Islamic Art, several other institutions, which are at various stages of development, are driving Qatar’s agenda forward, although it is nearly impossible to know how many and what their content will ultimately be.119 A proposed museum about orientalism exemplifies Qatar’s quest for global cultural leadership and

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its willingness to take on difficult issues others are afraid to touch. Conceptualized as a “mini-Getty” (referring to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles), it will use its collections and research center, performing arts facilities, and five-to-seven-star hotel and convention center to encourage ordinary visitors, scholars, and world leaders to debate seemingly intractable problems and to bridge irreparable cultural divides. The royal family’s outstanding collection will be used as a catalyst for turning the museum’s name on its head, by initiating conversations about mutual misunderstandings between the East and West. “The primary vocation of this country,” said Emin Balcıoğlu, who directs this project, along with the National Museum, “is investing its resources in a totally different set of projects and ideas, compared with Dubai, for example. I think it is remarkable. At the end of the day, I am impressed and amazed that a country with a population of a quarter of a million is constantly having a positive impact on the world.” In March 2013, the Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum opened Olympics: Past and Present, a sneak preview of the exhibitions it will host in the future. While the show initially featured nude replicas of Greek- and Roman-era athletes, because that was how athletes competed in ancient Greece, the government later ordered them removed, deeming them “culturally offensive.”120 The museum is designed to fulfill several goals: it will appeal to the planeloads of fans Qatar hopes will attend the 2022 World Cup, and who will need things to do during lulls in the competition; help the nation in its second bid to host the summer Olympics; and inspire Qataris to be more physically fit.121 One of its key messages, said a curator, is that anyone can join the fun. “You don’t have to be a worldclass athlete. You just have to try at your own level and at your own pace. Women can also take part.” In fact, a second exhibition, Hey’Ya: Arab Women in Sports, on view at Katara Village, used videos and photographs showcasing seventy Arab sportswomen to further the QMA’s mission to “educate and spark debate about sports, and persuade more girls to find a way to participate.”122 The Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum will also teach universal values. Who can argue with fair play, good sportsmanship, and team spirit? Another institution that will broach thorny issues is a proposed museum about slavery, which is slated to be housed in one of four restored historic buildings in the Msheireb complex, a major project to create a new Doha downtown. Although open slave trading had declined by midcentury, and many former slaves became part of the families who owned them, slavery in Qatar was not officially abolished until the 1950s.123 By creating this museum, the first in the region, said Scott Cooper, director at the Msheireb museums, Qatar is signaling: “We are forward thinking. We don’t necessarily have to reopen this, but we are strong enough and confident enough to take it on.” There is no obvious market for this museum; but again, money is no object. “Now, this kind of museum is popping up everywhere, because the West is at a point in its psychological relationship with slavery where it needs to get this stuff out on the table,” said Cooper. That is not what is happening here. Rather, Cooper mused, Sheikha Mayassa (Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, the emir’s sister and head of the QMA) “probably sees this [as being] like a badly set broken arm. If you are going to do this, and grow up into

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a mature country, you have to go back and do some little correctives. [If ] you have a badly set broken arm, you have to go back and set it, so it can heal better.” And then there is Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, what staff members call “a safe place for unsafe ideas.” Mathaf’s unique role in the scheme of things is to connect Doha to the global art world. Just as the iconic MIA inserts the nation into the class of countries with premier Islamic art institutions, so too Mathaf inserts it into a parallel contemporary art conversation happening at biennials, universities, and edgy galleries everywhere. This became clear during my first visit to Mathaf, which coincided with the Art Dubai International Fair. Every March for the last seven years, well-known and upand-coming collectors, creators, and scholars have traveled to the United Arab Emirates, which, along with places like Dakar, Shanghai, and Singapore, are re-centering the global art map. Art is only one of many attractions; there are also performances, films, lectures, and moderated debates. Participants circulate in and out, creating their own mixedmedia, multisensory experience. Fans fondly refer to one event, the Global Art Forum, as the “brains of the fair.” The 2013 forum, which began in Doha and then moved to Dubai, wove together presentations by artists, writers, and thinkers, including an exploration of Giles Deleuze’s epic eight-hour interview with his former student Claire Parnet.124 The forum aimed to unpack Deleuze’s concept of “definitionism”: investigating the words, terms, clichés, and misunderstandings that proliferate in the art world and beyond. “The Forum,” the website advertised, “attempts to (re)define words, phrases and ideas we think we know, and those we need to know, to navigate the 21st century.”125 During each session, panelists reflected on an everyday term like heritage, biography, or place, or something less familiar, like academese, neologism, or MENA (Middle East nervous anxiety). Not for the light of heart, and not your standard Doha fare. Indeed, the afternoon session I attended felt a lot like a PhD seminar. The “polemic and discussion” on MENA, which included author Oscar Guardiola-Rivera; New Yorker writer Elif Batuman; director of the Dakar Raw Material Company, Koyo Kouoh; and artist Ala Younis, posed questions like: “Where are we now?” “Is it Near, Middle, or Far?” and “Why does this unnerve the West?” The evening ended with a video and musical performance by musician and composer André Vida about the relationship between music and language. Projects like these, admitted Michelle Dezember, run the risk of talking only to a small clique. “That is a danger you have to always be aware of. The Global Art Forum has been criticized as too highbrow, too intellectual,” but in general, staff like it because it pushes them intellectually and integrates Mathaf into important networks. “If you want to be in the global art world, you have to learn how to talk that way. You have to learn how to speak international art speak,” Dezember said. “We need to be able to play in this pond if the rest of the program is going to be realized.” Mathaf is meant to be different. In fact, it does difference. The museum’s founders made a conscious decision to be an Arab museum of modern art rather than a museum of contemporary Arab art. “We say,” said education program specialist Grace Murray,

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“that we provide an Arab perspective on art and culture.” From time to time, Mathaf exhibits work by artists from other parts of the world, but the shows always relate back, in some way, to the Arab world. Saraab, an exhibition of work by Chinese artist Cai GuoQiang, reflected Mathaf’s commitment to “present an Arab perspective on modern and contemporary art as it turns eastward to consider dynamics across Asia for the first time.”126 “We do not define what is Arab,” said Dezember. “We are trying to question what that means in the first place. . . . The adjective Arab is about how a museum perspective could be Arab rather than how we could display Arab art works, which would have been too constraining, narrow, and uninteresting.” Mathaf is also grappling with what it means to be a museum in the twenty-first century. “We also wanted to say that museums have their history. We don’t want to be an art center. We don’t want to be a library. Museums carry baggage for better or worse. We want the good side, the legitimacy, which gives weight and recognition to these artists and their narratives. But we are also thinking that an Arab perspective on this is something that hasn’t yet been defined.” The idea is not to mimic, unreflexively, a Western model but to have a conversation about what that model should be. “This is all happening in Doha, which is a diverse and confused society that needs a place like Mathaf as a mirror or looking glass back upon itself.” The museum, said Dezember, has a responsibility to explore the issue of who belongs, who is included, and how it influences those feelings of inclusion and belonging. What Mathaf does is often more about creating the space for that conversation than what the conversation is actually about. “Since so much in Doha is about celebrating national identity,” said one curator, “we are a place where you can question it.” Many Qataris feel sorry for Mathaf. The museum doesn’t have a brand-new building designed by a famous architect but is housed in an old school. French architect JeanFrançois Bodin purposely renovated the building to make it look like it was hastily put together and to invite the community to help finish or add to it. Visitors walk through scaffolding permanently placed right outside and inside the entrance. The ticket desk is made from shipping crates. Staff members admit it is not always easy to get people in the door. Mathaf’s location, far removed from the center of the city and surrounded by blocked roads and construction sites, does not help. While people already fluent in “global art speak” will feel right at home, this is intimidating foreign territory for many others. The strategies Mathaf uses look a lot like those employed in Brooklyn or Stockholm. In part, that is because some staff came to Qatar by way of Brooklyn and Queens. But it is also because global art speak has a programmatic equivalent that travels. One of Mathaf’s greatest successes was an exhibition of works created by Doha schoolchildren. More people attended the opening than any other Mathaf event. Another successful program is Mathaf Voices, a yearlong internship for university students, who then become museum docents and serve as a kind of programming advisory board. Family Fridays is the equivalent of the Brooklyn Museum’s Target First Saturdays or the MFA’s First Fridays. But other efforts have been less successful. A series called Another Look, aimed at getting participants to take a close look at one artwork on display, was, according to one

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staff member, “not the most exciting format.” Although staff realize that the public needs time to acclimate to what Mathaf has to offer, visitor numbers for some exhibitions have been disappointingly low. But by far, the most controversial and challenging project undertaken by the QMA is the new National Museum, scheduled to open in December 2014. Qatar actually had a National Museum, created just four years after independence and one of the first national museums in the Gulf. It was well loved, offering visitors a little of everything: an aquarium reflecting the country’s strong ties to the sea, and displays about regional flora and fauna, pearling, and the discovery of oil. An exhibition on the creation of the world, Islam, and Qatar’s place in the universe was a particular favorite. But while Qatar changed around it, the museum remained the same. An aspiring global player needs a museum commensurate with its new position, especially in time to host the World Cup. More than any other institution, the National Museum must do the difficult work of speaking to multiple audiences at the same time, reflecting Qatar’s traditions, introducing foreigners to the nation, and bringing both into the future. It has to specify what makes Qatar unique while acknowledging the many things the nation shares with its neighbors. It is meant to be the place where a father brings his son (or a grandmother brings her granddaughter, as in Baltimore) to teach him about his country, but it is also meant to be a place where you or I, on a business trip to the region or on a two-day stopover on our way somewhere else, can get an insider view of Qatar and its place in the world. What the national museum will do, explained Heather Ferrell, deputy director for programs, is highlight traditional values in an extremely innovative way. The building itself “symbolizes where Qatar stands: strongly connected to its traditions but extremely progressive in terms of how it is moving forward into the future.” “This unprecedented 21st century institution,” says the website, “will celebrate the culture, heritage and future of Qatar and its people. It reflects and belongs to a new era in Qatari prosperity, the country’s prominent role in the Arabian Gulf community and its world standing.”127 Like MIA, the building “will be in international dialogue with other cities with iconic buildings about what architecture can be and how it can represent a city,” said Ferrell. “It is trying to say something local, regional, and global. It is saying that we are not that different from our Saudi cousins, yet this building is in Qatar.” Architect Jean Nouvel drew inspiration from a traditional national symbol—the desert sand rose, a gypsum crystal formation of jutting planes that come together like the petals of a blooming flower. The timing of the project is critical, and not only because of its importance for Qatar’s master plan. Very soon, there will be only a few people who can actually remember what Qatar was like before oil. “If there is a complete cut between the old and the new, eventually there is a problem,” said Jelena Trkulja. “Whenever there is such radical change, there is always the danger of a backlash. It is extremely important to preserve continuity and identity, because eventually people wake up and realize what they are missing. That then becomes the topic around which everything revolves, which is something you don’t

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want to happen politically.” People need to know who they are to have a stable present and a prosperous future. But what does that identity consist of, and how can its many strands be combined into a cohesive narrative, especially when so much is intangible? “In essence,” said Ferrell, “we are trying to place Qatar in a global context. We are saying it has not just been around since 1971. There is a long history; there are lots of influences; it has always been part of trade routes. And Qataris will also learn that some of the things they do didn’t simply start here.” But, said Emin Balcıoğlu, “this is a heterogeneous population. People feel affiliations to particular tribes, to the north or the south, to the coast and the desert. Bringing all these different views into one shape is the big challenge.” The museum will always be a work in progress and will undoubtedly change down the road. Serving as the director of a contemporary art museum in Salt Lake City, said Ferrell, was great training for her current position. Doha and Salt Lake are a lot alike. “In Salt Lake, you have people who are Mormon and people who are not Mormon and people who are coming through, like the American Samoans, who are a very strong presence. So, it’s a small population that also feels [as if it has been] invaded by outsiders.” She takes many cues from her colleagues in the United States who are working with indigenous communities with rich, intangible traditions. In these settings, said Ferrell, you don’t merely have your curators and experts; you ask community members to take the lead. As Jette Sandahl also envisioned, professionals help create the narrative; they do not create it themselves. These groups are saying, “We are people; we are still alive; we have a great heritage, even though we might not have a lot of fine objects to put on a stand. But is our story any less significant?” To figure out the story and how to tell it, staff members convened numerous community consultations, aggressively collected oral histories, and hosted workshops with experts and scholars. Nouvel’s building, still under construction, consists of twelve galleries, which conduct visitors from prehistory to a final room titled “Between the Past and the Future.” A virtual tour posted on YouTube offers a sneak peak. The building will be landscaped with extensive aromatic gardens.128 Visitors will learn about life in the desert, “moving shelters,” and life on the sea, as well as how “new resources” transformed Doha. When they exit the final gallery, they will come upon Sheikh Abdullah bin Jassim Al-Thani’s restored early-twentieth-century palace, which is encircled by the new building. It contains a large open space, a caravanserai, where traders and pilgrims exchanged goods and information and rested for the night. Here visitors will be able to take part in a wide range of programs, including reciting or listening to stories and poems, watching falconry demonstrations, and learning to cook traditional recipes.

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Every museum in Doha tells at least two stories: one for Qataris and one for the outside world. The MIA, said Roger Mandle, tells Qataris “that they are not Bedouins in a

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small country in the middle of the desert. Islam connects them to a much bigger time line, a social and intellectual movement that stretches four continents and seven civilizations. The museum says to the world that Qatar is as ambitious and culturally aware about museums as anyone else, but this museum is about Qatari culture. Mathaf encourages locals to embrace the art and artists from this region. It says they need to know about contemporary art. At the same time, it says to the world that the artists the museum celebrates should be recognized and appreciated. The National Museum tells Qataris their official history for the first time, and says to the international community that this small place has a fascinating, important history that is worth knowing.” Qatar is trying its best, said Mandle, to build upon its Bedouin traditions, and on Islam, in order to think about cosmopolitanism in new way. “How does a centuries-old, very narrow, localized culture—I mean, to-the-corner-of-the-tent narrow—which suddenly has more resources than it knows what to do with, use that legacy to engage with the rest of the world and, at the same time, say what its culture means in the twenty-first century?” Unlike its neighbors, Qatar wants to join the international conversation on its own terms as an equal. “They are not giving themselves over, not retreating,” but are instead trying to participate as full partners in the dialogue. They are not importing culture from outside, he believes, but helping citizens develop a sense of the cultural riches and history already there. “The emir and his family are extremely sophisticated about striking the right political balance. Every once in a while, there will be an article in the newspaper about Western women wearing jeans that are too tight. I think that is intentional,” said Mandle. “The country is inching forward in a way that keeps the abaya and the thobe but also allows for Western practicality to prevail.”129 As in Singapore, cosmopolitanism is not for everyone. Here, the dividing line is between Qataris and non-Qataris. Despite some staff ’s best efforts, construction workers are not likely to come into the museums as visitors anytime soon. Staff talk about it. They know that at the Sharjah Art Museum in the United Arab Emirates, where there is also a large population of South Asian workers, there are labels in Hindi and Urdu. “We have all said workers are one of our audiences, and that aspects of their story should be told,” said one curator. “But realistically, they have one day off a week, and they spend half that day getting groceries and lining up to wire money home. . . . But should they be a target group and feel welcome? Absolutely.” The QMA is trying hard to put as many Qataris at its helm as possible and to include equal numbers of women and men. But the demography is stacked against them. Outsiders occupy most of the seats at the table where the national story is being written. While they may bring amazing professional experience to the task, many do not speak Arabic, have not worked in the Arab world before, and come on one- to three-year contracts—as “parachutists” and “spiralists.” Just as they start to get the hang of things, they are packing up to go. Constant references to “Doha time” attest to this. Among elite expatriates, people who stay for three years or more are longtimers. The fact that Westerners have

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been assigned the task of creating a coherent Qatari national identity, heritage, and history fuels charges of neocolonialism. It is also fodder for those who see the royal family as only wanting to tell stories that consolidate its hold. Some see what is happening in Doha as a missed opportunity. How many places in the world will build so many new museums in the next twenty years? “Rather than bringing in a bunch of experts,” one professional said, “my idea would be to think about creating museums in a different way, about creating narratives in a different way, where everyone gets involved and says, ‘This is mine.’ ” Museums in the West, he says, are doing all kinds of retrofitting. “ ‘You are Indian. You are Black. Well, we are about that, too.’ It’s all about the changing sense of the nation and about apologizing for that.” Instead, the process of creating museums could be socially transformative. Doha could create a new model that doesn’t replicate the mistakes of the past. Singapore and Doha share a great deal. They are both young and aspiring to global prominence, using museums to build their nations and rescale them, rather than to reimagine them, unlike in Scandinavia and the United States. They both “punch above their weight,” although Doha aspires to assume a global political role, in addition to an economic and cultural one of the sort that Singapore seeks for itself. They are not known for their respect for human rights or democracy. Their publics enjoy few freedoms and are unable or unwilling to protest. Both states are afraid of losing their sense of self in the face of rapid change. Peranakanamania in Singapore is the equivalent of falconry and camel racing in Doha: dusted off, previously disparaged traditions meant to stem the flow of disappearing memories and social dislocation. The question of cosmopolitan values, skills, or political projects takes on a different hue in these contexts. It is not simply about leaving out the vision of what a different world would look like. It is that, even if museums articulated one, there would be no safe way to put it into practice. The urban cultural armature figures prominently in both stories. Singapore, the prototypical entrepôt, embraces the hybridity and mixing that run deep in its geography at the same time that it reifies the boundaries between ancestral groups. The historical diversity-management regime, and its materialization in the clear ethnic division of city space, is even replicated in the ACM’s architecture. In this context, seemingly contradictory messages are not that contradictory at all. They are merely part of the package Singaporeans are expected to accept as they move forward on their collective journey to global importance. Even the heartlander, the conservative parochial charged with safeguarding the nation’s most treasured values, is coaxed into learning to be open, curious, and engaged in the world by the museums’ free admission policy. Doha, too, is located at an important crossroads. Traders and travelers have long passed through. In fact, mobility had been a way of life for large segments of its population. Its history, while long and deep, was also unwritten and intangible. While Singapore and Doha boast cultural landscapes that borrow readily from the rest of the world, they are also consciously fashioning something new, never losing sight of the Arab or Southeast Asian soil on which it grows. Museums in Doha reflect an Arab

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cosmopolitanism that selectively combines and rejects ideas and practices from around the world. Doha has a lot in common with its neighbors in the region but also strives to make clear what is nationally unique. In Singapore, museums articulate an Asian version of cosmopolitanism that includes critical thinking, curiosity, and confidence about one’s global place, but not what rights and responsibilities go along with it. The sense that smoke and mirrors are hiding much of what is going on in Doha came through in many conversations. What does it mean that so many buildings in its impressive skyline are half finished? Why are Mathaf and other art galleries often so empty? Some say it is because the physical landscape has changed while the social structure has not. Tribes, lineages, and blood ties, whether real or imagined, still organize people’s lives, no matter how many skyscrapers there are. In fact, the country’s wealth reinforces these divisions by making new kinds of exclusive residential patterns possible. Now families can afford to build their own compounds, complete with mosques, so they never have to mix with other parts of the nation.130 Miriam Cooke calls these developments tribal modernity. She writes of the Barzakh, a physical, cultural, and epistemological space where seeming opposites coexist. The tribal and the modern in the Gulf today are two sides of the same coin, neither compromising nor erasing the other. Rather, culture, previously faulted for thwarting modernity, is now the site for achieving it. The return to the thobe and abaya over Western clothing, the resurgence of interest in Bedouin poetry, and the growing heritage industry throughout the Gulf, which mixes indigenous architectural language with modern trappings, exemplify this path. “Cultural uniqueness is being fabricated out of a whole cloth to distinguish new countries from each other but also from their past,” writes Cooke. “The challenge is to mesh individual memories of belonging to an unbounded territory with official histories of borders and flags.” Museums, heritage sites, media outlets, and universities are all places where this national branding gets articulated and spread. “The tribal modern,” Cooke goes on, “is the barzakh that connects and disconnects a specific, separate, superior uncontaminated identity from the cosmopolitan mandates of the twenty-first century.” In other words, it aspires to be a uniquely regional, if not national, brand of cosmopolitanism.131 But this is also a politically driven move, believes Cooke. Most of the region’s citizens are the first to have grown up with national rather than regional or tribal identities. They must participate in excavating a largely unrecorded past that is fast getting buried under what look like nearly identical global cities. Projects like Qatar’s museums are patriotic, erasing the prenational and projecting a global, de-territorialized lifestyle. They enable the state to act as if large-scale migration is something new and as if colonialism is a distant, insignificant memory. This version of history sidesteps centuries of struggles for control over the region between the Portuguese, the Ottomans, and the British and conceals the country’s desperately poor past.132 So, clearly, in Singapore and Doha, lots of people and ideas get left out. Writing about the proliferation of new museums across the Gulf, critic Sultan Sooud al-Qassemi says that what is missing is often more interesting

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than what is on display: “These museums have become tools to propagate the ‘approved’ narrative of the state. In most museums in the Gulf we see the elements of the prehistoric era, the advent of Islam and a sudden jump to the era of the current ruling family.” Missing are the tribal feuds, assassinations, and, in a number of instances, massacres that took place. Also absent is a clear-eyed look at internal religious and ethnic strife, the role of women, the slave trade, or immigration. “Museums in the Gulf may very well continue to be tools to recast the modern history of the states through a governmentapproved narrative.”133 The same might be said about Singapore—the government there sees museums as an important vehicle for transmitting an official version of the past that translates easily into the Singapore it needs for the future.

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CONCLUSION

“The number of people living in a country that is not their own is more than 220 million,” says Pico Iyer in a June 2013 TED Talk. “It’s almost unimaginable.” To put these numbers in context, he asks the audience to picture the total number of people living in Canada and Australia, double it, and then double it again. You will still, he says, end up with fewer people than the number of members of this floating tribe. People living outside traditional nation-state categories have increased by 64 million in the last twelve years. At that rate, Iyer predicts, they will soon be even more numerous than the population of the United States, making up the fifth-largest “nation” on earth.1 More and more people choose or are pushed into living lives that cross borders— earning livelihoods, raising their political voices, caring for family members, and saving for retirement in more than one nation-state. They call many places home: the scattered sites where their dispersed family members live, the cities where they work or study, the places they remember and dream of, and the homes they long to return to and rebuild. Their movements diversify even societies that still insist they are not diverse, by bringing languages, faiths, traditions, and histories into daily contact. And all this unfolds in a world plagued by economic crisis, heightened ethnic and religious strife, and declining social protection. A world on the move produces opportunities and anxieties, more wealth and much more inequality, a decentering of power into multiple centers, where power gets concentrated anew. New social safety nets are needed that protect and provide for individuals outside the traditional nation-state framework, along with different kinds of health,

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education, and social welfare institutions that respond more effectively to people’s mobile lives. It is no surprise that countries across the world are grappling with how to create citizens who can live successfully in diverse neighborhoods and who actively engage with the world at the same time. The many professionals and policy makers described here shed light on how museums drive forward these dynamics and respond to them. In fact, this book includes two stories that, although in tension, have to be told at the same time. The first is about the role of museums in creating citizens: the project of crafting cosmopolitan values, competencies, and projects among people who also feel part of nations, regions, cities, and towns. The second is the story of how global cultural production and consumption, as seen through the prism of the art world, both influence and are influenced by these processes on the ground. On the one hand, these pages tell how larger processes leave their footprint in simple, everyday objects, such as those in museum showcases, a mark that reveals how culture is embedded in the materialities of everyday life.2 On the other, they tell about how these local expressions get uploaded and produce global culture—about how what happens inside and outside actual museums shapes global museum assemblages. These mobile bundles of technologies, objects, expertise, organizational models, and sensibilities continuously circulate, get vernacularized, and talk back, changing the constellation of elements they incorporate and shed as they continue on their way. A cadre of administrators, curators, and educators, who often have previous work experience in several other countries, is part of this constellation. Each time these people move, they bring to their new posts the ideas, skills, and know-how they recently acquired. This transnational class of museum professionals is almost single-handedly responsible for building Doha’s new museums. It includes people like Jette Sandahl, who worked in Sweden and New Zealand before returning to Denmark, and Alan Chong, who worked in Boston before moving to Singapore to run the Asian Civilizations Museum. The only thing that is really international about Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, joked one staff member, who asked to remain nameless, is that its retiring director, Malcolm Rogers, comes from England. Individuals like these—who travel, lecture, attend conferences, serve on boards of trustees, and act as advisers and consultants—parachute in, spiral, or sometimes settle semipermanently in the places where they work. They become experts at working at the sites of encounter, where multiple layers of culture meet and where they adapt their imported bags of tricks to fit local realities. The global museum assemblage that these professionals form part of, and that they are shaped by, reveals itself in the stellar new museum buildings and wings going up around the world, which are being built by a now familiar roster of architects. It rears its head in the programmatic approaches so many museums share: their educational activities, gallery and outreach programs, and use of technology; and at the First Saturdays in Brooklyn, First Fridays in Boston, and Family Fridays in Doha. It is why Damien Hirst is on display in London and Doha, Murakami is everywhere, and why Boston’s MFA, the

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Queens Museum, and Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art all featured exhibitions of work made by contemporary artists in conversation with ancient objects from their collections. The global museum assemblage makes its presence known in the struggles all museums face over whether to treat objects as art or artifact, how to right the wrongs of contested acquisitions, and how to make curatorial voices transparent. It gets standardized in global governance institutions like the International Committee on Museums and in their regional equivalents. While the museums discussed in this book differ with respect to how much they contribute to or borrow from this assemblage, and whether they operate near or far from its orbit, they all recognize its potential and its power. As a result, the structures that organize the museum world look a lot alike across the globe, although their substance varies. Places still differ, but that difference gets structured in similar ways.3 The museum is a contact zone, not simply, as James Clifford described, between different kinds of people and material culture. It is a site of encounter between, on the one hand, these global ways of seeing, knowing, teaching, exhibiting, and organizing and, on the other, local ways of doing things. Evidence of this appears on museum walls. All museums have texts and interpretive materials, but the length, content, and purpose of these materials vary. In Singapore, labels included clear, authoritative explanations about contemporary works of art because the government wanted museums to teach people how to appreciate and interpret them. No mea culpa here about hitting audiences over the head too hard with subjective descriptions. In Doha, MIA’s early curators wanted visitors to revel in the beauty of the objects on display and not be overwhelmed by too much text, because most Qatari stories are told rather than written down. At the National Museum of Denmark, director Per Christian Hansen explained his belief that interpretative materials give visitors tools to craft their own narratives and explanations. To produce a prepackaged message for them would be manipulative social engineering. Conflicts also abound when museums consider what to do about issues of provenance. Etnografiska Museet in Sweden returned a totem pole to a First Nation community in Canada. Staff also opted to let visitors decide for themselves whether to enter a cordoned-off space where a sacred object, originally intended to be seen only by members of the community that made it, was on display. The MFA in Boston featured curatorial statements, and created “behind the scenes” galleries, in which staff reflect on the museum’s collecting and conservation practices. Because these ways of working are recognizable around the world, visitors develop their own portable tool kit. They expect certain kinds of things to be displayed in certain ways. They also expect certain kinds of activities and amenities, and they know what to do when they find them. I write this book at a particular moment. Notions of identity, including “national identity” and its relationship to cosmopolitanism, are not universal but historically and culturally specific. What is entailed in “thinking” and “doing” “the nation” or “the public,” and what role museums play in that “thinking” and “doing,” is always changing.4 But what is constant across this snapshot is how interdependent the nation and the world

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are—that there is a continuum of cosmopolitan nationalism, and that the cosmopolitan side always comes with a dose of the national, and the national with some element of the cosmopolitan. There is clearly some truth to the claim that aspects of cultural memory are no longer rooted in particular territories.5 The world of museums, and the history and objects housed in them, extends way beyond the reach of one country. It involves contacts, collisions, and complementarity not only between people and objects but also between modes of display, organization, and education. But national narratives and styles still hold sway.6 Global stories are refracted through national lenses. The national story and its regional variations, whether they are told in Brooklyn or Doha, are the building blocks with which the global story is narrated.

T H E C O S M O P O L I TA N - N AT I O N A L I S M C O N T I N U U M

The working definition of cosmopolitanism that emerged from my conversations is not universal or homogenous. And it is not a list of values that people all over the world would recognize or endorse. It is simply the willingness, curiosity, critical thinking, and courage needed to engage, openly and respectfully, with people who are different. In several cases, the cosmopolitanism on display stopped at ideas and values; in others, it was also about competencies and skills. Some museums in Stockholm, Gothenburg, and New York City also took the next step, moving to a plan for putting those competencies and skills into practice by articulating a vision of what a cosmopolitan world actually looks like and how we might achieve it. How these messages combined with those about nationalism, or where each museum fell on the cosmopolitan-nationalism continuum, arose, in part, from its city’s cultural armature, including, in particular, its demography and its diversitymanagement regimes. It also reflected where each country was on its nation-building and world-claiming journey. The more globally oriented projects of Stockholm’s museums are a natural extension of the nation’s self-perception, its continuing desire to be a moral exemplar, and its deeply rooted belief that solidarity does not stop at the nation’s borders. Since Stockholm’s founding, migrants from outside the city have lived and worked there, in part because Sweden was a major regional player with Stockholm at its center. Sweden’s emphasis on cosmopolitanism over nationalism also allows it to sidestep “black spots” on what it considers to be its otherwise exemplary record. If it focuses on the world, it does not have to confront its experiments with racial eugenics, its role in World War II, or its treatment of the Sami. Museums in Copenhagen use the global primarily to explain and reassert the national. This is, in part, because many Danes still equate being a strong, successful democracy with being a small, homogenous country—one that looked inward to recover from the sense of loss provoked by its shrinking size and demography. Denmark never played as prominent a regional role as its neighbor. In fact, both countries are long past their imperial moments, although in Sweden the memory of having been a regional power runs deeper.

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Although both countries are struggling to come to grips with their increasing diversity, museums have shied away from drawing too much attention to difference. According to conventional wisdom, drawing attention to enthnicity and race contributes to social exclusion. The diversity-management regimes in place hold that using these labels is a step backward rather than forward. So immigrant stories have instead been subtly embedded in the broader national story, or they get told at city museums or special multicultural centers. Since the city is more diverse than the nation as a whole, it makes sense, several respondents argued, for urban institutions to shoulder the responsibility for showcasing difference. Museums in the Boston area and in New York tell global stories, too, although the stories tend to be louder and more diverse in New York. In this paradigmatic country of immigrants, labeling difference is a means to empowerment. Groups get their own institutions when they are allowed to enter the mainstream. As a result, most museums had something to say about immigrants, Native Americans, and people of color. Even if they were not initially inclined to do so, they have to: these are the visitors, donors, and curators of the future whom museums depend on to survive. Several museums used the diversity within their communities as a bridge to the world beyond. The Brooklyn Museum tells the American story by starting in its neighborhood, which is necessarily about racial and ethnic difference, and then links that diversity to people and places across the globe. The Queens Museum actively orchestrates relations between groups, viewing the streets and park that surround it, and the people who use them, as natural extensions of its square footage. The museum is known in Ecuador and Taiwan because it supports curatorial exchanges, art making, and exhibition creation in collaboration with people in the countries from which its primary target groups come. Again, museum practice reflects the cultural armature of the cities in which museums are located. The reverence of Boston’s early leaders for social hierarchy and responsibility, and their intention, like that of Sweden, to produce a city that would be a moral exemplar, produced a museum of fine arts that distanced itself from its populist roots for many years. That it is now beginning to reclaim them is, in part, a response to the region’s changing demography. New York’s superdiversity, its founding fathers’ belief that their city was destined to be the world’s cultural capital, and the fact that New York never became the “go-to” place for learning about colonial America, produced a set of institutions that more closely mirror the city around them. By and large, in both cities, I found that cosmopolitan ideas and skills were not directed toward cosmopolitics. This, too, reflects how the United States sees its place in the world— as that of a global leader that is so large and powerful that it can disengage when it likes and simply reengage on its own terms when and if it decides to. For many Americans, being global means being American. So even when the MFA internationalized the American story, it was a new story about what constituted the nation rather than a reexamination of its global position. The museums that articulated more action-oriented projects, such as Queens and El Museo, did so not only because their leaders define cultural institutions as

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agents of social change but also because they believe it is not possible to separate art from politics when so many of their visitors face such daily uphill struggles. In Singapore and Doha, the nation is being constructed, from the outset, in conversation with the globe. Here, cosmopolitanism is strategically and selectively defined to promote each country’s global aspirations and allow it to position itself on the world stage on its own terms. Certain values and skills are allowed that will create the citizens and attract the tourists and workers needed to achieve this. Others that might threaten state authority or fuel demands for additional rights and freedoms are not. In Singapore, critical thinking; targeted global economic, political, and cultural engagement; and selective intergroup mixing went hand and hand with the idea of putting the group before the individual, deference to authority, and the belief that having strong ancestral roots ultimately leads to strong regional and global connections. This Asian cosmopolitanism, which rejects the individualism and freedoms associated with the West, is also not for everyone. It is directed at educated professionals rather than at the “heartlander,” who is busy safeguarding traditional Singaporean values, or at the new, low-skilled immigrants crowding Singapore’s shores. Professionals in Doha articulate a similarly selective cosmopolitan nationalism, spelling out attitudes and skills consistent with regional priorities—family, hospitality, and abiding by Islamic principles. This is an Arab version of cosmopolitanism, intended only for Qatari citizens and the transnational class of professionals they invited in to help spread it, defined by a country that wants to show the world it is an equal partner playing by its own rules. In Singapore and Doha, where only limited rights are granted, critical thinking, curiosity, and openness are not to be used to rock the national boat, or even available to most of the people doing the dirty work of building it.

S T U DY I N G G L O B A L L I V E S

Driving this book was a quest to contribute to ongoing efforts to find new words and new methods for understanding the world at this global moment. It’s the challenge of the day and so hard to do well. The idea of multisited ethnography—looking at similar things, people, or dynamics and their connection to each other, across multiple sites—is a major step forward. Theoretically, you can study many places with the same care, attention, and preparation you use to study one. But if we’re honest, the reality is different. Many of us, especially in the United States, never master a foreign language, let alone the number that such a study, evaluated according to a particular set of expectations about its analytic rewards, would require. The demands of professional and personal life make it hard to spend extended periods away from home.7 So what to do? Give up? Decide it is impossible to say something meaningful about certain issues if the methods of yore no longer apply? Simply read about those issues from our desks and write synthetic analyses? We still need regional experts, but we also need people who know something about several different places, who can see the structures of common difference and what is in

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them, and to help explain why. This is not multisited ethnography or actor-network theory. It is not neo-institutionalism or world polity theory, which assert global culture but do not tell us enough about how it gets created or used. It is looking at how a similar set of social processes come together across sites, and at how global cultural forces and national and urban dynamics simultaneously influence their interaction. It is privileging, as Aihwa Ong urges us to do, the analytics of assemblage over an analytics of structure by focusing on evolving milieus over stable global orders—not an enduring set of attributes with predetermined outcomes but a logic of organizing and governing that migrates and gets used selectively in diverse political contexts according to who holds the power and what their interests are.8 The analytical goal is to explain what happens when what is migrating comes to ground, where assemblages of various shapes and sizes change and are changed by local ways of doing things. This book describes how global museum assemblages interacted with national and urban cultural politics to produce certain kinds of museum practices, and describes the ways in which place, demography, power, and institutions came together to shape it. One could imagine similar studies of encounters between all kinds of global assemblages and local realities and of how different but comparable social threads intertwine and affect how they meet. The goal of this kind of work would not be to produce a definitive account of a particular nation. Nor, in my case, was it to come up with a grand theory of museums. Rather, it is to give equal credit to what the hedgehog or the forest-seer contributes—a broader, thinner, but equally valuable snapshot that complements, rather than takes a backseat to, deeper, narrower, long-term approaches. Both types of scholarship are needed to understand the world today.

W H AT R O L E C A N M U S E U M S P L AY ?

A number of people I met while writing these pages believe strongly that museums are not about creating citizens. They feel, as do James Cuno and Neil MacGregor, with whom I began, that museums are for collecting, preserving, and interpreting, and that we should still abide by enlightenment principles of interpretation and display. “What happens to the ‘art’ when it gets taken out of the museum’s title?” they ask. Is there no place where visitors can simply delight in the beauty of objects? In spite of their colonial pasts, certain “universal” institutions have done a fine job of preserving the world’s heritage for centuries. Shouldn’t we simply let them continue because they tend to be located in places where the greatest numbers can visit? These museums, according to this view, are not national but global, putting world culture on display for the benefit of people everywhere. There were also people who argued that, while museums must confront their political pasts and not shy away from their political futures, there are clear limits to what they can and cannot do. They are not agile institutions. They have to create installations that last a long time and that appeal to large numbers. In the United States, in particular, museums must play according to the logic of the market, because public funding is so limited.

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Museums are constrained by their collections—they have to tell the stories that the objects they own, or can borrow, allow. Encyclopedic museums, such as Boston’s MFA and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, that have large budgets and lots of resources have more to work with but less freedom to do as they like. Newer museums like the MWC and the Queens Museum have less at their fingertips but more room to experiment and take risks. Because they are somewhat out of the spotlight, fewer people will notice if they fall. Museums are also stymied by their traditional role in the organizational ecology and by the roles played by other institutions within it. Visitors simply expect certain things from certain institutions, an expectation that becomes even more important when budgets are tight. As Erica Hirshler of the MFA explained, the objects in the Art of the Americas Wing are required to tell stories about the nation that other materials are not. Similarly, the National Museum of Denmark must tell the story of Denmark, while the Museum of Copenhagen, its smaller, less well-known neighbor down the street, can take on a wider variety of topics, including Denmark’s diversity, in more complex ways. When culturally specific museums like El Museo del Barrio, Singapore’s various heritage centers, and the Mångkulturellt Centrum in Stockholm showcase the experiences of particular groups, other institutions are off the hook—since others display diversity, they don’t have to. Meanwhile, as communities change and grow, these community-based, or constituency, museums struggle with how to honor their original mandates and respond effectively to the changing demographics around them. There is some truth to all of these concerns, as there is truth to the claim that, for many people, museums still feel like they are for elites only. But there is more truth to the claim that museums’ social power extends far beyond their buildings. They each play some part in influencing how we envisage and talk about our nations and their place in the world— and the images and vocabulary we use to do so—even among people who never come inside. Museums, therefore, cannot help but be part of the creation of citizens. Claiming to be apolitical caretakers of art is a political choice. Claiming to be anational safeguarders of universal treasures ignores the national history that brought those treasures under the care of the nation to begin with. Not confronting the effect of curatorial or collecting choices, and not acknowledging the consequences of what is displayed and what is absent, of what is talked about and what is silenced, is also a deeply political act. But so is dismissing museums as lost causes, beyond redemption, because they are too flawed by their imperial histories or their current neo-imperial roles. In some cases, they will continue to be instruments of social control, favoring the status quo and leaving less powerful voices out. Curatorial and collecting decisions always involve trade-offs. When a grandmother and granddaughter recognize something of themselves on display in a constituency museum, such as El Museo, it is a wonderful moment. But it is not the same as when they see themselves among other groups on the walls of a large encyclopedic museum. In the first instance, they are there but set apart, while in the second they are unmistakably part of a larger whole and the “official” canon.

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In a world where one out of every seven people is an internal or international migrant, the challenge of getting along, both inside the nation and out, grows greater by the minute. As I write this conclusion, the world’s seemingly intractable problems are looming so loud and large, a voice inside me questions how I can still side with cosmopolitanism. But another part of me remembers what Rabbi Tarfon said famously in the Pirkei Avot, “It is not incumbent upon you to complete the work [of perfecting the world], but neither are you at liberty to desist from it.”9 As Brooklyn’s Kevin Stayton summed up, it’s not a question of whether museums are the right places to create citizens, it is that they cannot survive by pursuing business as usual. So, we must take museums, with all their warts and blemishes, as well as their promise, and keep trying. Art, ethnographic, cultural history, and constituency museums all have a role to play. Too often, social critics identify false dichotomies between “good” guys and “bad.” We stop at critique without trying to identify a pragmatic way forward, deconstructing without suggesting ways to reconstruct. But as these pages reveal, there are a lot of examples of creative institutions that, willingly or because they had to, stepped up to the plate. Painting the walls blue and green, telling the story from the neighborhood’s point of view, transforming the museum into a sometimes community center, mounting exhibitions that directly address social problems, and using art to jump-start social engagement are just a few. How museums are doing this, and with whom, is also changing. Organizing artistic and curatorial exchanges, partnering with community members to create exhibitions, sharing the ownership and management of objects, and collaborating with the descendants of the people who made them to figure out what stories they should tell are also examples. As the staff at the Queens Museum described, partnerships and collaboration take precedence over outreach. Reciprocity is the key paradigm shift. Let me return to the MWC for one last story. One of the museum’s first installations, Horizons: Voices from a Global Africa, showcased its African collections. Jette Sandahl, who was the museum’s director at that time, wanted visitors to understand that Africa is not a single country or nation but a continent characterized by vast differences. One part of the exhibition focused on Africa’s ancient kingdoms to show visitors that the region produced high culture before most people dreamed of it elsewhere. A showcase displaying stunning objects from the Congo ironically featured a quote alongside it, from a colonial civil servant, that read, “We had to bring culture to these people who had none.” Sandahl chose Mali as a site for exploring gender, inviting curators from its National Museum to collaborate on the exhibition concept and design. They lent the museum beautiful dresses that women wear when they perform female circumcisions. This, said Sandahl, is the only way she knows to work with these collections if they are going to stay in Europe. “Our knowledge is thin and faulty. We have torn these objects out of their contexts. We have to reconnect to the knowledge that is in the objects and to the living memories that they still carry.” If you have an ethnographic collection that is by definition colonial and about a past that is undefined, you have to build partnerships and start working with people.

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Cosmopolitanism suffers from its own warts and blemishes—it is another flawed term that many claim is also beyond repair. In the European and U.S. cases, what were once considered universal values have been toned down in response to critiques of cultural imperialism and relativism. Defining cosmopolitanism as curiosity, critical thinking, and openness allows those who embrace it to walk that elusive line between not telling others what to do and not sanctioning practices that seem morally reprehensible. It sidesteps the intractable for the sake of the possible. In Singapore and in Doha, a comparable selection process is at work. In these cases, critical thinking and curiosity remain while basic rights are left out. Singapore and Doha can look global without asking whether it is really possible to be cosmopolitan without granting certain freedoms to your own people. Again, both faces of cosmopolitanism are true. There is the promise of cosmopolitanism: the willingness and desire to deal respectfully and reflexively with difference and to confront how our starting point affects the shared project we collectively define. And there are its dangers: that those of us lucky enough to try to be cosmopolitan fail to acknowledge how our status influences what gets included in the package, which we dismiss as uncosmopolitan when we disagree. I hope these pages convince readers that we have no choice but to bet on cosmopolitanism’s promise. The numbers of the world’s floating tribe, both voluntary and involuntary, are increasing exponentially. So are the conflicts this mobility brings. We need new ways to think and talk about nations and the relations within and between them. We need new kinds of institutions that respond more effectively to this reality, particularly in the face of global economic crises and heightened inequality. A cosmopolitan ethos and cosmopolitan skills, and the political projects they inspire, provide some of the building blocks for this conversation and for seeding more successful diverse and worldly communities. Museums are just one of a range of cultural institutions that can help.

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NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1.

2.

3. 4.

Information about Sir Hans Sloane is from Arthur MacGregor, “Sloane, Sir Hans, Baronet (1660–1753),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 2004). Neil MacGregor and James B. Cuno, Neil MacGregor at the Art Institute of Chicago, 360 Degrees: Art Beyond Borders, 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENlCJzodxZ4&featu re=youtube_gdata_player. British Museum, “Sir Hans Sloane,” accessed November 2, 2014, www.britishmuseum. org/about_us/the_museums_story/sir_hans_sloane.aspx. McGregor was responding in part to critiques of institutions like the British Museum, which claim to be of the world rather than the nation. They consider themselves the rightful guardians even of objects that were stolen or plundered, and which many former colonies now want back. In fact, in 2002, the directors of nineteen museums declared their institutions to be “universal” rather than “national,” because they saw themselves as caring for collections that matter to all humankind. In the “Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums,” the nineteen signatories suggest, “We should acknowledge that museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation.” All the institutions that signed were located in Europe and North America. Critics called it a preemptive strike launched in anticipation of forthcoming claims for restitution and repatriation. Mads Daugbjerg and Thomas Fibiger, “Introduction: Heritage Gone Global: Investigating the Production and Problematics of Globalized Pasts,” History and Anthropology 22, no. 2 (2011): 135–47. See also George O. Abungu,

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“Universal Museums: New Contestations, New Controversies,” in Utimut: Past Heritage–Future Partnerships: Discussions on Repatriation in the 21st Century, ed. Mille Gabriel and Jens Dahl (Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, Greenland National Museum and Archives, 2008), 32–43; Neil G. W. Curtis, “Universal Museums, Museum Objects and Repatriation: The Tangled Stories of Things,” Museum Management and Curatorship 21, no. 2 (2006): 117–27; Geoffrey Lewis, “The Universal Museum: A Special Case?” ICOM News 57, no. 1 (2004): 3; Mark O’Neill, “Enlightenment Museums: Universal or Merely Global?” Museum and Society 2, no. 3 (2004): 190–202. I am not the first to find this tension between cosmopolitanism and nationalism being played out across the culture and heritage sectors. Hanna Schissler and Yasemin Soysal have asked similar questions about how textbooks shaped changing narratives about nations and their global status in the context of European unification. Geneviève Zubrzycki uses the term cosmopolitan nationalism to describe how intellectuals and activists promote a new version of the Polish nation. Cosmopolitanism alone came up short, she writes, because these individuals did not bypass or ignore the category of the nation. They were nationalists arguing against an ethnic, locally rooted view of nationhood. They embraced “Polishness” as a meaningful category constructed at “home” and in the diaspora but with broad, worldly horizons. Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider argue that we are witnessing a transition from national to cosmopolitan memory cultures. Institutions such as Holocaust memorials and museums take us beyond collective memories framed as belonging to particular national or ethnic experiences to those framed as “the global” or “of humanity,” where the central message is: “Never forget.” As a result, millions of people who have no direct relationship to these atrocities feel part of this de-territorialized memory that drives forward a common European cultural memory and a cosmopolitan politics of human rights. A kind of “internal globalization” occurs when global concerns become part of the local experiences of large numbers. But, according to Sharon Macdonald and Mads Daugbjerg, cosmopolitan and nationalistic portrayals are often deeply intertwined. The reinvention of the Danish battlefield Dybbøl as a site of peacekeeping rather than a site of conflict, argues Daugbjerg, relied on Danes’ perceptions of themselves as a nation of tolerance and humanitarianism. He, too, uses the term cosmopolitan nationalism, to remind those who celebrate the cosmopolitan ideology of contemporary museums and heritage that it is often coupled with a strong dose of nationalism. Jackie Feldman contends that increased mobility and media access supports rather than diminishes nationalistic claims on particular sites or memories. Because it is easier now for governments to keep in touch with their diasporas and to facilitate actual or virtual visits to important destinations, they use them as opportunities to reassert the nation. As a result, the nation, writes Macdonald (2013: 215), is still important because of its affective weight and is important as a frame of action, although it is difficult “to ‘do nation-ness’ in quite the same ways in which it was formerly done. . . . It is not so much the nation being displaced or ‘cracked’ by cosmopolitan memory as the nation presenting itself as cosmopolitan through harnessing shared pasts as part of its own.”

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6.

These writers open the door to a more relational review that sees cosmopolitanism and nationalism as mutually interdependent and constantly in conversation with each other. They also drive home how greater worldliness sometimes arises from the recognition and embrace of the diversity within—the redefining of the nation itself as more diverse—which then connects to the diversity without. Hanna Schissler and Yasemin Soysal, eds., The Nation, Europe, and the World: Textbooks and Curricula in Transition (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004); Genevieve Zubrzycki, “ ‘We, the Polish Nation’: Ethnic and Civic Visions of Nationhood in Post-communist Constitutional Debates,” Theory and Society 30, no. 5 (October 1, 2001): 629–68; Geneviève Zubrzycki, “Religion, Religious Tradition, and Nationalism: Jewish Revival in Poland and ‘Religious Heritage’ in Québec,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 51, no. 3 (September 1, 2012): 442–55; Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in the Global Age, English edition (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); Mads Daugbjerg, Borders of Belonging: Experiencing History, War, and Nation at a Danish Heritage Site (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013); Sharon Macdonald, Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today (London: Routledge, 2013); Jackie Feldman, Above the Death Pits, beneath the Flag: Youth Voyages to Poland and the Performance of Israeli National Identity (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008). Nadya Jaworsky et al., “Rethinking Immigrant Context of Reception: The Cultural Armature of Cities,” Nordic Journal of Migration and Ethnicity 2, no. 1 (2012): 78–88. I see parallels between the cultural armature of cities and what Nina Bandelj and Fred Wherry describe as the “cultural wealth of nations” (The Cultural Wealth of Nations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). What explains, they ask, why countries with similar levels of resource endowments and human capital experience different rates of growth? Some countries attract foreign direct investment and tourism more successfully than others with similar endowments, and they do so because of their cultural wealth, defined as their reputational attributes, their cultural products, their cultural and natural heritage sites, the amount of their art and artifacts found in top international museums, and how many international prizes are earned by their citizens. My argument also resonates with organizational theorists. Long ago, Stinchcombe wrote of imprinting, in which the environment is the source and the organization is the target. Arthur L. Stinchcombe, “Social Structure and Organizations,” in Handbook of Organizations, ed. James G. March (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965), 142–93. See also, John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan, “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 2 (September 1, 1977): 340–63; David Strang and John W. Meyer, “Institutional Conditions for Diffusion,” Theory and Society 22, no. 4 (August 1, 1993): 487–511. My research clearly reveals how much the legacy of cognitive models and norms, within both museums and the cities where they are located, shapes current institutional practice. Cultural organizations and cities harbor “memory traces” through which social structures make themselves felt across time and institutional domains. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 17; Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Harvey Molotch, William Freudenburg, and

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7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

Krista E. Paulsen, “History Repeats Itself, But How? City Character, Urban Tradition, and the Accomplishment of Place,” American Sociological Review 65, no. 6 (December 1, 2000): 794. Molotch et al. (“History Repeats Itself, But How?”) refer to this as a city’s character. They even call our attention to physical traces: graffiti, store signs, buildings, and so on, which reveal what Howard Becker describes as the “congealed social agreements” that lie behind them (Tricks of the Trade [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 44). Whether it is the organizational responses to early economic development efforts that imprint themselves onto organizations, or, as Henrich R. Greve and Hayagreeva Rao argue, the events and context within which the organizations are founded that imprint themselves onto the community, a certain knowledge and skill set that these authors call “civic capacity” takes root and continues to shape regional responses over time (“Echoes of the Past: Organizational Foundings as Sources of an Institutional Legacy of Mutualism,” American Journal of Sociology 118, no. 3 [November 1, 2012]: 637). For discussions about the strategies and policies nations use to manage difference see Paul Bramadat and Matthias Koenig, eds., International Migration and the Governance of Religious Diversity. Migration and Diversity 1 (Montreal: School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University, 2009); Adrian Favell, Philosophies of Integration: Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Peggy Levitt, God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape (New York: New Press, 2007). Peggy Levitt, The Transnational Villagers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). United Nations Information Service, “232 Million International Migrants Living Abroad Worldwide—New UN Global Migration Statistics Reveal,” September 11, 2013, press release, www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2013/unisinf488.html. Migration Policy Institute, “Data Hub,” accessed October 15, 2012, www.migrationpolicy.org/programs/data-hub. This is a 7.3 percent increase from 2013; remittances are expected to increase to $516 billion in 2015. World Bank, “Remittances to Developing Countries to Stay Robust This Year, Despite Increased Deportations of Migrants, Says World Bank,” April 11, 2014, www. worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2014/04/11/remittances-developing-countriesdeportations-migrant-workers-wb. In twenty-four countries, remittances equaled more than 10 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2011; in nine countries the proportion reached more than 20 percent. See Manuel Orozco, Migrant Remittances and Development in the Global Economy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2013); Ibrahim Sirkeci, Jeffrey H. Cohen, and Dilip Ratha, eds., Migration and Remittances during the Global Financial Crisis and Beyond (Washington, DC: World Bank Publications, 2012); Stephen Castles and Raúl Delgado Wise, eds., Migration and Development: Perspectives from the South (Geneva: International Organization for Migration, 2008); Raúl Delgado Wise and Humberto Márquez Covarrubias, “Understanding the Relationship between Migration and Development: Toward a New Theoretical Approach,” in Migration, Development, and Transnationalization, ed. Nina Glick Schiller and Thomas Faist (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 142–75; Glick Schiller and Faist, Migration, Development, and Transnationalization.

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12. 13. 14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

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Levitt, The Transnational Villagers. Steven Vertovec, “Super-diversity and Its Implications,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 6 (2007): 1024–54. Leo Benedictus, “Every Race, Colour, Nation and Religion on Earth,” The Guardian, January 21, 2005, www.theguardian.com/uk/2005/jan/21/britishidentity1, cited in Vertovec, “Super-Diversity.” Museums are, of course, only one of many potential sites where aspects of cosmopolitanism might be encouraged. Marie Gillespie and Alban Webb, for example, describe the role that the BBC World Service played in creating cosmopolitan identities and affinities throughout the British Empire. “Corporate Cosmopolitanism: Diasporas and Diplomacy at the BBC World Service, 1932–2012,” in Diasporas and Diplomacy: Cosmopolitan Contact Zones at the BBC World Service (1932–2012), ed. Marie Gillespie and Alban Webb (New York: Routledge, 2013), 1–20. See also the special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies, edited by Peggy Levitt and Pál Nyíri: “Books, Bodies, and Bronzes: Comparing Sites of Global Citizenship Creation,” 37, no. 12 (2014). Bryan S. Turner, “Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalization and Patriotism,” Theory, Culture and Society 19, no. 1–2 (April 1, 2002): 45–63. For in-depth discussions of the conflicted history of cosmopolitanism see Elijah Anderson, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011); Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, Cultural Politics 14 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, Cosmopolitan Europe (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2007); Magdalena Nowicka and Maria Rovisco, eds., Cosmopolitanism in Practice (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate Press, 2009); Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, Migration, Diasporas and Transnationalism (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 1996); Roland Robertson and Anne Sophie Krossa, eds., European Cosmopolitanism in Question (Houndmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Annette Jean Ahern, Berger’s Dual-Citizenship Approach to Religion (New York: Peter Lang, 1999). Sheldon Pollock, “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” Public Culture 12, no. 3 (2000): 596; Pollock, “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” in Cosmopolitanism, ed. Carol Breckenridge et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 15–53. Roxanne Leslie Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore: Muslim and Western Travelers in Search of Knowledge, Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 181. The Islamic ethos always included travel in search of knowledge, an emphasis in the Qur’an on the moral significance of diversity, or the belief that differences of opinion within the umma are a source of mercy. Mohammed Bamyeh, “Global Order and the Historical Structures of Dar al-Islam,” in Rethinking Globalism, ed. Manfred B. Steger (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 217–31; Euben, Journeys to the Other Shore. “A countergenealogy of cosmopolitanism,” Euben writes, “might weave together such doctrinal sources with all the disparate practices, moments, and ideas that punctuate the history of Muslim societies and continually shape collective memory” (Journeys to the Other Shore, 179). Cosmopolitanism arose not just through multiculturalism but also through interculturalism. It was “not solely the product of Muslim/non-Muslim

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exchange but also of literature and imaginative interaction among Muslims located in different cultural milieus, encounters that at various moments articulate and occasion a reworking of racial, religious and geographic frontiers” (ibid., 182). See also Peter Van Der Veer, “Transnational Religion: Hindu and Muslim Movements,” Global Networks 2, no. 2 (April 1, 2002): 95–109. “The space of Sanskrit culture and the power that culture articulated,” writes Pollock, “were never demarcated in any concrete fashion; the populations that inhabited it were never enumerated; nowhere was a standardization of legal practices sought, beyond a vague conception of moral order (dharma) to which power was universally expected to profess its commitment. Nor was any attempt ever made to transform the world into a metropolitan center; in fact, no recognizable core-periphery conception ever prevailed in the Sanskrit cosmopolis. . . . As a result, people in tenth-century Angkor or Java could see themselves no less than people in tenth-century Karnataka as living not in some overseas extension of India but inside “an Indian world.” “Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History,” in Cosmopolitanism, 27. The production of this kind of feeling beyond one’s immediate environment, this vast cosmopolitanization of southern Asia, has rightly been described as “one of the most impressive instances of large-scale acculturation in the history of the world” (ibid.). This view sees these “global wannabes” who, in the past, fueled imperialism by imposing their Eurocentric views on the rest, as merely playing at caring about the greater good. Cosmopolitanism from above almost always involves social control, they say, albeit with a velvet fist. What’s more, it is easier to ask people to be curious and open to others when they have full stomachs and pocketbooks. See Jonathan Friedman, “Champagne Liberals and the New ‘Dangerous Classes’: Reconfigurations of Class, Identity, and Cultural Production in the Contemporary Global System,” Social Analysis 46, no. 2 (2002): 33–55. This view redefines “cosmopolitanism” by pointing to its vernacular, pragmatic articulations, rooted in local places and held by individuals who support global projects at the same time. Anthony Appiah calls this partial cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006). Basic human differences and cultural heterogeneity will persist, he says, but “conversation” and translation can ease them. See also Carol Breckenridge et al., eds., Cosmopolitanism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Craig Calhoun, “The Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers: Towards a Critique of Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice, ed. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 86–110; Craig Calhoun, “Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Social Imaginary,” Daedalus 137, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 105–14; Martha Craven Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 2–17; Karen Fog Olwig, “Cosmopolitan Traditions: Caribbean Perspectives,” Social Anthropology 18, no. 4 (November 1, 2010): 417–24; Pnina Werbner, “Introduction: Towards a New Cosmopolitan Anthropology,” in Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism, ed. Pnina Werbner (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 1–29. Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity, 2006).

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Here, I draw on the work of Hiro Saito, who also conceptualizes cosmopolitanism as having three parts: cultural omnivorousness, ethnic tolerance, and cosmopolitics. Cultural omnivorousness is the willingness to appreciate a wide variety of cultural objects, while ethnic tolerance entails positive attitudes toward ethnic out-groups. Cultural omnivorousness and ethnic tolerance refer to the subjective orientations of individuals, while cosmopolitics refers to the collective project of forming a transnational public and debating global risks as citizens of the world. Cultural omnivorousness and ethnic tolerance, according to Saito, refer to the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of cosmopolitanism, while cosmopolitics captures its political dimension. “An Actor-Network Theory of Cosmopolitanism,” Sociological Theory 29, no. 2 (2011); 124–49. In the literature, there is no shortage of ways to talk about aspects of cosmopolitanism. Paul Gilroy writes of conviviality (Postcolonial Melancholia [New York: Columbia University Press, 2005]). Bryan Turner (“Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalization and Patriotism”) describes a sense of responsibility that leads people to care about other cultures, to distance themselves so they can reflect on their own cultures, and to take part in cross-cultural criticism and dialogue. According to Ulf Hannerz, competent cosmopolitans have the ability to make their way “into other cultures, through listening, looking, intuiting and reflecting” (“Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,” Theory, Culture and Society 7, no. 2 [1990]: 239). They have, according to Magdalena Nowicka and Maria Rovisco, “a mode of self-transformation, which occurs when individuals and groups engage in concrete struggles to protect a common humanity and become more reflective about their experiences with otherness” (Cosmopolitanism in Practice, 6). Nina Glick Schiller, Tsypylma Darieva, and Sandra Gruner-Domic describe cosmopolitan sociabilities, or the skills and competencies people need in order to actively create social relations of openness and inclusiveness in the places and spaces where they come together. “Defining Cosmopolitan Sociability in a Transnational Age: An Introduction,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 34, no. 3 (2011): 399–418. But at the end of the day, we do not know enough about where and how cosmopolitans are “made”—what Will Kymlicka and Wayne Norman refer to as the little-understood ways in which we actually do multiculturalism, or what Beck and Grande (Cosmopolitan Europe) recognize as the frequent mismatch between cosmopolitanization and the production of cosmopolitan sentiments (Kymlicka and Norman, eds., Citizenship in Diverse Societies [London: Oxford University Press, 2000]). As a result, warns Craig Calhoun (“Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Social Imaginary,” 110), “cosmopolitan theories need to be supplemented by an emphasis on the material conditions and social institutions that make this sort of cosmopolitan inhabitation of the world possible—and much more likely for some than others.” We need to shift, writes Bruno Latour, away from the cosmopolitan to cosmopolitics: not simply dreaming of a time when people recognize that they inhabit the same world but actually taking on the daunting task of seeing how that “same world” can be created (“Whose Cosmos, Which Cosmopolitics?” Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 [Fall 2004], 457). See Annie Coombes, “Museums and the Formation of National and Cultural Identities,” in Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, ed. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago (Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Press, 2004), 278–98; Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, “The

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Universal Survey Museum,” in Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, ed. Bettina Messias Carbonell (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 51–80; Eileen Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping to Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992); Vera Zolberg, “Tensions of Mission in American Art Museums,” in Nonprofit Enterprise in the Arts, ed. Paul Dimaggio (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 184–99; Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995); Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995); Robert Rydell, “World Fairs and Museums,” in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 135–51. In 1901, for example, G. Brown Goode, an ichthyologist and museum administrator who would go on to serve as the assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution in charge of the United States National Museum, writes, in a paper titled “Museums and Good Citizenship,” that museums were much more in touch with common people than libraries or universities were. He worried little about whether the masses were ready for high art. Instead, his primary concern was with how exhibitions could “minister to the mental and moral welfare” of the masses and turn them into good citizens of the newly rebuilt national state (cited in Rydell, “World Fairs and Museums,” 137). Zoos, aquariums, public monuments, botanical gardens, and libraries, among others, also helped drive what Bennett calls “civic seeing” forward (“Civic Seeing: Museums and the Organization of Vision,” in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald [Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011], 263–81). For further discussions of the relationship between museums, nations, and communities see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006); Bettina Messias Carbonell, ed., Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, 1st ed. (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004); Sharon Macdonald, “Exhibitions of Power and Powers of Exhibition: An Introduction to the Politics of Display,” in The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture, ed. Sharon Macdonald (London: Routledge, 1998), 1–24; Timothy W. Luke, Museum Politics: Power Plays at the Exhibition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Preziosi and Farago, Grasping the World; Rudolph Starn, “A Historian’s Brief Guide to Museum Studies,” American Historical Review 110, no. 1 (2005): 68–98; Peter Vergo, ed., introduction to The New Museology (London: Reaktion Books, 1989); Selma Holo, Beyond the Prado: Museums and Identity in Democratic Spain (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999); Andrew McClellan, ed., Art and Its Publics (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003); Andrew McClellan, The Art Museum from Boullée to Bilbao (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Richard Sandell, ed., Museums, Society, Inequality (London: Routledge, 2002). Sharon Macdonald, “Museums, National, Postnational, and Transcultural Identities,” in Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, ed. Bettina Carbonell, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 273–87; Ruth B. Phillips, “Where Is ‘Africa’? Re-viewing Art and Artifact in the Age of Globalization,” in Preziosi and Farago, Grasping the World, 758–75. Andrew McClellan, “Art Museums and Commonality: A History of High Ideals,” in Museums and Difference, ed. Daniel J. Sherman (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2007), 25–60.

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According to Daniel J. Sherman, “Evolutionary schemas also played an important role in the elaboration of the new, anthropological notion of culture as a set of beliefs and practices common to a particular group, which Young has traced to polygenist notions of human difference that informed the nineteenth-century nexus of science and imperialism. In as much as public museums figured among the institutions that sought to acculturate unlettered Europeans into the civilizing mission attributed to them, they formed a key link in the recursive loop between culture, difference, and power characteristic of modernity” (introduction to Sherman, Museums and Difference, 4). “The museological terrain is still uneven in the sense that the cultural artifacts of some peoples may still be found in natural history or ethnographic museums as well as in art museums,” writes Andrew McClellan (Art Museum, 28), “but the drift toward greater inclusion and equal treatment of all cultures within the discursive and institutional parameters of the art world has been decisive. What allows for the assimilation of new art worlds into established art museums is the guarantee that the traditional art world criteria of quality, rarity, and beauty apply consistently to everything museums  display and acquire. While our museums now encourage us to view all the world’s peoples as art producing, the imposition of Western aesthetic standards on nonWestern objects often distorts our understanding of those objects and the cultures that produced them, as Clifford and others have argued.” See James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). Artists and curators challenged these practices as far back as the early twentieth century. Marcel Duchamp pronounced museums “mausoleums” and urged their gatekeepers to think hard about who and what was being included and excluded (Danielle Rice, “Museums: Theory, Practice, and Illusion,” in Art and Its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millennium, ed. Andrew McClellan [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003], 77–97). Daniel Buren critiqued museums for privileging certain kinds of art and organizing it in certain ways (“Function of the Museum,” in Museums by Artists, ed. A. A. Bronson and Peggy Gale [Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983]). “Exhibits,” argued Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, “whether of objects or people, are displays of the artifacts of our disciplines. They are for this reason also exhibits of those who make them, no matter what their ostensible subject” (“Exhibitionary Complexes,” in Exhibiting Cultures [Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991], 434). The essence of the “exhibitionary complex,” writes Tony Bennett, was to persuade the public “to identify power, to see it as, if not directly theirs, then indirectly so, a force regulated and channeled by society’s ruling groups but for the good of all: this was the rhetoric of power embodied in the exhibitionary complex—a power made manifest not in its ability to inflict pain but by its ability to organize and co-ordinate an order of things and to produce a place for the people in relation to that order” (The Birth of the Museum, 67). Museum exhibitions disciplined; but because they also made the forces and principles of order visible and made objects available for public inspection, they produced a voluntary, self-regulating citizenry. Many of these critiques draw on Foucault’s insights about disciplinary institutions. For some, therefore, museums take their place alongside prisons, asylums, and schools

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in creating disciplined, orderly citizens (Beth Lord, “Foucault’s Museum: Difference, Representation, and Genealogy,” Museum and Society 4, no. 1 [2006]: 11–14). See Bennett, The Birth of the Museum; Richard Handler, Nationalism and the Politics of Culture in Quebec, New Directions in Anthropological Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988); Nelia Dias, “Looking at Objects: Memory, Knowledge in Nineteenth Century Ethnographic Displays,” in Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement, ed. George Robertson et al. (London: Routledge, 1994), 164–76. Corrine Kratz, “Rhetorics of Value: Constituting Worth and Meaning through Cultural Display,” Visual Anthropology Review 27, no. 1 (2011): 22. The challenge, writes Tony Bennett, is to “reinvent the museum as an institution that can orchestrate new relations and perceptions of difference” by providing more socially engaging and productive encounters with other cultures (“Exhibition, Difference, and the Logic of Culture,” in Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp et al. [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006], 59). Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories: Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India, Cultures of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). Ghassan Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Sydney: Pluto Press, 1998). Hans Haacke writes that the art world in general and, particularly museums, formed part of the consciousness industry. The museum’s primary role is to support the prevailing distribution of capital and power and to convince the public to abide by the status quo. “Whether museums contend with governments, power-trips of individuals or the corporate steamroller, they are in the business of modeling and channeling consciousness,” writes Haacke. “Even though they may not agree with the system of beliefs dominant at the time, their options not to subscribe to them and instead to promote an alternative consciousness are limited. The survival of the institution and personal careers are often at stake” (“Museums: Managers of Consciousness,” reprinted in Preziosi and Farago, Grasping the World, 411). The term culture, he goes on to say, masks the social and political effects of the industrial distribution of consciousness. Critics make parallel claims about today’s world’s fairs. Writing about the 1992 World’s Fair in Seville, Penelope Harvey argues that today’s events involve an “informatics of domination” that reinforce the myth that technology and consumerism are key to human liberation. While earlier world fairs drove forward nation-building projects, their contemporary counterparts represent the “harnessing of national identities to corporate ends.” See Hybrids of Modernity: Anthropology, the Nation State and the Universal Exhibition (London: Routledge, 1996), 103, 126. For a discussion of similar questions about identity formation, power, and cultural displays, see the section on festivals in Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); and Timothy Mitchell, “The World as Exhibition,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31, no. 2 (April 1989): 217–36. This is what Pierre Bourdieu had in mind when he wrote about how elites use culture and cultural institutions to reproduce their superior social status (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984]). For

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41.

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a discussion of these ideas, as well as a useful roadmap to her own critique, see Michèle Lamont, “Looking Back at Bourdieu,” in Cultural Analysis and Bourdieu’s Legacy: Settling Accounts and Developing Alternatives, ed. Elizabeth Silva and Alan Warde (London: Routledge, 2010). See also Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, Paradise Transplanted: Migration and the Making of California Gardens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), for a fascinating discussion of gardens as sites of class construction and display. James B. Cuno, Museums Matter: In Praise of the Encyclopedic Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 44–45. Ibid., 7. Quoted in Judith Dobrzynski, “Hip vs. Stately: The Tao of Two Museums,” New York Times, February 2, 2000, www.nytimes.com/2000/02/20/arts/hip-vs-stately-the-taoof-two-museums.html. For example, Ivan Gaskall gives more credit to the museumgoer, claiming that even visitors with little museum-going experience recognize that museums are not apolitical, transparent institutions (review of On the Museum’s Ruins by Douglas Crimp; The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal; and Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, ed. Daniel Sherman and Irit Rogoff, Art Bulletin 77, no. 4 [1995]: 673–75). Nick Prior, like Sharon Macdonald and Gordon Fyfe, argues that seeing museums—which have changed dramatically in the last decades—as one-dimensional objects of social reproduction is far too simplistic. Prior, Museums and Modernity: Art, Galleries and the Making of Modern Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2002); Macdonald and Fyfe, eds., Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, Sociological Review Monograph Series (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996). See also Ruth B. Phillips, “Re-placing Objects: Historical Practices for the Second Museum Age,” Canadian Historical Review 86, no. 1 (March 1, 2005): 83–110. Clifford drew on Mary Louise Pratt’s work on contact zones, which she defined as “the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict” (cited in Clifford, Routes, 192). He writes that if museum professionals could think of their mission as contact work—”decentered and traversed by cultural and political negotiations that are out of any imagined community’s control”—museums could begin to grapple with the “real difficulties of dialogue, alliance, inequality, and translation” (ibid.). Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). See also Philipp Schorch, “Contact Zones, Third Spaces, and the Act of Interpretation,” Museum and Society 11, no. 1 (March 27, 2013): 68–81. Anna Tsing’s notion of friction also powerfully captures the diverse and unequal global encounters that produce new cultural and power dynamics when ideas and concepts intersect at various scales. Her descriptions of “activist packages,” stories about environmental heroes, also offer a way of thinking about “sites of encounter.” These stories become detached from their original contexts as they travel and are reframed for different audiences. Powerful institutions and actors determine their paths. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Here I use the idea of global assemblages to capture the changing packages of resources that circulate within the social fields in which museums are located. Actors on the

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ground voluntarily choose from this repertoire but are also pressured to conform to its norms and standards. I continue, as Sally Merry and I proposed, to understand cultural circulation and appropriation as vernacularization. Our work uncovered at least three types of vernacularization: the act of building on the imaginative space, momentum, and power of particular global frames without using them directly; the act of translating global ideas so they are locally appropriate and applicable to new issues; and the act of taking core concepts, articulating them in locally appropriate ways, and modeling new ways to put them into practice. “Vernacularization on the Ground: Local Uses of Global Women’s Rights in Peru, China, India and the United States,” Global Networks 9, no. 4 (2009): 441–61. For a more in-depth discussion, see Peggy Levitt, “Global Culture in Motion,” in Global Culture: Consciousness and Connectivity, ed. Roland Robertson and Didem Buhari (London: Ashgate Press, forthcoming). According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Bruno Latour, and Aihwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, assemblages incorporate people, technologies, knowledge, and objects that shed elements and accrue others as they travel while maintaining a certain basic core. “Practices of assemblages and reassemblage,” writes Ong, “are key to our understanding of the making and unmaking of contingent spaces that disrupt old notions of spatial division and connection” (“Neoliberalism as a Mobile Technology,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32, no. 1 [2007]: 4). Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Ong and Collier, eds., Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005). Several scholars have applied the notion of assemblages to museums and heritage. Tony Bennett, for example, draws on Latour’s work on collecting institutions and their role in “the processes through which worlds are made and mobilized.” Latour, he says, emphasizes “assembling as a practice which, by rendering the things it brings together as readable, combinable, and presentable with one another in new ways, makes new realities thinkable and actionable (“Making and Mobilizing Worlds: Assembling and Governing the Other,” in Material Powers: Cultural Studies, History and the Material Turn, ed. Tony Bennett and Patrick Joyce [London: Routledge, 2010], 201). For additional discussion, see Rodney Harrison, Sarah Byrne, and Anne Clarke, eds., Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency, Advanced Seminar Series (Santa Fe, NM: School for Advanced Research Press, 2013); Sharon Macdonald, “Reassembling Nuremberg, Reassembling Heritage,” Journal of Cultural Economy 2, no. 1–2 (2009): 117–24; Christoph Rausch, “Rescuing Modernity: Global Heritage Assemblages and Modern Architecture in Africa” (PhD diss., Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands, 2013), http://pub.maastrichtuniversity.nl/4c8316bd-48ce-4536-84e56bbf3830b762. According to Mark W. Rectanus, this globalization of the museum world has been going on for some time: “The internationalization of exhibition programming, exchanges of collections, and the movement of curators and directors were already well-established features of many national museums even before the advent of the “blockbuster . . .

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47. 48.

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which marked a pivotal moment in the globalization of the contemporary museum by: (a) putting in place standardized ways of mass marketing and product merchandising; (b) globalizing tropes of national culture (e.g., ‘national treasures’), canon (e.g., ‘Impressionism’), and identity; (c) state anointing of museums in Europe and North America as instruments of democratization and reaching new audiences; (d) and trying to entertain and enlighten at the same time.” “Globalization: Incorporating the Museum,” in Macdonald, A Companion to Museum Studies, 381. They are what Leslie Sklair identifies as the professional sector of the transnational capitalist class, who traverse the world accompanied by their corporate, political, and consumerist counterparts. See “Transnational Capitalist Class,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization, published online February 29, 2012, http://onlinelibrary. wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470670590.wbeog585/abstract. I take these categories from Ulf Hannerz, Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). Robert Park, “The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment,” in Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities, ed. Richard Sennett (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1916), 91. Previously published in American Journal of Sociology 20, no. 5 (March 1915): 577–612. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1938), 223, www.bcin.ca/Interface/openbcin.cgi?submit=submit&Chinkey=23474. Morton Keller, “The Personality of Cities: Boston, New York, Philadelphia,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd ser., 97 (1985): 1–15. Mark Twain, “What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us,” North American Review 160 (January 1, 1895), www.mtwain.com/What_Paul_Bourget_Thinks_of_Us/0.html. Keller, “The Personality of Cities.” Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith, “The Strong Program: Origins, Achievements and Prospects,” in The Handbook of Cultural Sociology, ed. John R. Hall, Laura Grindstaff, and Ming-cheng Lo (New York: Routledge, 2010), 13–24. I treated each city in which I did research as a potential organizational field. I tried to visit as many museums as possible where the nation and the globe might be showcased and to find out the extent to which cultural institutions showcased them in coordination with each other. I visited many more museums than those featured in these pages. For example, in Boston, I also interviewed staff at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and a project to create an immigration museum, which never saw the light of day. In Stockholm, I spoke with people at Moderna Museet, Stringbergs Museet, MusikMuseet, Vasa Museet, the Swedish National Museum, the Stockholm City Museum, and Skansen. I spent time with as many curators as possible in the larger institutions I feature. In smaller museums, particularly the constituency museums, there were often only one or two curators on staff. In some cases, I was able to speak with former curators and consultants; in others, staff turned over as I wrote. I also reached out to educators, people involved with public programming and outreach, and directors. Most of these interviews took place in person, were tape-recorded, and were then transcribed. In some cases, I continued the conversation via email or Skype. I also interviewed people from city

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government, including those in charge of the museum sector and cultural policy more generally, and members of the academic community. All in all, I conducted 183 interviews, including 32 in Sweden (5 directors, 3 educators, 4 academics, 5 administrator/ policy makers and 15 curators), 28 in Denmark (3 directors, 3 educators, 3 academics, 4 administrator/policy makers, and 14 curators), 28 in Doha (2 directors, 4 educators, 5 administrators/policy makers, 3 academics, 14 curators), 29 in Singapore (3 directors, 4 educators, 4 academics, 3 administrator/policy makers, and 15 curators), 36 in New York (7 directors, 3 educators, 2 administrator/policy makers, and 24 curators) and 30 in Boston (3 directors, 3 educators, and 24 curators). Of course, and particularly outside the United States, many people are both curators and academics or administrator/policy makers. I counted their primary role at the time of our conversation. I spent as much time as possible listening to gallery talks and informally observing visitors in galleries and during formal public programming. I listened to audio guides and culled through descriptions of past and current installations on the Internet, in catalogues, and in newspaper and journal reviews. I did not, however, interview visitors about their responses to the exhibitions. I wrote only about what the museum professionals I spoke with thought they were doing, not about how well they were doing it. In many cases, I sent my introduction and the relevant chapter to my respondents for their comments. This is part of accompaniment—I could not write about such a wide range of places without getting feedback from the people who live and work there. In Singapore and Doha, several people also asked to see how our conversation had been incorporated into my analysis before publication. I received wonderful, helpful, generous comments from many people. Readers will note that I occasionally refer to respondents by their titles rather than their names. That is because they asked to remain anonymous. I have written about a moving target—the political climate in each country, and the cultural institutional landscape, is constantly changing. As this book goes to press, I note that on May 11, 2014, Doha News reporter Victoria Scott wrote that the Qatar Museum Authority is undergoing a rebranding process and has been renamed the “Qatar Museums,” significant layoffs are expected, and plans for new museums have been scaled back. These pages, then, reveal a snapshot of the period in which I did my fieldwork. There will undoubtedly be many more changes before they reach the bookstore shelf. Denmark has been a member of the European Union since 1973, but it continues to use its own currency, the krone, after voters, in a 2000 referendum, rejected switching to the euro. Sweden, which joined the EU in 1995, similarly opted out of switching from its native krona to the euro in 2003. For example, see George Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 95–117; Michael Burawoy et al., Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Giselinde Kuipers, Good Humor, Bad Taste: A Sociology of the Joke (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2006). Latour, Reassembling the Social; John Law, “Notes on the Theory of the Actor-Network: Ordering, Strategy, and Heterogeneity,” Systems Practice 5, no. 4 (1992): 379–93.

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58.

59. 60. 61.

“Structures of common difference” refers to the production of local difference on a global scale, or how localized processes and relations get slotted into increasingly similar packages and categories around the world. Richard Wilk, “Learning to Be Local in Belize: Global System of Common Difference,” in Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local, ed. Daniel Miller (London: Routledge, 1995), 110; Kasja EckholmFriedman and Jonathan Friedman, “Global Complexity and the Simplicity of Everyday Life,” in Miller, Worlds Apart, 134–89. Berlin was in turn playing on the famous claim by the Greek poet Archilochus that “the fox knows many things; the hedgehog one big thing.” Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2006), 7. Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz, “American Studies as Accompaniment,” American Quarterly 65, no. 1 (2013): 12. See also David FitzGerald, “A Comparativist Manifesto for International Migration Studies,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 35, no. 10 (October 2012): 1725–40, in which he stresses the importance of collaboration in comparative studies of migration.

1. THE BOG AND THE BEAST

1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

The information on Hazelius in this section comes from Edward P. Alexander, “Artur Hazelius and Skansen,” in Museum Masters: The Museums and Their Influence, American Association for State and Local History Book Series (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1995), 55–79. Both institutions exemplified his interest in and commitment to pan-Scandinavianism. For more on this, see Peter Aronsson, “Representing Community: National Museums Negotiating Differences and Community in Nordic Countries,” in Scandinavian Museums and Cultural Diversity, ed. Katherine J. Goodnow and Haci Akman, Museums and Diversity (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008), 195–211. For more on Hazelius and the history of the Nordiska Museum and Skansen, see Barbro Klein, “Women and the Formation of Swedish Folklife Research,” Journal of American Folklore 126, no. 500 (2013): 120–51. This expressive style, and romantic nationalism in general, is discussed in Mads Daugbjerg, “Playing with Fire: Struggling with ‘Experience’ and ‘Play’ in War Tourism,” Museum and Society 9, no. 1 (2011): 17–33. According to Barbro Klein, these distinctions have deep roots. When Etnografiska Museet and the Academy of Sciences separated from each other in the early 1900s, Etnografiska Museet was put in charge of “foreign” collections and Nordiska Museet was placed in charge of the “Nordic ones.” Personal communication with the author, April 12, 2013. Museums of World Culture, accessed March 24, 2010, www.varldskulturmuseerna.se/en/ varldskulturmuseet/. Gunnar Tibell, “Linnaeus Deceased,” Linné on Line (Uppsala University), 2008, www. linnaeus.uu.se/online/life/9_0.html. David Quammen, “The Name Giver: A Passion for Order,” National Geographic (June 2007), ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/06/linnaeus-name-giver/davidquammen-text/1.

NOTES TO PAGES 13–20

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8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

The descriptions in this section are taken from the exhibition text, my interviews, and information available on the museum’s website at www.varldskulturmuseerna.se /etnografiskamuseet. By that, Björklund means that all Swedish museums receive public monies, although different levels of government fund and manage them. In Denmark, there are approximately 300 museums and museum-like institutions. About 120 receive at least some support from the Ministry of Culture and must in turn meet certain government standards. The state owns seven national museums outright. For a more detailed description of cultural policy in Sweden, see Marilyn Rueschemeyer, “Art, Art Institutions, and the State in the Welfare States of Norway and Sweden,” in Art and the State: The Visual Arts in Comparative Perspective, ed. Victoria Alexander and Marilyn Rueschemeyer (Oxford: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 101–26. For more details on Denmark, see the website of the Ministry of Culture, Denmark, http://kum.dk/servicemenu/english/policy-areas /cultural-heritage/museums/, accessed November 22, 2014. Rebecca Parker Brienen, Visions of Savage Paradise: Albert Eckhout, Court Painter in Colonial Dutch Brazil (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006). Jarrett A. Lobell and Samir S. Patel, “Bog Bodies Rediscovered,” Archaeology 63, no. 3 (May–June 2010). From the Archaeology archive, http://archive.archaeology.org/1005 /bogbodies/. Nationalmuseet (National Museum of Denmark), “The Egtved Girl,” accessed February 2, 2013, http://natmus.dk/en/historisk-viden/danmark/moeder-med-danmarks-oldtid /the-bronze-age/the-egtved-girl/. Francesca Fiorani, “Reviewed Work: The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology by Horst Bredekamp, Allison Brown,” Renaissance Quarterly 51, no. 1 (1998): 268–70. All information on Christian Jürgensen Thomsen is drawn from the following sites: Carl Frederick Bricka, “Thomsen, Christian Jürgensen, 1788–1865, Musæumsmand og Arkæolog,” in Dansk biografisk leksikon (Danish biographical encyclopedia; 1887–1905), 27:220–26, digitized and transcribed by Project Runeberg, http://runeberg.org /dbl/17/0222.html; Heimskringla, “Christian Jürgensen Thomsen (1788–1865),” 2013, www.heimskringla.no/wiki/Christian_J%C3%BCrgensen_Thomsen_biografi, adapted from Salmonsens konversationsleksikon (Salmon’s encyclopedia; 1915–1930); the automated translation from Danish is by Google Translate. Mads Daugbjerg and Thomas Fibiger write, “A recently adopted policy of the ethnographic department of the National Museum of Denmark exemplifies well what we may call a “national globality” (“Introduction: Heritage Gone Global: Investigating the Production and Problematics of Globalized Pasts,” History and Anthropology 22, no. 2 [2011]: 135–47). In the face of economic cutbacks, the Copenhagen institution has decided to concentrate on “Danish traces”—that is, locations and ex-colonies across the globe on which Danes have left their marks in the past—at the expense of its collections from other regions of the world.” This may, they remark, be a way of reaching out to former colonies, or it may “imply a curious set of national interests and assumptions and a particular understanding of what constitutes relevant knowledge for the museum’s present-day Danish public.” Nathalia Brichet’s “Awkward Relations and Universal Aspi-

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16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

rations: Common Global Heritage in Ghana” is an account of the NMD’s projects in Ghana (History and Anthropology 22, no. 2 [2011]: 149–68). See Helle Jørgensen’s study of the heritage town of Tranquebar, a former Danish trading colony in Tamil Nadu. “Remoteness and Development: Transnational Constructions of Heritage in a Former Danish Trading Colony in South India,” History and Anthropology 22, no. 2 (2011): 169–86. Of course, there are exceptions. In 2012, the NMD hosted a temporary exhibition, Pow Wow, about Native Americans in the United States, which explored, among other things, the ethics of exhibiting “otherness.” The museum has an impressive collection of Native American clothing, weapons, and ritual objects, in part because during the 1800s its directors asked Danish emigrants to send back artifacts for its collections. The decision to treat much of the museum’s ethnographic materials as art needs to be taken in context. At that time, the department was reorganized into what was meant to be a three-legged stool. The Peoples of the World, packed with wonderful, though decontextualized, artifacts, clothing, and art from around the world, would go hand and hand with a second exhibition, Treasure Chamber, designed to resemble a museum storage room, where visitors could examine row upon row of pipes, cups, and tools that only curators had been able to look at before. The third leg, which never came to be, was a space for temporary didactic exhibitions, where specific themes or geographic areas could be explored in greater detail. Unfortunately, as the demands of school groups grew, the museum had to devote more room to student programming and this threelegged strategy was never realized. Some staff felt these decisions also reflected a shift in the museum’s priorities and focus. “What is the core of the museum’s activity? Is it even the job of the National Museum of Denmark to have an ethnographic collection?” one former curator asked. “The answer was that is was down-prioritized. I think there are pockets of the museum where the ethnographic collection is seen as aberration.” Nationalmuseet (National Museum of Denmark), “Dansmarkshistorier (1660– 2000),” 2012, http://natmus.dk/besoeg-museerne/nationalmuseet/udstillinger /danmarkshistorier-1660-2000/danmarkshistorier-1660-2000/?cHash=b806e85eeaa 78b8d12c0a8cd77a625c7. Aronsson, “Representing Community.” Charles Westin, “Sweden: Restrictive Immigration Policy and Multiculturalism,” in Migration Information Source (Migration Policy Institute), June 1, 2006, www .migrationinformation.org/usfocus/display.cfm?ID=406. Paul Norlén, “Stockholm,” in Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World, ed. Jonathan Dewald (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2004), 5:528–30. Tony Griffiths, Stockholm: A Cultural History, Cityscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v. “Stockholm,” last updated March 21, 2013, www .britannica.com.luna.wellesley.edu/EBchecked/topic/566797/Stockholm. Jan Lindegren, “The Swedish ‘Military State,’ 1560–1720,” Scandinavian Journal of History 10 , no. 4 (1985): 305–36; Leon Jespersen, ed., A Revolution from Above? The Power State of 16th and 17th Century Scandinavia (Odense, Denmark: Odense University Press, 2000).

NOTES TO PAGES 27–30

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25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41.

Robert Sandberg, “Town and Country in Sweden, 1450–1650,” in Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800, ed. S. R. Epstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Riitta Laitinen and Dag Lindström, “Urban Order and Street Regulation in SeventeenthCentury Sweden,” Journal of Early Modern History 12, no. 3 (September 1, 2008): 257–87. Norlén, “Stockholm,” 529. Bo Stråth, “Recent Development in Swedish Social History of the Period since 1800,” Social History 9, no. 1 (1984): 77–85; Stråth, “Nordic Modernity: Origins, Trajectories and Prospects,” Thesis Eleven 77, no. 1 (2004): 5–23; Lars Trägårdh, “Swedish Model or Swedish Culture?” Critical Review 4, no. 4 (1990): 569–90; Trägårdh, “Welfare State Nationalism: Sweden and the Specter of the European Union,” Scandinavian Review 87, no. 1 (1999): 18–23. Jonas Frykman, “Svensk Mentalitet: Mellan Modernitet Och Kulturell Nationalism,” in Den Svenska Framgångssagan? ed. K. Almqvist and Kay Glans (Stockholm: Foscher, 2001), 139. Olof Palmes Minnesfond (Memorial Fund), “Ungdomsåren” (Adolescence), in Vem Var Olof Palme? accessed October 20, 2012, www.palmefonden.se/index.php?sid=1andpid=29. Automated translation by Google Translate. Hendrik Hertzberg, “Death of a Patriot,” in Politics: Observations and Arguments, 1966– 2004 (New York: Penguin, 2004), 263–66. UNOstamps, “Olof Palme,” last updated March 28, 2010, www.unostamps.nl /person_palme.htm. Ann-Sofie Dahl, “Sweden: Once a Moral Superpower, Always a Moral Superpower?” International Journal 61, no. 4 (2006): 895–908. Ibid., 906. Karen Holst, “Palme’s Political Legacy ‘Put Sweden on the Map,’ ” The Local, February 28, 2011, www.thelocal.se/32314/20110228. “Palme Was ‘the Best Politician We Ever Had,’ ” The Local, February 28, 2011, www .thelocal.se/32320/20110228/#.UQgx3oUvjME. By the end of the war, Estonians and Latvians also fled to Swedish shores; some thirty thousand remained in Sweden. Officials resettled about thirty thousand survivors of Nazi concentration camps between 1945 and 1948. While the Swedish government had no official refugee settlement program, there was so much work available that most newcomers could integrate successfully on their own. Karin Borevi, “Dimensions of Citizenship: European Integration Policies from a Scandinavian Perspective,” in Diversity, Inclusion and Citizenship in Scandinavia, ed. Bo Bengtsson et al. (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 143–68. In 1990, however, the government instituted more restrictive asylum policies. While at first it approved almost all asylum requests, by 1993 so many people were ere arriving from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, and Kosovo that visa requirements were introduced. In 2013, the population of Sweden was 9,592,552. In 2012, the total population of Stockholm was 881,235, and the foreign-born population numbered 201,827. Stadsledningkontoret, Statistics in English: Dataguide 2013 (Stock-

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42.

43.

44.

45.

46.

47. 48. 49.

50.

holm: Stadsledningkontoret, 2013). Available at Statistik om Stockholm, www .statistikomstockholm.se/index.php/statistics-in-english. Gölin Frank, Sweco Eurofutures, på uppdrag av Stadsledningskontoret, Stockholms stad, Statistik om Stockholm: Befolkning Befolkningsöversikt, 2011 (Stockholm: Stadsledningkontoret, 2011). Available at Statistik om Stockholm, www.statistikomstockholm.se /attachments/article/39/S_2012_08.pdf. Roger Andersson, “Reproducing and Reshaping Ethnic Residential Segregation in Stockholm: The Role of Selective Migration Moves,” Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography 95, no. 2 (2013): 163–87. Niklas Magnusson and Johan Carlstrom, “Swedish Riots Put Faces to Statistics as Stockholm Burns,” Bloomberg News, May 27, 2013, www.bloomberg.com/news/201305-26/sweden-riots-put-faces-to-statistics-as-stockholm-burns.html. Sofie Fredlund-Blomst, “Assessing Immigrant Integration in Sweden after the May 2013 Riots,” Migration Information Source (Migration Policy Institute), January 16, 2014, www .migrationpolicy.org/article/assessing-immigrant-integration-sweden-after-may-2013 -riots. Greenland and the Faroe Islands have home rule. The northern part of Schleswig has been a fully integrated part of Denmark since 1920, when a plebiscite was held there to determine whether the population wished to be affiliated with Germany or Denmark. As a result of the vote, the southern half of Schleswig remained in Germany, while the northern half joined Denmark. Greenland is an autonomous, self-governing dependent territory of Denmark, which has enjoyed limited self-government since 1979. Denmark is in charge of Greenland’s foreign affairs and defense policy and contributes two-thirds of its national budget revenue. Denmark is also Greenland’s principal trading partner. “Greenland Profile,” BBC News Europe, December 10, 2014, www.bbc.com /news/world-europe-18249474. J. V. Jesperson, A History of Denmark (Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Uffe Ostergärd, “The Danish Path to Modernity,” Thesis Eleven 77 (2004): 25–43. In 1864, almost a third of Denmark’s population was German. Holstein and Lauenburg belonged to the German Confederation, while Schleswig was nationally divided. The pro-German Schleswig-Holsteiners wanted a liberal constitution and for Schleswig to become part of the German Confederation. Liberals in Copenhagen wanted a democratic constitution that would include Schleswig. In 1863, the Danish parliament approved their separation and Chancellor Bismarck declared war. For a more detailed and subtle explanation, see Mads Daugbjerg, “Pacifying War Heritage: Patterns of Cosmopolitan Nationalism at a Danish Battlefield Site,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 15, no. 5 (2009): 431–46. According to Benedikte Brincker, Tine Damsholt describes, in Fœog Borgerdyd, three competing versions of “fatherland.” One view did not even consider birthplace as a marker of national belonging. Another, which was popular in the first half of the eighteenth century, conceptualized the fatherland as the country in which one is a citizen. It included all the inhabitants of the Danish multinational state, regardless of where they were born or what language they spoke. A third, more exclusive vision, which took hold in the second half of the 1700s and ultimately prevailed, argued that members of the

NOTES TO PAGES 34–36

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52.

fatherland should be defined by birth and language criteria. By the time King Christian VII ascended the throne in 1766, the Law of Indigenous Rights had also been introduced. It stated that only people born within the borders of the Danish state could hold government positions, which some argue was a response to the increasing anti-German sentiment that took hold in the 1700s. Damsholt disagrees. She argues that the importance of birthplace in the conceptualization of the fatherland, the growing interest in the Danish language, and the Law of Indigenous Rights were not meant to define the Danish people, especially in opposition to other peoples. Instead, these efforts lay the foundation for a civic consciousness that was patriotic rather than nationalistic. The idea of the fatherland was, first and foremost, about creating citizens—patriots—who would be willing to work and die for their country. It was about defining the proper relationship between ruler and ruled. Damsholt cited in Brincker, “When Did the Danish Nation Emerge? A Review of Danish Historians’ Attempts to Date the Danish Nation,” National Identities 11, no. 4 (2009): 353–65. Heiberg cited in O. Feldbæk and V. Winge, “Tyskerfejden 1789–1790,” in Dansk Identitetshistorie, vol. 2, Et yndigt land, 1789–1848, ed. O. Feldæk (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1991), 2:45. A translation of the Heiberg quote is available in Brincker, “When Did the Danish Nation Emerge?” 359. One of his poems, which became a popular hymn, “Er lyset for de lærde blot” (1839), illustrates this: Er lyset for de lærde blot til ret og galt at stave? Nej, himlen under flere godt, og lys er himlens gave, og solen står med bonden op, slet ikke med de lærde, oplyser bedst fra tå til top, hvem der er mest på færde.

53.

54.

A translation reads: “Is the light of the spirit only something for the learned to spell with? No! Heaven has bequeathed more good things, and the light is the gift of heaven. The sun rises with the farmer, and not with those who possess learning. It illuminates, from top ‘til toe, the one who is really on the go.” The poem is cited in Feldbæk and Winge, “Tyskerfejden 1789–1790,” 45. A translation is available in Brincker, “When Did the Danish Nation Emerge?” 359. All information on N. F. S Grundtvig draws on the following: Pauline Valvo, “Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig, 1783–1872,” Adult Education: Resources (Chicago: NationalLouis University, 2005), www.nl.edu/academics/cas/ace/resources/nfsgrundtvig.cfm; Steven M. Borish, The Land of the Living: The Danish Folk High Schools and Denmark’s Non-violent Path to Modernization (Nevada City, CA: Blue Dolphin, 1991), 7–20, 164–78, 193–206, 306–13. As Denmark made the transition from a civic to an ethnically defined view of the nation, the Danish peasant became the mythic bearer of “authentic” national (e.g., Danish) virtues. Whereas previously peasants needed education and enlightenment, they were now cast as the primordial representatives of “the Volk,” who needed to be preserved

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55.

56.

57.

58. 59.

60. 61.

62.

and protected. Mads Daugbjerg, Borders of Belonging: Experiencing History, War, and Nation at a Danish Heritage Site (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013). Many people, write Karen Fog Olwig and Karsten Paerregaard, simply ignore how socioeconomic conditions in Denmark might thwart immigrant incorporation or why people might want to maintain their own religious practices and traditions. Despite having lived in Denmark for years—even generations—immigrants are commonly referred to as “second-generation immigrants” or “persons of other ethnic origin.” Although the state has helped immigrants and refugees socially and economically, “Danish perceptions of these people as culturally different—and therefore as foreign elements in the country—have presented serious obstacles to their social acceptance.” “Strangers in the Nation,” in The Question of Integration: Immigration, Exclusion and the Danish Welfare State, ed. Karen Fog Olwig and Karsten Paerregaard (Newcastle upon Tyne, U.K.: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), 3. A clear sign of the need for foreign labor, writes Garbi Schmidt, is the large numbers of non-Danish carpenters working in Copenhagen in the early 1850s, almost all of whom came from Germany. “Going beyond Methodological Presentism: Examples from a Copenhagen Neighborhood, 1885–2010” (forthcoming). Ulf Hedetoft, “Denmark: Integrating Immigrants into a Homogenous Welfare State,” Migration Information Source (Migration Policy Institute), November 1, 2006, www .migrationpolicy.org/article/denmark-integrating-immigrants-homogeneous-welfarestate. Ibid. Statistics Denmark, “Immigrants and Their Descendants: Key Figures,” accessed August 15, 2014, www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/indvandrere-og-efterkommere /indvandrere-og-efterkommere.aspx. Garbi Schmidt, “ ‘Grounded’ Politics: Manifesting Muslim Identity as a Political Factor and Localized Identity in Copenhagen,” Ethnicities 12, no. 5 (October 1, 2012): 603–22. Henrik Christofferson, Michelle Beyeler, Reiner Eichenberger, Peter Nannestad, and Martin Paldam, The Good Society: A Comparative Study of Denmark and Switzerland (New York: Springer, 2013). Citizenship in Denmark is based on the principle of ethnic descent, jus sanguinis, rather than jus solis, place of birth. Dual citizenship is prohibited. The Integration Act of 1999, the first of its kind in a Western country, reassigned responsibility for refugee integration to municipal governments, taking it away from the Danish Refugee Aid organization. During a three-year period, refugees and immigrants over age eighteen were expected to learn Danish; familiarize themselves with Danish history, culture and society; acquire job skills; and to learn to negotiate Danish institutions. When the act was first approved, critics, including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, charged that it violated international refugee conventions because refugees received a much lower monthly stipend than Danes in comparable circumstances. After a few months, the government backed down. A second law, introduced in 2003, included a “twenty-four-year rule” for family reunification. It stated that no Danish citizen could marry a non-EU or non-Nordic foreign national and settle in Denmark with his or her spouse unless both parties were

NOTES TO PAGES 37–38

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63. 64.

65.

66.

67. 68.

69. 70.

71. 72.

73. 74. 75.

twenty-four years old or older. The law was designed, in part, to protect young women from family pressure to marry. One unintended consequence, though, was that young native Danes with foreign spouses had to settle in other EU countries, which often meant Sweden. The United Nations, the European Union, and the Council of Europe strongly denounced the twenty-four-year rule. Hedetoft, “Denmark.” “Helle Thorning-Schmidt to Be Danish PM after Poll Win,” BBC News, September 15, 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14928312. Jan M. Olsen and Karl Ritter, “Denmark Elects Its First Female Prime Minister,” SFGate, September 16, 2011, http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-09-16/news/30163581_1_denmarkgreenland-bloc. Ibid. Thorning-Schmidt also promised to soften Denmark’s anti-immigrant stance. With support from the Danish left-wing party, Enhedslisten, the government revamped the citizenship test and eased the language proficiency requirements. It also cancelled the point system used to determine cases of family reunification and lowered the amount of money prospective applicants for Danish residency needed to have in their bank accounts. “Helle Thorning-Schmidt to Be Danish PM after Poll Win,” BBC News. New to Denmark, “Declaration on Integration and Active Citizenship in Danish Society,” last updated November 6, 2014, www.nyidanmark.dk/en-us/coming_to_dk/permanentresidence-permit/integration-and-active-citizenship.htm. Museums of Copenhagen, “Becoming a Copenhagener,” accessed May 25, 2013, www .copenhagen.dk/en/whats_on/the_population_of_copenhagen. Danish Immigration Museum, www.danishimmigrationmuseum.com/index.php?page =om-museet, accessed April 26, 2014. Unfortunately, the museum opened after I completed my fieldwork in Denmark, so I was not able to visit. Paracas: The Gothenburg Collection, “History,” accessed April 4, 2011, www.paracas .se/en/history/. In 2009, the Peruvian ambassador to Sweden officially asked that the textiles be returned to Peru. While at first reluctant to consider this request, in April 2010 the Culture Committee of the City of Gothenburg recommended to the city council that the textiles gradually be repatriated. Sebastian Castañeda, “Sweden Returns Ancient Textiles to Peru,” CBS News, June 16, 2014, www.cbsnews.com/news/sweden-returns-ancient-textiles-to-peru/. For a more detailed account of the exhibition, which has much in common with my conclusion, see Aronsson, “Representing Community.” However, he cautions that a more “territorial us” is depicted in Swedish, while more universal issues get discussed in English. See also Peter Aronsson and Lizette Gradén, eds., Performing Nordic Culture: Everyday Practices and Institutional Cultures (Farnham, Surrey, U.K.: Ashgate Press, 2013). Mångkulturellt Centrum, “Välkommen till Mångkulturellt centrum,” accessed August 1, 2014, http://mkc.botkyrka.se/. Københavns Museum (Museum of Copenhagen), “About,” accessed May 24, 2011, www .copenhagen.dk/en/about/. Immigration policy refers to who is allowed in and what it takes to become a citizen versus integration policies that facilitate socioeconomic and political participation.

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76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

83. 84. 85. 86. 87.

88.

Hedetoft, “Denmark,” 392. There is some evidence to back up the stereotypes and myths respondents expressed about their respective countries. Sweden’s policies have been more favorable to newcomers than Denmark. The Migrant Integration Policy Index, which compares integration policies across countries, reveals stark differences. In 2007, Denmark’s overall score was 51 compared to Sweden’s 85; in 2010, their scores were 53 and 83, respectively. In 2010, Denmark scored a 73 with respect to labor market mobility compared to Sweden’s 100. The Multiculturalism Policy Index, a measure of eight policy areas in which liberaldemocratic states can chose more multicultural forms of citizenship, reveals that out of a possible score of 8, Sweden scored 3 (1980), 5 (2000), and 7 (2010), while Denmark scored 0, 0.5, and 0 during the same time periods. Grete Brochmann and Anniken Hagelund, “Immigrants in the Scandinavian Welfare State: The Emergence of a Social Policy Problem,” Nordic Journal of Migration Research 1, no. 1 (2011): 13–24. Daugbjerg, Borders of Belonging; Ulf Hedetoft, Multiculturalism in Denmark and Sweden (Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies, 2006). Richard Jenkins, Being Danish: Paradoxes of Identity in Everyday Life (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum, 2012), 290. Ibid., 297. As cited in Andreas Johansson Heinö, “Democracy between Collectivism and Individualism: De-nationalisation and Individualisation in Swedish National Identity,” International Review of Sociology 19, no. 2 (2009): 303. Equality does not necessarily equal collectivism, however. Several recent studies have focused on the strong individualist tendencies in Swedish equality discourse. H. Berggren and L. Trägårdh (Är Svensken Människa? Gemenskap Och Oberoende i Det Moderna Sverige [Stockholm: Norstedts, 2006]) argue that Swedes have their own unique views on equality, freedom, and individualism. Equality is understood as a prerequisite for freedom and liberty, not an obstacle. Sweden has combined a strong state based on universal principles with a generous welfare system. The individual is the core unit of society, which is directly linked to the state, thus diminishing the importance of the family or local community. Heinö, “Democracy between Collectivism and Individualism,” 303–4. O. Löfgren, “Nationaliseringen Av Sverige,” Ord and bild, no. 3 (1987): 4–9. Karl-Olov Arnstberg, cited in Heinö, “Democracy between Collectivism and Individualism.” I am grateful to Karin Fog Olwig for sharing her thoughts about the ideas featured in the section. Many of these friskoler—free schools—were inspired by Grundtvig and Christen Kold’s ideas of education and are therefore connected in important ways to the folk high school movement I described. Interestingly, the label “free school,” has assumed an additional significance as Muslim free schools are being founded and run according to the same rules under which the Grundtvig-Koldian schools were founded. Many argue that these developments contradict Danes’ ideas of freedom of thought and freedom of education. According to Grete Brochmann and Anniken Hagelund (Immigration Policy and the Scandinavian Welfare State, 1945–2010 [Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012],

NOTES TO PAGES 45–47

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89. 90.

91. 92. 93.

94. 95.

96.

97.

98.

249), “The space for open conflict concerning immigration policy was far greater in Denmark (and also in Norway) than in Sweden.” Aronsson, “Representing Community,” 20. Annika Bergman, “Co-constitution of Domestic and International Welfare Obligations: The Case of Sweden’s Social Democratically Inspired Internationalism,” Cooperation and Conflict 42, no. 1 (2007): 73–99. Annika Bergman, “Adjacent Internationalism: The Concept of Solidarity and Post-ColdWar Nordic-Baltic Relations,” Cooperation and Conflict 41, no. 1 (2006): 73–97. Bergman, “Co-constitution of Domestic and International Welfare Obligations.” Marianne Gullestad, “Invisible Fences: Egalitarianism, Nationalism and Racism,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8, no. 1 (March 2002): 45–63; Per Gustafson, “Globalisation, Multiculturalism and Individualism: The Swedish Debate on Dual Citizenship,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 28, no. 3 (2002): 463–81. Brochmann and Hagelund, Immigration Policy and the Scandinavian Welfare State. These groups, explains a government website, “have existed in Sweden for a long time and are part of Sweden’s cultural heritage. The policy aims to protect, promote the participation of, and keep the languages alive of these groups in accordance with the National Minorities Law in Sweden (Government Bill 1998/99:143) and two Council of Europe conventions: the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (the Framework Convention) and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (Minority Languages Charter),” which Sweden ratified in 2000. Mänskliga Rättigheter, “Rights of National Minorities,” accessed August 25, 2014, www.manskligarattigheter.se /en/human-rights/what-rights-are-there/rights-of-national-minorities. Ulf Hedetoft, “Divergens eller konvergens? Perspektiver I den dansk-svenske sammenstilling,” in Bortom stereotyperna?: Invandrare och integration i Danmark och Sverige, ed. Ulf Hedetoft, Bo Petersson, and Lina Sturfelt (Lund, Sweden: Centrum för Danmarksstudier vid Lunds Universitet, Makadam, 2006); Hedetoft, Multiculturalism in Denmark and Sweden. These differences are evident, for example, in different citizenship norms. In addition to its higher bar for linguistic and cultural proficiency and economic self-sufficiency, prospective citizens must live in Denmark for at least nine years. They are also evident in the various official canons put in place by the Danish Ministry of Culture to counteract the perceived “historylessness” of Danish youth and to ensure that native and foreign-born Danes master a shared understanding of the nation. Daugbjerg, Borders of Belonging. In Sweden, newcomers must conform to norms considered democratic and universal, not particularly Swedish. Sweden makes few demands on aspiring citizens, because that could create unequal barriers to naturalization. In other words, someone can become Swedish after living in Sweden for five years; without knowing much about Swedish history, society, or its language; without giving an oath of allegiance; and without demonstrating economic self-sufficiency. Brochmann and Hagelund, Immigration Policy and the Scandinavian Welfare State, 266. International Migration Outlook: Annual Report 2007 Edition (Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2007).

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99. Changes are also under way in Sweden. The Parliamentary Committee on Circular Migration and Development presented its final report to the government in March 2011, recommending policies that make it easier for migrants to move back and forth between Sweden and their countries of origin, to enhance the positive development effects. 100. Niklas Magnusson, “Swedes Protest on Streets as Anti-immigrants Enter Parliament,” Bloomberg News, September 21, 2010, www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-21/swedesthrong-streets-to-protest-against-anti-immigrant-party-in-goverment.html. 101. Niklas Magnusson and Johan Carlstrom, “Sweden Riots Put Faces to Statistics as Stockholm Burns,” Bloomberg News, May 27, 2013, www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-26 /sweden-riots-put-faces-to-statistics-as-stockholm-burns.html. 102. Karl Ritter, “Sweden Shifts to Left in Parliamentary Election,” Associated Press, September 14, 2014, http://bigstory.ap.org/article/power-shift-expected-swedish-election-0.

2 . T H E L E G I S L AT O R A N D T H E P R I E S T

1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

In September 2014, Lehman announced he would retire by mid-2015. Alan Wallach, “Norman Rockwell at the Guggenheim,” in Art and Its Publics, ed. Andrew McClellan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 102. National Gallery of Art, “Mission Statement,” accessed November 2, 2014, www.nga. gov/content/ngaweb/about/mission-statement.html. Richard Pallardy, “Smithsonian Institution,” Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, last updated September 3, 2014, www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/549980/SmithsonianInstitution. Smithsonian Institution, “The Museums and Zoo,” accessed May 24, 2014, www.si.edu /Museums. See also “Our History,” www.si.edu/About/History. The Smithsonian is governed by a board of regents, which oversees its budget. The board includes the vice president of the United States, the chief justice, three senators and three members of the House of Representatives, and nine citizens approved by a joint resolution of Congress. Pallardy, “Smithsonian Institution.” Robert Rydell, “World Fairs and Museums,” in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 135–51. Ibid. Ibid., 140. Ibid., 149. This included colonial Euro-American material culture, European and Euro-American ceramics and glass, musical instruments, military history, and European and EuroAmerican art, as well as ethnographic displays of indigenous peoples from North and South America, Africa, and Asia, and exhibitions of rocks, plants, and animals. William Walker, A Living Exhibition: The Smithsonian and the Transformation of the Universal Museum (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). Ibid., 6. Smithsonian Institution, “Smithsonian Folklife Festival,” 2014, www.festival.si.edu. Walker, A Living Exhibition, 197. Ibid.

NOTES TO PAGES 49–53

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16.

17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

On the Washington Mall alone, the National Museum of the American Indian, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and the proposed National Museum of African American History and Culture, scheduled to open in 2015, reflect this approach. Thomas H. O’Connor, The Athens of America: Boston, 1825–1845 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 18. Darren Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class: Intellectuals and Intelligentsia in Puritan Massachusetts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Hence, Boston’s nickname, “the Hub,” still in use today. O’Connor, The Athens of America; Darrett Bruce Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston: Portrait of a Puritan Town, 1630–1649 (New York: Norton, 1972), 6. Staloff, The Making of an American Thinking Class, 3. According to Cleveland Amory, “Contrary to the general impression they are never loath to give outsiders, the First Families of Boston are not those whose forebears came over on the Mayflower. . . . Plymouth, settled in 1620, was made up of people who were proud of the fact that hardly a one of them had more than a few drops of old English blue blood in his veins. Boston, settled in 1630, was in comparison a definitely aristocratic undertaking, financed to the extent of a sum equal to five million dollars, and made up largely of upper-crust merchant adventurers. The Proper Bostonians (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947), 36. Winthrop told his fellow travelers: “God almightie in his most holy and wise providence hath soe disposed of the Condicion of man kinde, as in all times some must be rich, some poore, some highe and eminent in power and dignitie; others meane and in subjection.” Rutman, Winthrop’s Boston, 7. See also Amory, The Proper Bostonians; Robert Dalzell, Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987). They belonged to religious congregations governed by direct democracy—a clear rejection of the hierarchical Catholic Church. Their economic success also required strong, cooperative networks. Boston’s early inhabitants made their money not by selling cash crops such as tobacco, like their counterparts in the South, but by supplying other colonies with the goods they needed. Doing this well entailed getting the balance between supply and demand right, which required constant communication with each other. Until the 1700s, elite merchants met everyday to discuss politics and business at 1 p.m., before returning home for their midday dinner. Edward Glaeser, “Reinventing Boston: 1630–2003,” Journal of Economic Geography 5, no. 2 (April 1, 2005): 119–53. doi:10.1093/jnlecg/lbh058. According to historians Richard D. Brown and Jack Tager, “As the 18th century progressed . . . the intense devotion to the Puritan past waned among ordinary farmers as well as wealthier, more cosmopolitan people. In the port towns, Boston, Salem, Newbury, and in a handful of others, commercial prosperity encouraged more and more involvement with the Atlantic trading world.” Massachusetts: A Concise History (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 52. During the years leading up to the Civil War, the Associates invested in real estate, insurance, railroads, and banking. By 1845, the group consisted of about eighty men.

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26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35.

In 1848, seventeen of the Boston Associates directed seven Boston banks and oversaw over 40 percent of the city’s authorized banking capital. Dalzell, Enterprising Elite. “First families in Boston have tended toward marrying each other in a way that would do justice to the planned marriages of European royalty. . . . Old Colonel Henry Lee, an impeccable First Family man, phrased the matter gently: ‘Lees, Cabots, Jacksons, and Higginsons knew each other well . . . and had a satisfying belief that New England morality and intellectuality had produced nothing better than they were; so they very contentedly made a little clique of themselves, and intermarried very much, with a sure and cheerful faith that in such alliances there can be no blunder.’ ” Amory, The Proper Bostonians, 37. Dalzell, Enterprising Elite. Cohesive in more than family and business connections, this illustrious upper class also shared a common culture, bolstered by their common connection to one (in)famous educational institution: Harvard University. Indeed, during the nineteenth century, Harvard would become a stronghold of the Boston “aristocracy.” During that time, the university would experience unprecedented growth, owing to the generosity of private benefactors, and would largely be governed, staffed, and attended by members of the growing elite. From 1779 to 1789, the Harvard Corporation went from being made up of teaching faculty to becoming a largely external board of trustees; from 1810 to 1828, six of the eighteen men were members of “Associate families.” Funding, much of which came originally from the state, gradually came increasingly from Brahmin donors. Furthermore, the Harvard endowment, like many charitable organizations of the time, was often invested in the very businesses run by members of its governing board, creating a continuous flow of capital that was then fed back to enhance the holdings of their companies. Ibid., 8. O’Connor, The Athens of America. “Perhaps the time is already come,” Emerson said, “when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Nature: Address and Lectures (1849), Emerson Central, last updated September 3, 2009, www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar. htm. This oration was delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society, Cambridge, MA, August 31, 1837. Susan Cheever, American Bloomsbury: Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau; Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work (Detroit: Thorndike Press, 2006), 80. Glaeser, “Reinventing Boston.” Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, 140. Thomas O’Connor, The Boston Irish: A Political History (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), xvi. Encyclopedia Britannica Online, s.v. “James Michael Curley,” last updated January 13, 2014, www.britannica.com.luna.wellesley.edu/EBchecked/topic/146980/JamesMichael-Curley.

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36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

Triple-decker homes are typical of the housing stock in many Boston neighborhoods. They are three stories high, with apartments that run front-to-back on each floor. Massachusetts Historical Society, “Boston Abolitionists 1831–1865: Introduction,” accessed May 23, 2014, www.masshist.org/features/boston-abolitionists. For a full account, see Anthony J. Lukas, Common Ground (New York: Alfred P. Knopf, 1985). Nineteenth-century America boasted few museums. Like their early counterparts in Europe, these institutions grew out of the enlightenment model in which art, humanities, and the sciences were intertwined. They displayed “curiosities”—wondrous objects meant to provide visitors with perspectives on the world that would help them transcend their narrow and provincial views and experiences. By the end of the century, however, knowledge became more specialized, which was also reflected in museum practice. Whereas the “scientific” and the spectacular had been displayed side by side, they were increasingly relegated to separate venues. Before Boston’s MFA opened its doors, the Columbian Museum, created in 1795, contained wax figures of John Adams, George Washington, and Ben Franklin; 123 paintings, with titles such as Mr. Garrick Speaking the Ode to Shakespeare and Scene in the Third Act of King Lear; and live rattlesnakes, alligators, and eagles. Moses Kimball’s Boston Museum, which opened in 1841, looked a lot like the European curiosity cabinets containing Albert Eckhout’s paintings. Founded as a commercial venture, the museum displayed paintings by early Republic portraitists Thomas Sully and Charles Willson Peale alongside Chinese curiosities, stuffed animals, dwarves, and mermaids. For no additional cost, museumgoers could visit the Boston Museum Theatre, where performances by gymnasts and contortionists followed works by Dickens and Shakespeare. The Boston Athenaeum, established in 1807, is one of the oldest private library and art collections in the country. Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Paul Dimaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” Media, Culture, and Society 4 (1982): 33–50; Joel Orosz, Curators and Culture: The Museum Movement in America, 1740–1870 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990). Orosz, Curators and Culture. Oscar Handlin, Boston’s Immigrants, 1790–1880: A Study in Acculturation, rev. and enl. ed., 50th anniversary ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “The Museum Year 2011, Founders and Benefactors,” www.mfa.org/annual-report-2011/founders.html. The city’s movers and shakers wanted a museum long before they got one; a happy convergence of events finally made their dreams come true. Colonel Timothy Bigelow Lawrence had an armor collection that could not fit in the Boston Athenaeum. Harvard University had a collection of prints that needed a fireproof home. And MIT and the American Social Science Association could not house all the architectural casts in their collection. City leaders set about raising money for a suitable home for these treasures in the city’s Back Bay. Neil Harris, “The Divided House of American Art,” Daedalus 128, no. 2 (1999): 33–56.

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43.

44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

See Elliot Bostwick Davis, Training the Eye and the Hand: American Drawing Books, 1820–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), in which she discusses in detail how manufacturing interests and post–Civil War declines in the male work force influenced the founding of the MFA and the Massachusetts College of Art. Harris, “The Divided House of American Art.” Luigi Palma di Cesnola, An Address on the Practical Value of the American Museum (Troy, NY: Stowell Printing House, 1887), 10, as cited in Andrew McClellan, “A Brief History of the Art Museum Public,” in Art and Its Publics, ed. Andrew McClellan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 1–49. Benjamin Ives Gilman, Museum Ideals of Purpose and Method, 2nd ed. (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1923), 91. Gilman still championed the educational role of museums. In 1916, for example, the MFA employed thirty trained guides and served forty-three hundred visitors. In 1918, the museum abolished its fees. In 1924, Gilman’s last year as secretary, nearly four hundred thousand people visited and more than nine thousand took docent tours. Like many U.S. art museums in the early twentieth century, the MFA offered educational services that equaled, if not surpassed, what it offers today. Eventually, however, Gilman changed his tune, persuaded that museums should let visitors quietly contemplate art. Docents spoiled the silence, and labels and texts micromanaged visitors’ experience. Gilman’s approach stands in stark contrast to that of John Cotton Dana, his contemporary and antagonist. Dana, who founded and directed the Newark Museum, saw museums as civic instruments for a young, democratic, and industrious nation. They were not dead storehouses, or mere “gazing museums” for the privileged, but institutions of visual instruction that should serve communities by responding to everyday life. To be effective, museums needed to help visitors make up their own minds about what constituted beauty, rather than blindly following the tastes of European or nouveau riche connoisseurs. Ibid., 91; McClellan, “A Brief History of the Art Museum Public.” According to Rydell (“World Fairs and Museums,” 265), Gilman’s about-face, and that of those who followed him, grew more widespread owing to a course in museum studies offered by Paul Sachs at Harvard from the 1920s through the 1950s. It focused on cultivating “the most exacting standards of an elite,” promoting the interests of a “narrow cult of collectors, critics, and fellow museum professionals” at the expense of the public, which, as Dana had warned, resulted in a complete absence of any engaged civic purpose or usefulness. The museum’s declining populism also reflected broader cultural trends. More and more, a bright line separated high art—displayed in not-for-profit settings, managed by artistic professionals, and governed by prosperous and influential trustees—from popular entertainment, sponsored by profit-seeking entrepreneurs and put on display for anyone who could afford a ticket. The “cultural capitalists” who accomplished this, according to Paul DiMaggio, did so by creating the nonprofit corporation, a distinctly American invention, which later became the standard mode for governing and distributing high culture. The same kind of interconnected, semi-incestuous group of elites who ran institutions like Harvard also stood at the helm of many cultural institutions, while professional artists and art historians ran things day to day. In short, a cast of

NOTES TO PAGES 56–57

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1 71

49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65.

66.

Brahmins and a microcosm of elites, each with a special skill, set of connections, or large bank account, were in charge. “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth Century Boston.” Including Edward Sylvester Morse, Ernest Francisco Fenollosa, William Sturgis Bigelow, Charles Goddard Weld, and Denman Waldo Ross—and Okakura Kakuzō, the leading Japanese art historian and cultural commentator, who worked for the museum from 1904 until his death in 1913. Nagoya/Boston Museum of Fine Arts website, accessed July 10, 2014, www. nagoya-boston.or.jp/english. Rasoul Sorkhabi, “Ananda K. Coomaraswamy: From Geology to Philosophia Perennis,” Current Science 94, no. 3 (2008): 396; Philip Rawson, “A Professional Sage,” New York Review of Books, February 22, 1979, www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1979/feb/22 /a-professional-sage/?pagination=false. Roger Lipsey, Coomaraswamy: His Life and Work, vol. 3 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). Sorkhabi, “Ananda K. Coomaraswamy,” 394, 396. Lipsey, Coomaraswamy. Sorkhabi, “Ananda K. Coomaraswamy,” 396. Lipsey, Coomaraswamy. Rawson, “A Professional Sage.” Lipsey, Coomaraswamy. Sorkhabi, “Ananda K. Coomaraswamy,” 398. Ibid. Andrea Shea, “High Stakes for the MFA’s $504M Americas Wing,” WBUR, November 12, 2010, www.wbur.org/2010/11/12/mfa-opening. Elliot Bostwick Davis’s comments are from a conversation we had. See also her “Communicating through Design and Display: The New American Wing at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,” in Beyond the Turnstile: Making the Case for Museums and Sustainable Values, ed. Selma Holo and Mari-Tere Álvarez (Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2009), 182–85; Elliot Bostwick Davis, “The Art of the Americas Wing: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,” American Art 24, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 9–11. The gallery is formally called “New Spain and the Spanish Tradition” (gallery 135). Erica Hirshler, Sargent’s Daughters: The Biography of a Painting (Boston: MFA Publications, 2009). Brian Stinson, “Martha and Maxim Karolik,” Redwood Library and Atheneum, 2004, www.redwoodlibrary.org/research-projects/martha-maxim-karolik. The museum also owes much to another collecting couple, William H. and Sandra B. Lane, who contributed a major collection of twentieth-century paintings and photographs. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “The Lane Collection Gift,” accessed July 15, 2012, www.mfa.org /give/gifts-art/Lane-Collection-Gift. In the accompanying catalogue, Bostwick Davis writes, “Over time, the indigenous peoples, their descendants, and later waves of immigrants to the Americas would encounter other cultures from around the world. How those encounters influenced the works of art they created is the main theme of this book” (A New World Imagined:

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67. 68.

69. 70.

71.

72.

73.

Art of the Americas [Boston: MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2010], 12). In other words, newcomers brought their artistic traditions with them, and these artistic traditions played a central role in how the newly established nation defined itself. There was no single indigenous or national culture. “As peoples from different traditions came into contact with each other, artists adopted, adapted, borrowed, and put new or unfamiliar forms to old uses and new ends. The book is an exploration not a definition of the ‘American,’ because no attempt at definition could do justice to anything as rich and complex as a nation’s artistic culture, let alone a culture—or rather, cultures—as mixed and varied as those of the Americas” (ibid.). However, only two chapters deal with the Native American and pre-Columbian materials, followed by seven chapters about European influences, and four chapters covering Africa, the Near East, and Asia. Rogers declined my request to be interviewed. Betty Farrell and Maria Medvedeva, the authors of the report by the American Association of Museums, conducted focus groups among younger visitors between sixteen and twenty-five years of age. They found that participants never spontaneously mentioned museums as the kind of place where they would choose to spend their leisure time. In fact, they tended to describe museums as static places, places that exhibit things, didactic places (but not necessarily places where the learning was fun or engaging), and places where you had to be quiet and stand outside looking in. Demographic Transformation and the Future of Museums (Washington, DC: American Association of Museums Press, 2010), www.aam-us.org/docs/center-for-the-future-of-museums/demotransaam2010.pdf. Ibid., 5. Kevin Williams and David Keen, 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, November 2009), www.nea.gov /research/2008-sppa.pdf. In general, according to the American Association of Museums, art museum and gallery attendance remained steady during the twenty-five years that the National Endowment of the Arts collected data, although the core audience, adults between forty-five and fifty-four, dropped from 33 percent to 23 percent between 2002 and 2008. Still, blaring disparities persisted in cultural participation among racial and ethnic groups. While non-Hispanic whites represented 69 percent of the country’s population, they made up nearly 79 percent of all museum visitors. In contrast, Hispanics made up 9 percent of all museum visitors and 14 percent of the country’s residents. African Americans constituted 6 percent of all museum visitors, while they made up 11 percent of all Americans. While 23 percent of all adults in the United States visit museums, only 15 percent of Hispanic adults and 12 percent of African American adults do so. Another troubling demographic was the decline in museum visits among young people. Farrell and Medvedeva, Demographic Transformation and the Future of Museums. Holland Cotter, “Seating All of the Americas at the Same Table,” New York Times, November 18, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/11/19/arts/design/19americas.html?pagewanted =all&_r=0. Greg Cook, “OMFG: The New MFA,” Boston Phoenix, November 17, 2010, http:// thephoenix.com/Boston/arts/111581-omfg-the-new-mfa.

NOTES TO PAGES 62–64

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74.

75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80.

81.

82.

83.

84.

85.

John Frayler, “Stories from the Revolution: Privateers in the American Revolution,” The American Revolution: Lighting Freedom’s Flame, National Park Service, last updated December 4, 2008, www.nps.gov/revwar/about_the_revolution/privateers.html. National Park Service, “Salem’s International Trade,” Salem Maritime National Historic Site, last updated December 18, 2014, www.nps.gov/sama/historyculture/trade.htm. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Bantam Classics Reissue, 2003), 47–48. The institute and the East India Marine Society developed in tandem. The institute traded its natural history and archaeology collections to the museum in the 1860s in exchange for the museum’s local history collection. In fact, according to Dean Lahikainen, the institute became a leader in the historic preservation movement, displaying some of the country’s earliest period rooms, or what were then called “type rooms.” Locals bequeathed them on their deathbeds; the rooms’ contents were crated up and reassembled inside the museum’s walls. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “Mission Statement,” adopted February 28, 1991, www .mfa.org/about/mission-statement. Bostwick Davis is referring to Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 42–56. On director Rogers’s watch, the MFA also put on highly successful, user-friendly exhibitions like Speed, Style, and Beauty: Cars from the Ralph Lauren Collection and Dangerous Curves: The Art of the Guitar. The latter included instruments played by John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, and Chet Atkins. The exhibitions thrilled thousands but also evoked criticism from people who felt they were too populist. Rogers eliminated admission fees for children seventeen and younger, opened the museum seven days a week, and established a series of free community days and cultural celebrations. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “Director’s Message,” accessed March 2014, www.mfa.org/about/directorsmessage. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “Permission to Be Global / Prácticas Globales: Latin American Art from the Ella Fontanals–Cisneros Collection,” accessed June 7, 2014, www.mfa.org/exhibitions/permission-be-globalprácticas-globales. These curator statements are often quite personal and include anecdotes about how the curator got interested in a particular topic or question. Chris Geary, for example, introduced Global Patterns, a show about African textiles she curated in 2011, by describing the moment in her fieldwork when she realized the importance of dress in the African context. These comments by Gerald Ward (presented in this chapter with minor edits) can be heard in a video on view in one of the “Behind the Scenes” galleries in the Art of the Americas Wing. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “Behind the Scenes Galleries,” accessed August 27, 2010, www.mfa.org/americas-wing/article_behind.html. These galleries include displays and videos about how museum professionals make choices in conserving, collecting, and classifying, as well as histories of the museum’s important benefactors. The sixty-seven works came from the collection of longtime MFA benefactor John Axelrod, who, over fifteen years, amassed a collection including paintings, sculptures,

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NOTES TO PAGES 64–69

86.

87.

88.

89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

94.

95.

96. 97.

carvings, and drawings by renowned African American artists from the last 150 years, many of whom had not been represented in the MFA’s holdings. Since 1969, the MFA has also worked collaboratively with the National Center of Afro-American Artists, located in the nearby Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. According to the website of the latter, “The NCAAA is dedicated to the celebration, exhibition, collection, and criticism of black visual heritage worldwide. . . . Since 1969, the National Center of AfroAmerican Artists and the Museum of Fine Art, Boston, have enjoyed a unique collaboration that has been mutually beneficial, and has greatly assisted in the development of the NCAAA’s museum” (“The Museum,” National Center of Afro-American Artists, accessed July 10, 2014, www.ncaaa.org/aboutmuseum.html). Despite repeated attempts, I could not learn more about the relationship between the two institutions. There is no mention of it on the MFA’s website. NCAAA director Barry Gaither did not respond to my requests for an interview. Bostwick Davis continued: “All told, the Art of the Americas Wing represents three millennia of artistic production across four levels of architecture, which is intended to tell a story of “both/and”—through central-spine galleries and galleries that surround those, opening up windows, much as one would on a computer screen, to reflect greater breadth, depth, and nuance to the overview represented in the center of each of the four floors.” Nancy B. Rosoff, “As Revealed by Art: Herbert Spinden and the Brooklyn Museum,” Museum Anthropology 28, no. 1 (2005): 47–56; Carol Lopate, Education and Culture in Brooklyn: A History of Ten Institutions (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Educational and Cultural Alliance, 1979). Olive Hoogenboom, “Augustus Graham,” in Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography, Unitarian Universalist History and Heritage Society, 1999–2014, article posted August 30, 2001, http://uudb.org/articles/augustusgraham.html. Ibid. Nancy Rosoff, “As Revealed by Art.” Ibid., 48. Ibid. By some estimates, it was twice as big as the stairs leading up to the Metropolitan Museum today. Linda S. Ferber, Masterpieces of American Painting from the Brooklyn Museum (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1976). Grace Glueck and Paul Gardner, Brooklyn: People and Places, Past and Present (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991); Henry Reed Stiles, A History of the City of Brooklyn (Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 1993). The Brooklyn Museum defines its mission as acting as a “bridge between the rich artistic heritage of world cultures, as embodied in its collections, and the unique experience of each visitor.” Brooklyn Museum, “About: Mission Statement,” accessed July 10, 2014, www.brooklynmuseum.org/about/mission.php. Stayton is referring to the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan. In July 2012, Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute shocked blog readers when he posted the fact that four of the top twenty-five fastest-gentrifying zip codes in the nation were in Brooklyn. In the same month, the New York Times summarized Brooklyn’s

NOTES TO PAGES 69–72

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1 75

98.

99.

100. 101.

102.

103. 104.

transformation as follows: “For much of the past century, Brooklyn was the Rodney Dangerfield of boroughs, known for its blue-collar style, for its funny accent and, of course, for getting no respect. Then came the brownstone homesteaders and the bohemian pioneers. They turned lunch-bucket warrens in Park Slope, Dumbo and Williamsburg into glamorous destinations, drawing a flood of well-schooled young men and women who were attracted by quaint yet affordable homes, outdoor cafes, bicycle lanes and the neighborhoods’ sometimes self-parodying artisanal, sustainable and locavore ethos. Brooklyn somehow, against all odds, became an internationally recognized icon of cool.” Joseph Berger, “As Brooklyn Gentrifies, Some Neighborhoods Are Being Left Behind,” New York Times, July 8, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/07/09/ nyregion/as-brooklyn-gentrifies-some-neighborhoods-are-being-left-behind.html?page wanted=all&module=Search&mabReward=relbias%3Ar%2C{%222%22%3A%22RI %3A16%22}&_r=0. A kast is a large, freestanding wooden cupboard, usually with two doors. Wendell Garrett, “Garrett’s Attic,” ArtNet, February 14, 2000, www.artnet.com/magazine/features /garrett/garrett2-14-00.asp. Deirdre E. Lawrence and Deborah Wythe, comps., “Guide to the Culin Archival Collection,” Brooklyn Museum, accessed December 4, 2014, www.brooklynmuseum.org /opencollection/research/culin/culin.php. Nancy B. Rosoff, “Native American Art at the Brooklyn Museum” (unpublished manuscript, Brooklyn Museum, October 22, 2009). Brooklyn Museum, “Exhibitions: reOrder: An Architectural Environment by Situ Studio,” accessed December 4, 2014, www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection /exhibitions/3230/. As Dan Monroe of the PEM wrote in an email on March 12, 2013, “Culin and Spinden stand among many American curators who acquired major collections of Native American and Mesoamerican art. The means by which they acquired these collections involve a story that is not so uplifting. Not that they were exceptions; the history of collecting Native American and Mesoamerican art is not often a happy one from the standpoint of the people whose art was being collected. Museums, mostly natural history museums, began collecting Native American art based on the ‘vanishing red man’ theory: All these people and cultures were destined to become extinct as victims of ‘progress’; therefore, museums must collect their material culture and record their cultural practices before they disappear. The means by which these collections were formed were not ideal in many instances. Tombs were robbed. People who were starving were forced to sell. Graves were exhumed without permission. One can hardly characterize these efforts as ‘cultural exchange.’ The interpretations of indigenous cultures remains a vexing problem today, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 came into existence to help remedy some of the ethical problems associated with the building of collections of indigenous art.” Diane Fane, ed., Converging Cultures: Art and Identity in Spanish America (New York: Brooklyn Museum in Association with Harry N. Abrams, 1996). Between 1900 and 1940, schools, libraries, and museums all over the country were recruited to help acculturate newcomers. At the same time, collectors and museum

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NOTES TO PAGES 73–74

105. 106.

107.

108. 109. 110.

111.

112. 113. 114.

professionals were bent on “Americanizing” their collections, in part out of nostalgia for a preindustrial past but also out of concern about these seemingly unassimilable immigrants. Spinden, according to Nancy Rosoff, went a step further. He wanted to celebrate American history and art from the point of view of the indigenous cultures that inspired it. A truly national art, he believed, would also “take its inspiration from the materials, designs, and craftsmanship of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, and with which Americans could identify and be proud.” “As Revealed by Art,” 52. Part of Spinden’s tenure at the museum overlapped with Philip Youtz’s directorship (1934–38). Like Newark’s John Cotton Dana, Youtz believed in the social role of art and cultural institutions. Before taking up his post in Brooklyn, he ran the Sixty-Ninth Street branch of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He wanted to bring objects closer to people, and he believed museums could learn a lot from the ways successful department stores and other commercial ventures reached their customers. He established branch museums in storefronts located in active shopping districts, staying open late and showcasing objects in store windows to attract passersby. “It is high time that museums of all kinds become more definitely oriented toward the public,” Youtz concluded. “The aloof policy inherited from old private collections must be abandoned and museums must accept the leadership in public education.” Philip Youtz cited in McClellan, “A Brief History of the Art Museum Public,” 24. The term criollo, like creole, is used to refer to a person born in Spanish America but of European, usually Spanish, ancestry. Barbara Gallati and Dominic Carter, “5020: William Williams, Deborah Hall: Unknown, Doña Mariana Belsunse y Salasar,” Brooklyn Museum, 2012, www.brooklynmuseum .org/assets/uploads/5020_ColonialPairing.pdf. See also Fane, Converging Cultures. Brooklyn Museum, “Collections: Decorative Arts: Pizarro Commemorative Plate,” accessed July 24, 2012, www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/689 /Pizarro_Commemorative_Plate. Brooklyn Museum, “Collections: Decorative Arts: Tray or Waiter,” accessed July 24, 2012, www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/1849/Tray_or_Waiter. Carol Vogel, “Charles Ryskamp Bequeaths Work to Frick and Morgan,” New York Times, January 13, 2011, www.nytimes.com/2011/01/14/arts/design/14vogel.html?_r=1&. Holland Cotter, “The World Meets in Brooklyn: ‘Connecting Cultures’ at the Brooklyn Museum,” New York Times, April 19, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/04/20/arts/design /connecting-cultures-at-the-brooklyn-museum.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Holland Cotter, “A Local Place for a Global Neighborhood: The Expanded Queens Museum Reopens,” New York Times, November 8, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/11/08 /arts/design/the-expanded-queens-museum-reopens.html?module=Search&mab Reward=relbias%3Ar. Queens Museum, “Queens International 2013,” accessed January 21, 2013, www .queensmuseum.org/exhibitions/2013/11/09/queens-international-2013-2. See Deborah Cullen and Elvis Fuentes, eds., Caribbean: Art at the Crossroads of the World (New York: El Museo del Barrio in association with Yale University Press, 2012). “The work on view,” states the exhibition catalogue, “reflects Caribbean perspectives and external perceptions of the region through a wide range of subjects and artistic

NOTES TO PAGES 75–80

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practices,” including portraits, paintings with spiritual and religious themes, depictions of labor and historical events, abstraction, and contemporary video and installations. Ibid., 1. 115. El Museo del Barrio, “Museum Starter Kit: Open with Care,” accessed July 10, 2014, www.elmuseo.org/msk/. 116. Ibid. For a general overview of Latino cultural politics, see Arlene Dávila, “Latinoizing Culture: Art, Museums, and the Politics of U.S. Multicultural Encompassment,” Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 2 (1999): 180–202. 117. El Museo del Barrio, “About El Museo: Our History,” accessed January 23, 2012, www .elmuseo.org/about-el-museo/#History. 118. For an overview of the controversies surrounding El Museo del Barrio, see Arlene Dávila, Latinos, Inc. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); Felicia R. Lee, “Amid Turmoil at Museo del Barrio, Its Director Steps Down,” New York Times, February 16, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/02/16/arts/design/margarita-aguilar-leaves-el-museo-delbarrio.html?_r=0. 119. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, “Special Event: MFA First Fridays,” accessed February 21, 2013, www.mfa.org/programs/special-event/mfa-first-fridays. The MFA is also open free every Wednesday evening and hosts as least three free Community Open Houses each year, which, according to one staff member, “have more of the quality of a multicultural celebration.” 120. Brooklyn Museum, “About: Mission Statement.” 121. Brooklyn’s current good fortunes are also driven by the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the new Barclays Center, a sports and performance arena. 122. By U.S. standards, according to Nancy Foner, the city and its politicians has always been quite generous to its newcomers. The city provides a range of social, health, and educational services, including the City University of New York, one of the largest urban public universities in the nation. The city actively encourages ethnic pride by funding ethnic festivals and parades. “How Exceptional Is New York? Migration and Multiculturalism in the Empire City,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 6 (2007): 1000–1001. 123. According to Census Bureau population estimates, New York City’s population increased from 8,175,133 in April of 2010 to 8,405,837 in July of 2013. This is an increase of 230,704 residents, or about 2.8 percent over the 2010 mark (New York City Department of City Planning, “Population: Current Population Estimates,” accessed June 11, 2014, www. nyc.gov/html/dcp/html/census/popcur.shtml). The figure for Boston comes from U.S. Census Bureau, “State and County QuickFacts: Boston (City), Massachusetts,” U.S. Department of Commerce, accessed June 11, 2014, http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd /states/25/2507000.html. 124. U.S. Census Bureau, Quick Facts Beta, accessed January 22, 2015, www.census.gov /quickfacts/table/PST045214/00,3651000,2507000. 125. The largest ancestry groups were from the Dominican Republic, China, and Haiti. Boston Redevelopment Authority, Research Division, New Bostonians 2013–2014 (Boston: Office of the Mayor, 2014), www.bostonredevelopmentauthority.org/getattachment/6ca038ea75ae-4e98-ab5f-23e8861a0a9e/.

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126. This model of public-private partnership dates back to 1869, when the New York State legislature authorized the city to build the Museum of Natural History, amass a collection to display within it, and oversee its exhibitions and programs. Members of the Cultural Institutions Group are many of the city’s oldest institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Botanical Garden, the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the now independent pieces of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Interestingly, according to the website, in the 1960s and 1970s the Cultural Institutions Group expanded exponentially “as the City recognized that its increasingly diverse population required a diverse and dynamic pool of institutions to serve it.” Many of these new institutions, such as the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and El Museo del Barrio, were located outside Manhattan and served traditionally underserved constituencies. New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, “Funding for Cultural Organizations: City-Owned Institutions—History of City-Owned Cultural Institutions,” accessed August 27, 2014, www.nyc.gov /html/dcla/html/funding/institutions_history.shtml. 127. “Sensation Sparks New York Storm,” BBC News, September 23, 1999, http://news.bbc .co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/455902.stm. 128. Brooklyn Inst. of Arts & Scis v. City of New York & Rudolph W. Giuliani, 64 F. Supp. 2d 184, 205 (E.D.N.Y. 1999). 129. Interview with Katie Dixon, former chief of staff, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, March 2010. New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Fiscal Year 2015 Executive Budget, www.nyc.gov/html/dcla/downloads/pdf/DCLA%20FY15%20Exec%20 Budget%20Final.pdf. 130. Boston Cultural Council, “Boston Cultural Council Awardees,” March 18, 2014, http:// bostonculturalcouncil.com/2014/03/18/the-boston-cultural-council-awardees/. 131. Edward L. Glaeser, Citizens Committee on Boston’s Future: Chairman’s Final Report (Boston: City of Boston, December 14, 2010). www.cityofboston.gov/cityclerk/hearing /upload_pdfs/docket_pdfs/168612122010.pdf. 132. Steve Annear, “Mayor Marty Walsh Is Making Good on His Promise to the Arts Community,” Boston Magazine, March 18, 2014, www.bostonmagazine.com/news /blog/2014/03/18/mayor-marty-walsh-arts-commission/. 133. David Halle and Louise Mirrer, “New York City: City Culture as Public Display,” in Cities, Cultural Policy and Governance, ed. Helmut K. Anheier and Yudhishthir Raj Isar (London: Sage, 2012), 258. 134. Ibid.; see also Ferber, Masterpieces of American Painting from the Brooklyn Museum, 95. 135. Halle and Mirrer, “New York City,” 258. 136. Ibid.; Alan Wallach, “Norman Rockwell at the Guggenheim.” 137. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper Brothers, 1944). 138. Michael Ignatieff, American Exceptionalism and Human Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). 139. While these dinner companions did not always see eye to eye, they all firmly believed in the power of writing to instruct and inspire. “The men seated around the table,” writes

NOTES TO PAGES 85–88

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140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146.

147.

148. 149.

Robert Vare, “tended to view their prospective magazine as part of a revolution that was taking place in American literature. In an explosion of artistic innovation, American writers were breaking free of the old ties that had bound them for decades to Europe and creating works with a distinctly American voice, a distinctly American point of view, and distinctly American themes.” The early 1800s witnessed an outpouring of literary brilliance—The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Hawthorne, Moby-Dick (1851) by Herman Melville, Walden by Henry David Thoreau (1854), and The Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (1855). New England, and in particular Boston, proved especially fertile literary soil. Vare, ed., The American Idea: The Best of the Atlantic Monthly (New York: Broadway Books, 2008), xviii. Ibid., iii. Ibid. Ibid., 583. Ibid., 584. Ibid., 633. Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96, no. 1 (Winter 1967): 8. Werner Sombart, Warum Gibt Es in Den Vereinigten Staaten Keinen Sozialismus? (Why is there no socialism in the United States?) (Tübingen: Mohr / New York: Sharpe, 1906). There are several English translations, including Why Is There No Socialism in the United States (1976). John Ruggie, “American Exceptionalism, Exemptionalism, and Global Governance,” in American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, ed. Michael Ignatieff (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 304–39. Andrei S. Markovits and Steven L. Hellerman, Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Michael Ignatieff, “American Exceptionalism and Human Rights,” in Ignatieff, American Exceptionalism and Human Rights, 13–16.

3. A R A B I A A N D T H E E A S T

1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

According to Miriam Cooke, in 2012 alone Qatar spent $4.3 billion on European property. Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in the Arab Gulf (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), 167. Bob Simon, “Qatar: A Tiny Country Asserts Powerful Influence,” 60 Minutes, CBS News Online, January 15, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_ZuXbOtBbo. Richard Morin, “Indentured Servitude in the Persian Gulf,” New York Times, April 14, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/sunday-review/indentured-servitude-in-thepersian-gulf.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Central Intelligence Agency, “Qatar,” in The World Factbook (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, June 20, 2014, www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-worldfactbook/geos/qa.html. Joe Stork and Nicholas McGeehan, “Policy Brief: Qatar’s Human Rights Record,” Norwegian Peacebuilding Resource Centre, October 1, 2013, www.hrw.org/news/2013/10/01 /policy-brief-qatar-s-human-rights-record.

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NOTES TO PAGES 88–92

6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Allen James Fromherz, Qatar: A Modern History (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011). A port where merchandise is imported and reexported without import duties. “Singapore Opposition Make ‘Landmark’ Election Gains,” BBC News, May 9, 2011, www .bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-13313695. Lijie Huang, “Free Museum Admissions for Singapore Citizens, Permanent Residents Draw Crowds,” Straits Times, July 9, 2013, http://stcommunities.straitstimes.com /show/2013/07/11/free-museum-admissions-singapore-citizens-permanent-residentsdraw-crowds. Asian Civilisations Museum, “About Us: History of Empress Place Building,” accessed July 15, 2012, www.acm.org.sg/the_museum/history_building.html. The National Heritage Board is responsible for developing a vibrant cultural and heritage sector in Singapore. Its vision is to “make heritage an enriching part of everyone’s life,” and its mission is “to foster nationhood, identity, and creativity through heritage and cultural development. . . . We make heritage enriching, fun and accessible to all through exciting events that engage diverse audiences.” The board operates the city’s seven leading museums and heritage centers. National Heritage Board (Singapore), “Mission and Vision,” accessed July 29, 2012, www.nhb.gov.sg/NHBPortal/AboutUs /Mission&Vision. There is also a growing number of privately owned and operated museums in Singapore that are often developed as part of larger projects. For example, the Maritime Experiential Museum is located in the Sentosa Resort and Casino, and the ArtScience Museum is housed in the Marina Bay Sands complex. Lily Kong, “Ambitions of a Global City: Arts, Culture and Creative Economy in ‘PostCrisis’ Singapore,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 18, no. 3 (2012): 279–94. These sea nomads, or sea gypsies, were some of the earliest immigrants to inhabit the coastline of Singapore before colonization. Joycelyn Hwang, “Orang Laut,” Singapore Infopedia, National Library Board Singapore, 2001, http://infopedia.nl.sg/articles /SIP_551_2005-01-09.html. Central Intelligence Agency, “Singapore,” in The World Factbook (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, June 20, 2014), www.cia.gov/library/publications /the-world-factbook/geos/sn.html (search “Singapore”). C. M. Turnbull, “Raffles, Sir (Thomas) Stamford Bingley (1781–1826),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online), first published 2004, www.oxforddnb.com /index/23/101023010/. Ibid. Central Intelligence Agency, “Singapore.” Turnbull, “Raffles, Sir (Thomas) Stamford Bingley.” Ibid. Ibid. Central Intelligence Agency, “Singapore.” Lee Kuan Yew, From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, 1965–2000, 1st ed. (New York: HarperCollins, 2000). Ibid. Lee Kuan Yew, “Transcript of Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew’s Interview with Mark Jacobson from National Geographic on 6 July 2009 (for National Geographic Magazine

NOTES TO PAGES 92–98

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25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

Jan 2010 Edition),” Singapore Government Media Release, last updated December 28, 2009, www.news.gov.sg/public/sgpc/en/media_releases/agencies/pmo/transcript /T-20091228-1.html. Nirmala Srirekam Purushotam, Negotiating Language, Constructing Race: Disciplining Difference in Singapore (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998). Barbara Leitch Lepoer, ed. Singapore: A Country Study (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office for the Library of Congress, 1989), http://countrystudies.us /singapore/10.htm. Ibid. Lily Kong, “Cultural Policy in Singapore: Negotiating Economic and Socio-Cultural Agendas,” Geoforum 31 (2000): 409–24. Purushotam, Negotiating Language, Constructing Race. Kong, “Cultural Policy in Singapore” and “Ambitions of a Global City.” Kong, “Cultural Policy in Singapore,” 214. Between 1819 and the end of World War II, immigration propelled most of Singapore’s population growth. The colonial economy attracted large numbers of laborers from China, India, and the Malay Archipelago. By 1931, a half million people lived on the island. During the 1950s and 1960s, as Singapore inched closer to self-governance, the government limited immigration, allowing in only people it felt would drive forward economic growth. Independent Singapore imposed even stricter immigration and citizenship laws, decreasing the country’s nonresident population to just 2.9 percent. But during the 1970s, as Singapore grew more industrialized, it needed more labor again. Since early in the first decade of the twenty-first century, large numbers of workers have arrived, often from India and China, but generally from different regions of origin than the migrants who preceded them. Purushotam, Negotiating Language, Constructing Race; Brenda Yeoh and Weiqiang Lin, “Rapid Growth in Singapore’s Immigrant Population Brings Policy Challenges,” Migration Information Source (Migration Policy Institute), April 3, 2012, www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display. cfm?ID=887. Anoma Pieris argues that Furnivall’s well-known notion of plural societies, in which people of different ethnicities meet in the marketplace and live under the same political structure, but do not otherwise mix, fails to capture what happened in Singapore. In Singapore, it was not merely about the colonizer and the colonized. The constant influx of new immigrants challenged the boundaries between and within groups. Each group had a different relationship to the authorities; this relationship varied by class and race and gave rise to multiple types of loyalty and resistance. Pieris notes that, in Singapore, “the relationships within and between ethnic groups, between the government and settlers, and between the settlers and their countries of origin must all be taken into account for an adequate analysis of the Straits social context, as must the politics of a settlement colony dependent on the economies of immigrant groups.” The penal system, with its marked internal ethnic and racial hierarchy and spatial segregation, served as a model for the diversity management regime the British later used in the Straits settlement. Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: A Penal History of Singapore’s Plural Society (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009), 13; Ah Eng Lai, ed., Beyond Ritu-

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NOTES TO PAGES 98–99

34. 35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

als and Riots: Ethnic Pluralism and Social Cohesion in Singapore (Singapore: Eastern University Press, 2004). M. D. Barr and J. Low, “Assimilation as Multiracialism: The Case of Singapore’s Malays,” Asian Ethnicity 6, no. 3 (2005): 161–82. Li-Cong Ho, “Global Multicultural Citizenship Education: A Singapore Experience,” Social Studies (November–December 2009): 285–93. B. H. Chua, “Multiculturalism in Singapore: An Instrument of Social Control,” Race and Class 44, no. 3 (2003): 58–77; Kevin Y. L. Tan, “The Legal and Institutional Framework and Issues of Multiculturalism in Singapore,” in Lai, Beyond Rituals and Riots, 98–113; G. L. Ooi, “The Role of the Developmental State and Interethnic Relations in Singapore,” Asian Ethnicity 6, no. 2 (2005): 109–20; Yeoh and Lin, “Rapid Growth in Singapore’s Immigrant Population Brings Policy Challenges.” Tong cited in J. S. T. Quah, “Globalization and Singapore’s Search for Nationhood,” in Nationalism and Globalization: East and West, ed. L. Suryadinata (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2000), 84. Race and ethnicity are often conflated (Ho, “Global Multicultural Citizenship Education”). For example, the Singapore Department of Statistics assigns the same meaning to both terms and states that the term ethnic group signifies a person’s race. Joseph Tamney, The Struggle over Singapore’s Soul: Western Modernization and Asian Culture (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995), 19. On the whole, race relations have been relatively cordial, with some exceptions. Singapore had its own version of France’s “headscarf issue” in 2002, when four girls from the Malay Muslim community were suspended from school for wearing headscarves. The government argued that all students had to conform to the school dress code. Ho, “Global Multicultural Citizenship Education”; Lai, Beyond Rituals and Riots; E. Tan, “ ‘We, the Citizens of Singapore . . .‘: Multiethnicity, Its Evolution and Its Aberrations,” in Lai, Beyond Rituals and Riot, 65–97. Purushotam, Negotiating Language, Constructing Race. Singapore is a secular state with no official religion. The constitution protects freedom of religion, except when it poses a threat to “racial or religious harmony.” Singaporeans are extremely religiously diverse and boast high rates of religious affiliation. The government cooperates with and encourages religious traditions and activities that support the status quo, but it is not above suppressing others. It can and does restrict religious freedom in the face of perceived threats—allegedly to the multiconfessional character of society, but often, it seems, to assert its own power. Nearly 85 percent of Singaporeans identify with a faith tradition, including Buddhist, 33.9 percent; Muslim, 14.3 percent; Taoist, 11.3 percent; Catholic, 7.1 percent; Hindu, 5.2 percent; other Christian, 11 percent; other, 0.7 percent; and none, 16.4 percent. Central Intelligence Agency, “Singapore,” 2010 estimates; U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, “Singapore,” in International Religious Freedom Report 2005 (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, 2005), www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/irf/2005/51529.htm. Under the Internal Security Act, the government can block publications that incite violence; advocate disobeying the law; arouse tensions among ethnic, religious, and linguistic groups; or threaten national interests, national security, or public order. The metaphor

NOTES TO PAGES 99–100

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1 83

43.

44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51.

52. 53.

54.

of the Banyan tree to describe the government came up several times in my interviews. It protects, it provides shade, it keeps you comfortable, but little survives under its branches because it blocks out the sun. Emma Chanlett-Avery, Singapore: Background and U.S. Relations (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, July 26, 2013). The proportion of Singapore’s residents born outside the country increased from 18.1 percent in 2000 to 22.8 percent in 2010. Yeoh and Lin, “Rapid Growth in Singapore’s Immigrant Population Brings Policy Challenges.” There were fifty thousand in Australia, forty thousand in Great Britain, twenty thousand in the United States, and twenty thousand in China. Ibid. Recently, the government has grown concerned that Singaporeans will stay abroad permanently, resulting in a brain drain. To prevent this, it put in place several initiatives, including connecting expatriates to prospective employers, setting up information clearinghouses to keep Singaporeans abroad informed about national developments, and supporting recreational clubs and social events for the overseas community. Ibid. According to Yeoh and Lin, “To some locals, newcomers—particularly the ubiquitous Mainland Chinese—are commonly seen as uncouth and prone to objectionable behaviors like littering, eating on public transit, and talking loudly on the phone. Similarly, South Asian construction workers and Filipino domestic workers have been singled out as targets of public backlash.” Ibid. T. Chong notes that, in the early days, cultural policy was “taken to mean the ideological role prescribed by the state for arts and culture in the greater nation-building project, in which the state defines the meaning of art and culture and their relationship to society. In this sense, cultural policies are not sympathetic to art for art’s sake but subordinate to the ideologies, values, and interests of the ruling elite.” “The State and the New Society: The Role of the Arts in Singapore Nation-Building,” Asian Studies Review 34, no. 2 (2010): 132. Ibid., 132. In 1972, the minister of culture, Jek Yeun Tong, proclaimed that Singaporean national culture should reflect not only the nation’s ancestral cultures but also the new character and personality its people were trying to build together: their dynamism, industrialism, and multiracialism. Ibid., 134. Ibid., 137. “The role of the arts and culture in manufacturing this instant Singapore multicultural identity,” Chong writes, “may also be thought of as the visual and symbolic disciplining of races, where the imaginary on stage allowed for the animation of a multicultural utopia. Through repeated performances in public spaces, the formulaic presentation of styles and costumes eventually naturalized the essentializing of ‘race’ to support the orthodoxy of racial categories imposed by the PAP government.” Ibid., 137–38. Kong, “Cultural Policy in Singapore” and “Ambitions of a Global City.” Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts, Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts, Executive Summary (Singapore, April 1989), http://eservice.nlb.gov.sg/viewer /BookSG/4574f095-8cae-4e85-81ca-5e57f98af85f. National Arts Council, Report of the Arts and Culture Strategic Review (Singapore, January 31, 2012), www.nac.gov.sg/docs/resources/acsr_final_report.pdf.

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NOTES TO PAGES 100–102

55. 56. 57.

58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66. 67.

68.

Chong, “The State and the New Society.” Ministry of Manpower, “Foreign Manpower,” Government of Singapore, accessed September 5, 2013, www.mom.gov.sg/foreign-manpower/Pages/default.aspx. Government of Singapore, Culture and the Arts in Renaissance Singapore (Singapore, 2002); T. Chong, “From Global to Local: Singapore’s Cultural Policy and Its Consequences,” Critical Asian Studies 37, no. 4 (2005): 551–65; K. W. Kwok and K. H. Low, “Cultural Policy and the City-State: Singapore and the ‘New Asian Renaissance,’ ” in Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalisation, ed. Diana Crane, Nobuko Kawashima, and Kenishi Kawasaki (New York: Routledge, 2002), 149–68; C. J. WanLing Wee, “National Identity, the Arts and the Global City,” in Singapore in the New Millennium: Challenges Facing the City-State, ed. Derek Da Cunha (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002), 221–42. An earlier report, from the 1980s, described the artist as a craftsman who needed support from the state and wealthy patrons and did not feel that it was beneath him to make work his benefactor approved of. The artist would use his skill to support the government and its institutions, just as the Renaissance artist had supported the church. Like the Vatican underwrote Michelangelo, the state would underwrite artists—although the report warned that they could be disruptive “free spirits” and “Bohemians.” Chong, “The State and the New Society.” Economic Development Board and Ministry of Information and the Arts, Singapore: Global City for the Arts (Republic of Singapore, 1992), 3. Government of Singapore, Culture and the Arts in Renaissance Singapore, 38–39. Ibid. Chong, “The State and the New Society.” Brenda Yeoh, “Cosmopolitanism and Its Exclusions in Singapore,” Urban Studies 41, no. 12 (2004): 2431–45. Daniel Goh, “State Carnivals and the Subvention of Multiculturalism in Singapore,” British Journal of Sociology 62, no. 1 (2011): 111–33. Singlish is an English-based Creole language spoken in Singapore. Yeoh, “Cosmopolitanism and Its Exclusions in Singapore”; Michael Hill and Kwen Fee Lian, The Politics of Nation Building and Citizenship in Singapore (London: Routledge, 1995). Yeoh, “Cosmopolitanism and Its Exclusions in Singapore,” 2442. This recent policy turn, as Lily Kong has observed (“Ambitions of a Global City”), is based on the understanding that truly global cities have lively arts scenes and citizens that actively enjoy them. One particularly successful exhibition is the Art Garden, which the Singapore Art Museum organizes each year. It is designed to create the next generation of museumgoers. The installations are organized so that parents and kids have to work together to experience them. At a “fruit stand,” visitors cut out bananas that they then exchange for real pieces of fruit. The instructions are complicated enough that children and adults must work together to complete them. The Singapore Arts Festival, for example, is another one of the tools the government uses to create the art producers and consumers it thinks Singapore needs. Former director Goh Ching Lee, at the helm between 2000 and 2009, frequently described the

NOTES TO PAGES 102–104

•

1 85

69.

70.

71.

fair as a gateway between the East and West, noting that it included works that reflected global trends, were multidisciplinary, and were created out of international collaborations. She commissioned work by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, making clear to Singaporean audiences that they had to get comfortable with the same kinds of work that international audiences enjoy, but also had to continue to appreciate and engage with works with a regional stamp. After the 2012 festival, the National Arts Council conducted a review to chart future directions. See “Singapore Arts Festival,” National Arts Council, last updated October 4, 2013, www.nac.gov.sg/events/singaporearts-festival. “With Singapore becoming a global city for the arts, SAM’s international networks bring about a confluence of ideas, and create a dynamic arts scene invigorated by international flows of ideas, talents, knowledge and resources.” Its exhibitions, events, “fringe activities,” and lectures also “promote awareness and appreciation of contemporary art and encourage the growth of an active and stimulating cultural environment in Singapore.” Singapore Art Museum, accessed October 26, 2012, www.singaporeartmuseum.sg /museum/ (page no longer available). “Singaporeans have become very conscious of boundaries and distinctions; perhaps too much so,” notes the Educator’s Guide, which encourages teachers to discuss such issues with their students. “The constant need to always be able to define a space—cultural, social, or otherwise—could have immense ramifications for the way Singaporeans view themselves as individuals and as a nation. While the boundaries of a country are often taken to be its shoreline, the truth is that this border is in fact an imaginary line that lies far out at sea, an imaginary line that we materialize with sea markers. The sea markers lie still while the water moves freely beneath it. The artist suggests that perhaps the borders we have drawn for ourselves over the years are not as static and unyielding as we make them out to be.” Singapore Art Museum, Educator’s Guide: The Singapore Show: Future Proof (Singapore: Singapore Art Museum, 2012), www.singaporeartmuseum.sg/downloads/TSShow_Educator.pdf. As I am writing, the National Heritage Board is creating two museums from one. In additional to the Singapore Art Museum, the new National Art Gallery is scheduled to open in 2015 and be “a brand new visual arts institution building upon a sound foundation of scholarship and experience.” This new museum is also part of Singapore’s plan to become a regional and international hub. The National Art Gallery aims to be a “centre of excellence in Asian Art in the region,” generating new cultural and intellectual frameworks on “which international discourse and fresh understandings of our unique visual art heritage can take place.” While there will be some overlap, the National Art Gallery will focus on historical works from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries up to the contemporary period, and the Singapore Art Gallery will be a place “where the public can directly experience the diversity of contemporary art practices ranging from painting and sculpture, to installation, film & video, photography, new media, performance art and sound art, experience the work and ideas of living artists of Southeast Asia, and relate to the region’s unique aesthetic and social context.” National Gallery Singapore, “About the Gallery,” accessed October 26, 2012, http://nationalartgallery.sg /about-the-gallery/.

18 6

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NOTES TO PAGES 104–106

72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78.

79. 80.

“Singapore needs a new institution now,” said Tan Boon Hui, because the existing space is simply too small and the resources too limited to showcase the city’s artistic legacy and its contemporary artistic production. But it is also, Michael Koh told me in an interview, part of the government’s global strategy. “Because of the nature of Singapore and its history, we are perfectly placed to look at the art of Southeast Asia, then Asia, and then the rest of world. Most countries would only explore their own artists. As the National Gallery, we have to do that too. We have to celebrate Singapore artists. We have to talk about how these artists responded to the new light, new landscapes, and new mediums. What does it mean to live in Singapore; but in addition, what does it mean to have this region around you that has so many traditions?” In fact, Raffles started the library and museum to collect and preserve the ecology of the region. He included human artifacts in the ecological archive of human evolution in the region. The British later started the Perak Museum to collect Malay historical and cultural artifacts, defining Malaya as Malay. Most of the artifacts from the Raffles Library went to the small Raffles Museum of Biodiversity at the National University of Singapore, which will soon become the National University of Singapore’s National History Museum. I thank Professor Daniel P. S. Goh for pointing this out. In 1960, the museum and library separated; and in 1965, following independence, the museum was renamed the National Museum of Singapore. The Jawi Peranakans (or Jawi Pekan) are the progeny of Indian Muslims, while the Chitty Melaka are the descendants of Hindu traders. Peranakan Museum, “About the Peranakans,” accessed July 17, 2012, www.peranakanmuseum.sg/themuseum/abtperanakans.html. A Chinese-origin term describing a household employee who works as a combined nanny-housekeeper. Professor Lily Kong made a similar argument about an exhibition on Singapore’s Jewish community, which was on display at the Singapore History Museum in 1999–2000. By focusing on ritual practices and celebrations rather than external events like the Holocaust or Jewish-Muslim relations, the exhibition sidestepped the community’s difficult politics. According to Kong, “The SHM leadership expressed a preference that the portrayal of racial and religious interactions should be avoided, lest it ignited sensitivities. The Holocaust was off-limits, and mention of local sensitivities was also to be avoided.” The museum was silent about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict so as to not offend the Muslim community. “Representing the Religious: Nation, Community and Identity in Museums,” Social and Cultural Geography 6, no. 4 (2005): 502. As recently as 1998, the former Indonesian president B. J. Habibie called Singapore a “little red dot.” He was referring to its overwhelmingly Chinese-origin population and their alleged sympathies toward their ancestral home, and suggesting they could not be trusted by the over 200 million Muslims in Indonesia. Richard Borsuk and Reginald Chua, “Indonesia in Transition: Singapore Strains Relations with Indonesia’s President,” Asian Wall Street Journal, August 4, 1998. Kenneth Paul Tan, Renaissance Singapore? Economy, Culture and Politics (Singapore: National University Press, 2007). Ibid., 4.

NOTES TO PAGES 106–111

•

1 87

81. 82. 83.

84.

85.

86. 87. 88. 89.

Can-Seng Ooi, paper presented at the Sixteenth Biennial Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Wollongong, 2006, cited in Kong, “Ambitions of a Global City,” 6. Petrina Leo and Terence Lee, “The New Singapore: Mediating Culture and Creativity,” Continuum 18, no. 2 (2004): 214. These debates speak to questions about whether creativity can flourish in a society with limited freedoms, where the government, to varying degrees, still regulates what citizens do and say. How much the government actually controls artistic production, a key piece of the answer, is hard to come by. The state increasingly turns a blind eye to political challenges. Censorship regulations have softened, film classifications have broadened, and using art as a platform for political commentary is more common. These changes, writes Chong (“The State and the New Society”), began in the 1990s, under Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, who wanted to create a “kinder, gentler society” that would differ from the one created by the iron hand of Lee Kuan Yew. Yet we should not, Chong warns, forget about the deep ideological role culture still has to play in addition to its economic role. All too often, critics charge, talk of creativity is equated with talk about “industrializing creativity.” The government uses this kind of discourse to convince the transnational corporate class, whom they want and need to live in Singapore, that it is a good place to be. But real creativity and new ideas can flourish only where people are allowed to challenge conventional ideas and perspectives. A country where people still fear that the nation may not survive, depend on the government to provide, and define achievement only in economic terms is not particularly fertile creative ground. In March 2013, several important figures in the art community offered to the public “A Manifesto for the Arts,” which said, “Art is fundamental; Art is about possibilities; Art unifies and divides; Art can be challenged but not censored; Art is political.” Art, its writers asserted, cannot be separated from politics. The authorities should not play the role of critic. It must be Singaporeans who decide what they want to watch. Can-Seng Ooi, “Subjugated in the Creative Industries: The Fine Arts in Singapore,” Culture Unbound 3 (2011): 119–37; Helmi Yusof, “Can Singapore Accept Political Art?” Straits Times, April 28, 2013, http://stcommunities.straitstimes.com/show/2013/04/28/ can-singapore-accept-political-art. Legend has it that the name Doha comes from the Arabic al-Bidda, or “big tree,” which may refer to a large tree that stood on the site of the original fishing village which later became the city. Throughout the text, I use Doha and Qatar interchangeably because Doha is the center of Qatari life. In everyday parlance, people refer to the city and the nation interchangeably, in much the same way as in Singapore. “Museum of Islamic Art, Doha by I. M. Pei: The Museum of Islamic Art, a New Cultural Icon for the Gulf Region,” desMena, July 9, 2010, http://desmena.com/?p=2102. Louise Nicholson, “Pride of Qatar: Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art Is Open,” Apollo, January 24, 2009, www.apollo-magazine.com/features/3285921/pride-of-qatar.html. It is 274 square miles. Mehran Kamrava, Qatar: Small State, Big Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). Embassy of Qatar in Washington, DC, “History of Qatar,” 2010, www.qatarembassy.net /page/history.asp.

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NOTES TO PAGES 111–116

90.

91.

92. 93. 94.

95. 96. 97. 98.

99.

In the 1760s, the al-Khalifa and the al-Jalahima sections of the Bani Utub tribe migrated from Kuwait to Qatar’s northwest coast and founded Az Zubarah. It became a thriving center of trade and pearling, despite competition between the tribes. When an Omani Sheikh, who ruled Bahrain in the 1780s, attacked Az Zubarah, the Bani Utub of Kuwait and Qatar, along with several local Qatari tribes, joined together to capture Bahrain. But the al-Khalifa claimed Bahrain for themselves, ruling it for several years from Az Zubarah. This angered the al-Jalahima, who felt cheated, and they moved up the Qatari coast to settle al-Khuwayr. They used it as a base for raiding the al-Khalifa and Iranian ships. Later, as many al-Khalifa migrated to more hospitable sites in Bahrain—establishing a sheikhdom that endures to this day—their departure paved the way for the al-Jalahima branch of the Bani Utub to gain power in Qatar. But as the al-Khalifa shifted their focus to Bahrain, Az Zubarah’s economic importance declined and the peninsula, once again, became a relative backwater with no dominant local ruler and with troubled relations among rival tribes. Helem Chapin Metz, ed., A Country Study: Qatar (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, Federal Research Division, 1993), http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs /qatoc.html. This time, the struggles involved not only the al-Khalifa and the al-Jalahima of the Bani Utub tribe, as well as the Iranians, but also the Omanis under Sayyid Said ibn Sultan al-Said, the nascent Wahhabis of Arabia, and the Ottomans. The Al-Thani were originally Bedouin from Najd; they settled in Qatar and took up fishing, pearling, date palm cultivation, and trade. Fromherz, Qatar. Ibid., 83. General Secretariat for Development Planning, Qatar National Vision 2030 (Doha: General Secretariat for Development Planning, 2005), 3, www2.gsdp.gov.qa/www1_docs /QNV2030_English_v2.pdf. The document goes on to say that modern modes of work and the pressure to compete can be at odds with traditional relationships based on trust and personal ties and put a strain on family life. “The greater freedoms and wider choices that accompany economic and social progress pose a challenge to deep-rooted social values highly cherished by society. . . . Yet it is possible to combine modern life with values and culture. Other societies have successfully molded modernization around local culture and traditions. Qatar’s National Vision responds to this challenge and seeks to connect and balance the old and the new.” Kamrava, Qatar: Small State, Big Politics. Ibid. Central Intelligence Agency, “Qatar,” accessed July 16, 2014, www.cia.gov/library /publications/the-world-factbook/geos/qa.html (search “Qatar”). The average fee that a blue-collar worker pays to a recruiter is about $1,000 for a job that will pay, on average, $470 a month. Most workers go into debt to afford it. Among workers earning $275 or less, 80 percent take at least three months to earn back the recruiting fee; nearly a third take six months or longer. Human Rights Watch, “Building a Better World Cup: Protecting Migrant Workers in Qatar Ahead of FIFA 2022,” June 12, 2012, www.hrw.org/reports/2012/06/12/building-better-world-cup. According to a 2012 Human Rights Watch report, there is “pervasive employer exploitation and abuse of workers in Qatar’s construction industry, made possible by an

NOTES TO PAGES 116–120

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1 89

100. 101.

102.

103.

104.

105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111.

112.

inadequate legal and regulatory framework that grants employers extensive control over workers and prohibits migrant workers from exercising their rights to free association and collective bargaining.” The government, it goes on to say, has failed to enforce the laws that exist on paper to protect workers’ rights. Even workers with formal contracts are not adequately protected. Ibid. General Secretariat for Development Planning, Qatar National Vision 2030, 18. “Seven, eight years ago we didn’t have labor laws,” said Hussein al-Mulla, undersecretary of the Labor Ministry. “It is better now than before. It will be better in the future.” But new laws are not enough. “The challenge is enforcement of these laws and establishing a new work culture,” said Andrew Gardner, an anthropologist at the University of Puget Sound who studies Gulf laborers. “The scope of the problem is so large and the number of foreigners is growing so quickly.” Cited in Morin, “Indentured Servitude in the Persian Gulf,” 10. Many would say with good reason. It is a crime to insult the emir, punishable with prison time. As one respondent who had lived in Doha for three years put it, “The deal with the devil is that you tacitly agree to keep your mouth shut. Complain and you’ll either be locked up or deported. All expats coming here are made very aware of this.” At his workplace, a lawyer briefs all newcomers, warning them that they basically have no protection, legal or otherwise, and that their employer would not back them up if they got into trouble. See also Michael Slackman, “Affluent Qataris Seek What Money Cannot Buy,” New York Times, May 13, 2010, New York edition, www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14 /world/middleeast/14qatar.html./ “Human Rights Groups Call on Qatar to Release Poet Held for ‘Insulting the Emir,’ ” Doha News, October 30, 2012, http://dohanews.co/human-rights-groups-call-on-qatarto-release-poet-held/. This is according to Rachel Ziemba, an analyst at Roubini Global Economics in London, as quoted in Stanley Reed, “Qatar Pushes for a Larger Role on the Global Stage,” New York Times, January 6, 2013 (in the International Herald Tribune), www.nytimes .com/2013/01/07/business/global/07iht-jazeera07.html. Ibid. John Arlidge, “Qataris Quick to Splash the Cash,” Sunday Times, February 3, 2013, www .thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/sport/football/article1206525.ece. Qatar Foundation, “About,” accessed April 14, 2013, www.qf.org.qa/about. Sean Coughlan, “Why Is Qatar Investing So Much in Education?” BBC News, June 8, 2012, www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-18151511. Fromherz, Qatar, 29. Bob Simon, “Qatar: A Tiny Country Asserts Powerful Influence,” 60 Minutes, CBS News Online, January 15, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_ZuXbOtBbo. Kareem Fahim, “Egypt: Qatar Offers Support with Bond Purchase,” New York Times, April 11, 2013, New York edition, www.nytimes.com/2013/04/11/world/middleeast /egypt-qatar-offers-support-with-bond-purchase.html. Hala Droubi, “Qatar Proposes $1 Billion Jerusalem Heritage Fund,” New York Times, March 27, 2013, New York edition, www.nytimes.com/2013/03/27/world/middleeast /qatar-proposes-1-billion-jerusalem-heritage-fund.html.

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NOTES TO PAGES 120–122

113.

Ihsan Youssef, “QC Signs Pact with Shoprite, Mega Mart,” Qatar Tribune, February 13, 2012, www.qatar-tribune.com/data/20120213/content.asp?section=nation2_5. 114. “Qatar Charity United Kingdom,” Qatar Charity United Kingdom, accessed July 10, 2014, www.qcharity.com/en/index.php. 115. Doha Goals Forum, “Vision,” accessed April 14, 2013, www.dohagoals.com/en/goal /vision. 116. A survey conducted by the Supreme Health Council found that most adult Qataris are overweight, do not eat enough fruits and vegetables, and get very little exercise. “Survey: Obesity, Inactivity, Unhealthy Diets Put Qataris at Risk for Host of Health Problems,” Doha News, September 7, 2012, http://dohanews.co/survey-obesity-inactivity-unhealthydiets-put/. 117. Rowan Scarborough, “Al-Jazeera Coming to America: Controversial Network Ready to Hit U.S. TV Markets,” Washington Times, July 23, 2013, www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013 /jul/23/coming-soon-al-jazeera-america-hit-us-tv-markets/#ixzz2aAQlgB8s. 118. Fromherz, Qatar, 29. 119. This is because the expatriates who come to work in the museum sector have to sign confidentiality agreements, so they speak with care to outsiders. In fact, it often seemed like the team at one museum knew little about what was going on at another, despite the fact that they worked for the same organization (the QMA) and ostensibly faced many of the same challenges. Several curators complained they had no idea how decisions were made, except that Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani was at the top. According to one professional, this shroud of secrecy is, in part, a response to the fact that leaders in other Gulf countries have often made grand public claims, reported in the press, that they ultimately could not fulfill. The Qatari royal family has become, in a sense, gun-shy around journalists, not even wanting to publicize exhibitions before everything is installed in the galleries. 120. “Nude Statues Removed from Qatar Olympic Exhibition,” Doha News, April 24, 2013, http://dohanews.co/nude-statues-removed-from-qatar-olympic-exhibition/. 121. In addition to concerns about the mistreatment of the thousands of foreign-born workers who will be brought in to build the infrastructure needed for the 2022 World Cup, there have also been accusations that the site-selection process was tainted. Despite an investigation and a December 2014 report that acknowledged wrongdoing, the plan to hold the games in Qatar will still move forward. Ben Rumsby, “Qatar to Keep 2022 World Cup despite FIFA Report Criticism of Its Bid,” November 12, 2014, The Telegraph, www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/world-cup/11227057/Qatar-to-keep-2022-WorldCup-despite-Fifa-report-criticism-of-its-bid.html. 122. Qatar Museum of Art, “Hey’Ya: Arab Women in Sports Exhibition,” www.qma.org.qa /en/slide-show/731-heyya-arab-women-in-sports. Noted March 19, 2103, during visit to exhibition. 123. Fromherz, Qatar, 141. 124. Stephanie Bailey, “Art Dubai and the 11th Sharjah Biennial Re:Calibrate,” Ocula, March 25, 2013, http://ocula.com/reports/art-dubai-and-the-11th-sharjah-biennial-re-calibra/. 125. Art Dubai 2013, “Global Art Forum_7,” accessed December 27, 2014, www.myartguides .com/art-dubai-2013/fairs/item/406-global-art-forum-7.

NOTES TO PAGES 122–125

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126. “Mathaf’s First Eastward Looking Show—‘Cai Guo-Qiang: Saraab’ in Recap,” Art Radar, May 21, 2012, http://artradarjournal.com/2012/05/21/mathafs-first-eastward-lookingshow-cai-guo-qiang-saraab-in-recap/. 127. Qatar Museums Authority, “National Museum of Qatar,” accessed April 27, 2013, www .qm.org.qa/en/project/national-museum-qatar. For additional background on the history of the national museum project, see Peggy Loar, “Vision for Culture in the Arabian Gulf,” in Museums in a Global Context: National Identity, International Understanding, ed. Jennifer Dickey, Samir El Azhar, and Catherine M. Lewis (Washington, DC: American Alliance of Museums Press, 2013), 186–205. 128. “New National Museum of Qatar,” YouTube video, posted by Qatar Museums Authority, March 30, 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOaw4lYLtOk. 129. Traditional dress for men and women in the region. 130. Fromherz, Qatar, 7; Sharon Nagy, “Making Room for Migrants, Making Sense of Difference: Spatial and Ideological Expressions of Social Diversity in Qatar,” Urban Studies 43 (2006): 119–37. 131. Habib Toumi, “Scholar Highlights Past as Future in the Gulf,” GulfNews, November 15, 2010, http://m.gulfnews.com/news/gulf/qatar/scholar-highlights-past-as-future-in-thegulf-1.712429. See also Cooke, Tribal Modern, 170, 172. Also writing of the seemingly contradictory coexistence of tradition and modernity in consanguineous marriage, Geoff Harkness and Rana Khaled use the term modern traditionalism. “Modern Traditionalism: Consanguineous Marriage in Qatar,” Journal of Marriage and Family 76 (June 2014): 587–603. 132. Cooke, Tribal Modern. 133. Sooud al-Qassemi, “Treasure Troves of History and Diversity,” GulfNews, January 25, 2013, http://gulfnews.com/opinions/columnists/treasure-troves-of-history.

CONCLUSION

1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

Pico Iyer, “Where Is Home?” (lecture, TEDGlobal 2013, Edinburgh, Scotland, June 2013), www.ted.com/talks/pico_iyer_where_is_home. Jonas Frykman and Orvar Löfgren, Force of Habit: Exploring Everyday Culture, Lund Studies in European Ethnology 1 (Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1996), 1. Richard Wilk, “Learning to Be Local in Belize: Global System of Common Difference,” in Worlds Apart: Modernity through the Prism of the Local, ed. Daniel Miller (London: Routledge, 1995), 110–33. Sharon Macdonald, “Museums, National, Postnational, and Transcultural Identities,” in Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, ed. Bettina Carbonell, 2nd ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 273–87. Ulrich Beck, Daniel Levy, and Natan Sznaider, “Cosmopolitanization of Memory: The Politics of Forgiveness and Restitution,” in Cosmopolitanism in Practice, ed. Magdalena Nowicka and Maria Rovisco (Farnham, U.K.: Ashgate Press, 2009), 113. Tony Bennett, “Exhibition, Difference, and the Logic of Culture,” in Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp, Corrine Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 46–69.

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NOTES TO PAGES 126–136

7. 8. 9.

Ghassan Hage, “A Not So Multi-sited Ethnography of a Not So Imagined Community,” Anthropological Theory 5, no. 4 (2005): 463–75. Aihwa Ong, “Neoliberalism as a Mobile Technology,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 32, no. 1 (2007): 3. The Pirkei Avot is a collection of ethical teachings and sayings from the ancient rabbis that is included in the Mishnah, Judaism’s most important canonical source after the Bible. It was written between 200 b.c.e. and 200 c.e. Rabbi Tarfon lived during the first half of the second century c.e. (approximately 100–150 c.e.).

NOTES TO PAGES 138–141

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PLATES

Plates follow page 118.

1. Installation shot of an exhibition on human trafficking at the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg from 2008 to 2010 2. Albert Eckhout’s 1643 portrait of an indigenous inhabitant of Dutch Brazil, at the National Museum of Denmark 3. The Sun Chariot, a Bronze Age icon of Danish nationalism, from the National Museum of Denmark 4. An installation shot from Destination X at the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2010 5. K’iché burial urn, from around a.d. 750, from the Art of the Americas Wing at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts 6. Charles Willson Peale’s 1882 painting of Timothy Matlack, at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts 7. Miguel Cabrera’s 1754 painting of Don Manuel José Rubio y Salinas, at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts 8. William Williams’s 1766 portrait of Deborah Hall, at the Brooklyn Museum 9. José Joaquin Bermejo’s portrait of Doña Mariana Belsunse y Salasar, from around 1780, at the Brooklyn Museum

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10. Jane Lee’s Raw Canvas, on display at the Singapore Biennial in 2008 11. I. M Pei’s Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, which opened in 2008 12. Portrait of a European Gentleman, late seventeenth century, by an unknown Iranian artist, from the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha

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IMAGE CREDITS

Plate 1. Photograph of the exhibition Trafficking, 2009. National Museums of World Culture, Sweden, © Rose-Marie Westling. Plate 2. Tarairiu/Tapayu woman (EN38A2) by Albert Eckhout, Brazil 1643. Courtesy of the National Museum of Denmark, Ethnographic Collections. Plate 3. The Sun Chariot/Solvognen. Courtesy of The National Museum of Denmark/Lennart Larsen, Danish Prehistory Collections. Plate 4. Hannes Anderzén. Photograph from the exhibition Destination X, 2010. Museum of World Culture, Gothenburg, Sweden. Plate 5. K’iché burial or cache urn. Maya, late classic period, a.d. 650–850. Object place: Southern Highlands, Guatemala. Earthenware: white, black, yellow, gray-green, and red postfire paint, 127 x 74 cm (50 x 29⅛ in.). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Landon T. Clay. 1988.1289a-b. Photograph © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Plate 6. Charles Willson Peale, Timothy Matlack, 1882. Oil on canvas, 121.92 × 101.6 cm (48 × 40 in). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; A. Shuman Collection—Abraham Shuman Fund, 1998.218. Photograph © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Plate 7. Miguel Cabrera, Don Manuel Jose Rubio y Salinas, Archbishop of Mexico, 1754. Oil on canvas, 71⅝ × 493/16 in. (181.9 × 124.9 cm). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Charles Bayley Picture and Painting Fund, 2008.1. Photograph © 2014 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Plate 8. William Williams (American, 1727–91, active in America 1746–1776). Deborah Hall. 1766. Oil on canvas, 71⅜ × 46⅜ in. (181.3 × 117.8 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsey Fund, 42.45.

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Plate 9. José Joaquin Bermejo (Peruvian, active ca. 1760–1792). Doña Mariana Belsunse y Salasar, ca. 1780. Oil on canvas. Canvas: 78⅛ × 501/16 in (198.4 × 127.2 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Mrs. L. H Shearman, 1992.212. Plate 10. Photograph of Jane Lee, Raw Canvas. Copyright © Ronnie Ang (rumplestiltskin. zenfolio.com/biennale2008). Plate 11. Exterior shot, Museum of Islamic Art, photograph. Copyright © Museum of Islamic Art, Doha. Plate 12. Photograph, Portrait of a European Gentleman. Copyright © Museum of Islamic Art, Doha. PA.2.1997.

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INDEX

Note: Colored plates are indicated by Plate and the plate number. Exhibitions are listed under the particular institution and by country under the exhibitions entry. Abu Dhabi museums, 115 Academy of Sciences (Stockholm), 43, 157n4 accompaniment, x, 13, 155–56n54, 157n61 activist packages, 153n43 adjacencies or pairings in exhibitions: in American Identities, Plates 8–9, 72–76, 79; in Art of the Americas, Plates 6–7, 60; concept, 60; implicit vs. explicit, 82 Adonis (Syrian poet), 121 Afghan art, 114, 115 Africa: American trade with, 65; Eurocentric views of, 21; textiles of, 174n83 African Americans: acquisition of works by, 69, 174–75n85; educational materials on, 81; representation of, 75–76 Afro-Brazilians, 69, 174–75n85 Agüeros, Jack, 81 Aguilar, Margarita, 82 Ahlin, Margaret, 40 Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 121

al-Ajami, Mohammed (aka Mohammed bin al-Dheeb), 120 Albemarle, Duke of (Christopher Monck), 1 Aliens Act (Denmark, 1986), 38 Al-Jazeera network, 115, 118, 122–23 al-Khater, Aisha, 114 allegiances. See boundaries and borders; cosmopolitanism-nationalism continuum; transnational lives Almqvist, Carl Jonas Love, 16 al-Mulla, Hussein, 190n101 al-Qaeda, 121 al-Qaradawi, Yusuf, 121 al-Qassemi, Sooud, 131–32 al-Tamimi, al-Munzir bin Sawi, 116 Al-Thani, Abd Allah bin Qasim, 116–17 Al-Thani, Abdulla bin Ali, 121 Al-Thani, Abdullah bin Jassim, 128 Al-Thani, Ahmad bin Ali, 117 Al-Thani, Hamad bin Khalifa, 92, 112–13, 117–18, 121–22

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Al-Thani, Khalifa bin Hamad, 117 Al-Thani, Qasim bin Muhammad, 116 Al-Thani, Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa, 124, 191n119 Al-Thani, Tamim bin Hamad, 92 Al-Thani family: background, 189n92; consolidation of rule, 123, 130; number of, 120; secrecy about museums and exhibitions, 191n119; treaty with Britain signed, 116–17 American Association of Museums, 62, 173nn68, 71 American Identities (exhibition, Brooklyn Museum): Art of the Americas compared with, 72, 82; introduction and “walk through,” 72, 74–76; origins of objects, 73–74; reinstallation, 72–73 Americanization of museum collections, 176–77n104 American Party (Know-Nothing Party), 56 American Revolutionary War (1775–83), 59 American Social Science Association, 170n42 Amory, Cleveland, 168n21, 169n26 Amreus, Lars, 41, 47–48 Anacostia Neighborhood Museum (Washington, DC), 53 Anglo-Persian Oil Company, 117 Anvelotti, Carlo, 121 A. P. Moller-Maersk Shipping, 24 Apollo 11, 52 Appiah, Anthony, 148n23 Apprentices’ Library Association (Brooklyn), 69–70 Arab: use of term, 126 Arab Capital of Culture (2010), 118 Arab League, 122 Arab Museum of Modern Art. See Mathaf Arab Spring (2010–12), 118 Aranda-Alvarado, Rocio, 81 Archilochus, 157n59 architects, Plate 11, 8, 134. See also specific architects Arlanda Airport (Stockholm), 21–22 Aronsson, Peter, 29 Art and Industries Museum (Washington, DC), 52 Art Dubai International Fair, 125 artifacts. See artworks; exhibitions; objects Art Institute of Chicago, 51, 87

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artists: classification practices challenged by, 151–52n33; in conversation with ancient objects, 134–35; defined in Singaporean document, 185n58; freedoms and creativity of, 111–12, 188n83; nurturing talent of, 104–5; pairing immigrant and homeland, 79 Art of the Americas Wing (MFA): acquisitions to enhance, 69, 174–75n85; American Identities compared with, 72, 82; “Behind the Scenes” in, 68, 76, 174n84; creating global citizens idea and, 67; expectations of, 140; founding myth underlying, 87; impetus for, 62–63; international connections highlighted in, 58–62, 172–73n66; Manuel José Rubio y Salinas portrait by Cabrera in, Plate 7, 60, 82; response to, 64; as story of “both/and,” 175n86; Timothy Matlack portrait by Peale in, Plate 6, 60, 82 Arts and Culture Strategic Review (Singapore), 103 ArtScience Museum (Singapore), 181n11 arts festivals: Dubai, 125; Singapore, 104, 185–86n68. See also biennials; world’s fairs artworks: contextualization of, 66; objects as artifact vs., 27–28, 44, 135, 159n17; reproductions vs. originals, 57; transformative and connective power of, 79. See also exhibitions; objects art world. See global art world Asia: Massachusetts trading connections to, 59, 64–65; Singapore’s place in, 107–8; “tigers” of, 99; viewpoint on versus in or from, 94. See also South and Southeast Asia; and specific countries Asian Civilizations Museum (ACM, Singapore): building and location, 94; culture’s meanings in, 111, 130; curiosity about, 12; key messages, 107–8; organization of, 106–7; origins, 102, 106; unity in diversity narrative in, 95, 109; volunteer opportunities, 94 —exhibition: Patterns of Trade, 94 Asian Football Cup (2011), 122 Asian Games (2006), 122 assemblages: concept and function, 8, 139, 154–55n45. See also global museum assemblages

assimilation: impossibility of, 55; integration as, 39, 45, 49; as multiracialism and multilingualism, 99–101; of new art worlds into museums, 151n32; rejection of idea, 80 Aste, Richard, 76 Atahualpa (Incan emperor), 75 Atkins, Chet, 174n81 Atlantic Monthly, 88–89, 179–80n139 Attias, Richard, 122 Augustine (saint), 5 Australia, 101, 105, 184n44 autism, 78 Axelrod, John, 174–75n85 Aztec sun calendar, 75 Bahrain, 116–17, 118, 189n90 Balcıoğlu, Emin Mahir, 91, 119, 124, 128 Baltimore Museum of Art, 50 Bandelj, Nina, 145–46n6 Bannerman, James, 95 Banyan tree metaphor, 183–84n43 Barclays Center (Brooklyn), 178n121 Barzakh, 131 Batuman, Elif, 125 Baur, Jack, 72 BBC World Service, 147n15 Beck, Ulrich, 149n26 Becker, Howard, 145–46n6 Beckham, David, 121 Bedouin people, 42, 114, 128, 131, 189n92 Bell, John, 70 Bellah, Robert, 89–90 Belsunse y Salasar, Mariana (portrait of ), Plate 9, 75, 82 Bennett, Tony, 150n28, 151–52n33, 152n34, 154–55n45 Benzel, Kim, 7 Berger, Joseph, 175–76n97 Berggren, H., 165n82 Bergman, Stan, 21 Berlin, Isaiah, 12, 157n59 Bermejo, José Joaquin: Mariana Belsunse y Salasar portrait by, Plate 9, 75, 82 biennials: Queens International, 79, 114; Singapore, Plate 10, 104. See also arts festivals; world’s fairs Bigelow, William Sturgis, 57, 172n49 Bilbao (Spain) museum, 91, 115

Bismarck, Otto von, 35, 161n49 Björklund, Anders, 19, 21–22, 89, 158n9 Bloomberg News, 49 Bodin, Jean-François, 126 Bollywood film posters, 19 Boston: cultural affairs support in, 85–86; diversity of, 55, 62, 84–85, 178n125; early economy of, 168nn23–24; elite families of, 54–55, 56, 61, 88, 168n21, 168–69n25, 169nn26, 28, 171–72n48; founding myth (“city on the hill”), 53–55, 86, 87, 90, 137; historical context, 53–56; national context of, 11; New York City’s relationship to, 11–12; nicknamed “the Hub,” 168n19; nineteenth century museum in, 170n39; personality of, 9; population, 55, 56, 69; tensions and divisions in, 55–56; tourism in, 63; trading connections of, 57, 59; writers noted, 179–80n139. See also Museum of Fine Arts Boston Associates, 54–55, 168–69n25 Boston Athenaeum, 170n39 Boston Celtics, 55 Boston Cultural Council, 86 Boston Latin School, 54 Boston Museum, 170n39 Boston Museum Theatre, 170n39 Boston Phoenix, 64 Bostwick Davis, Elliot: on Art of the Americas Wing, 59, 61–62, 69, 172–73n66, 175n86; on MFA, 67, 171n43 boundaries and borders: balancing connections with, 103, 110–12, 186n70; national definition of, 6. See also cosmopolitanismnationalism continuum; living across borders Bourdieu, Pierre, 152–53n37 Bourne, Randolph, 89 branding and rebranding, 77, 131–32, 155–56n54 Brazil, 22–23, 25. See also Eckhout, Albert Brichet, Nathalia, 158–59n15 Brienen, Rebecca Parker, 23 Brimmer, Martin, 56 Brincker, Benedikt, 161–62n50 British East India Company, 95–97, 116–17 British Museum (London), 2, 27, 143–44n4 Brochmann, Grete, 165–66n88 Bronx Museum of Art (NYC), 179n126

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Brooklyn (NYC): gentrification, 175–76n97; population, 69–70; urban decline, 71; West Indian community, 76 Brooklyn Academy of Music, 70, 178n121, 179n126 Brooklyn Botanic Garden, 70, 179n126 Brooklyn Bridge, 72 Brooklyn Children’s Museum, 70 Brooklyn Institute of Art and Sciences, 70–71 Brooklyn Museum (was Brooklyn Museum of Art): attractions nearby, 178n121; community focus and populist stance, 71–72, 74, 76, 86; on cosmopolitanism-nationalism continuum, 50–51, 137; Cultural Institutions Group membership of, 85, 179n126; current collecting priorities, 75–76; free days at, 82, 126, 134; Giuliani’s attempt to censor, 85; hours and accessibility, 82; MFA compared with, 82–87; mission, 71–72, 175n95; motto, 70; number of visitors, 71; origins, 51, 69–70; particular context of, 83–84; “Rainbow House” of, 73; rethinking or rebranding of, 77 —exhibitions: Connecting Cultures, 76–77; Sensation, 85. See also American Identities Brooklyn Museum School Service, 74 Brown, Richard D., 168n24 Brunias, Agostino, 75–76 Brunius, Staffan, 43 Buren, Daniel, 151–52n33 Bush, George W., 121 cabinets of curiosities (kunstkammern), 23, 26, 170n39 Cabrera, Miguel: Manuel José Rubio y Salinas portrait by, Plate 7, 60, 82 Cai, Guo-Qiang, 126 Calhoun, Craig, 149n26 Carbone, Terry, 72–73, 86 Carlsson, Ingvar, 33 Carolus-Duran (Charles Auguste Émile Durand), 60–61 Carr, Dennis, 59, 60 CBS News, 40 censorship, 85, 111–12, 188n83 Center for the Future of Museums project (American Association of Museums), 62 Charles XII (king of Sweden), 41 Chicago, Art Institute of, 51, 87

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children: Brooklyn Museum’s welcoming of, 74; Doha exhibition of works by, 126; expedition story for, 21; iconic object funded in part by, 59; museum visits of, 14–15, 29; programming and collections specifically for, 42, 109. See also education and schooling; museum educational programming Childs, Marquis, 31 China: American trade with, 59, 64–65; in Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other classification, 99–101, 108, 110, 184n51; exhibition about, 109; Fresh Ink exhibition and, 68; Qatar’s natural gas contracts in, 121; Singaporeans living in, 101, 184n44 Chitty Melaka people, 187n74 Chong, Alan, 107, 134 Chong, T., 184nn47, 51, 185n58, 188n83 Christian Democrats (Swedish political party), 33 Christian II (king of Denmark), 37 Christian IV (king of Denmark), 35 Christian VII (king of Denmark), 161–62n50 Cinemarosa (LGBTQ film and video series), 78–80 citizens and citizenship: Danish debates and laws on, 36–38, 161–62n50, 163–64n62, 164n65; Danish declaration on, 39; ethnic descent (jus sanguinis) vs. place of birth (jus solis) as basis for, 163–64n62; “fatherland” and criteria for, 36, 161–62n50; museums as tool for creating, 3, 9–10, 42–43, 52–53, 57, 134, 140–41, 150n28, 151–52n33, 171n46; museums not a tool for creating, 67, 139–40; political rights in Qatar and, 92; social contract of nation and, 5; Swedish model for, 31; Swedish vs. Danish norms for, 166n97. See also global citizens Citizens’ Committee on Boston’s Future, 86 city: author’s interviews of government professionals, 155–56n54; characteristics of global, 185n67, 185–86n68; memory traces and character of, 145–46n6; as place of museum, 9–10; as potential organization field, 155–56n54 “city on the hill.” See Boston: founding myth civic capacity, 145–46n6 civic process as cumulative, 9 civic seeing, 150n28

civilizing mission, 151n32. See also colonialism classification and hierarchies: Brooklyn Museum’s shaking up of, 76–77; class, race, and nationalism in, 6–7; class-based stereotypes of Qatar, 119; in ethnographic portraits, Plate 2, 23–24, 25; evolutionary schemas in, 151n32; of high vs. popular art, 171–72n48; Linnaeus’s influence on, 19–20; as museum function, 8; Qatari and non-Qatari, 123, 129; in Smithsonian, 52–53; by stereotypical racial attributes (ChineseMalay-Indian-Other), 99–101, 108, 110, 184n51; Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages invented, 26; Swedish explorers’ influence on, 20–21. See also adjacencies or pairings in exhibitions Clemens, Samuel (Mark Twain), 9 Clifford, James, 8, 135, 151n32, 153n42 Codman, Martha Catherine (later, Karolik), 61, 87 collecting and collections: American art narrative and, 61, 172n65; background of, 26–27; critiques of, 92; of wealthy Americans, 51–52; world power dynamics of, 21–22. See also donors; expeditions; global art world Collier, Stephen J., 154–55n45 colonialism: acknowledgment of effects, 141; collecting in context of, 26–27; continuum assumed in, 52; Dutch in Brazil, 22–23; museums’ roots in, 7, 20–21, 52, 73; Palme’s rejection of, 32; portrait aesthetics similar across countries, Plates 6 and 7, 60, 63; portrait iconography similar across countries, Plates 8 and 9, 74–75. See also expeditions; imperialist projects; Spanish colonial art Columbia command module (Apollo 11), 52 Columbian Museum (Boston), 170n39 congealed social agreements, 145–46n6 Congo (Democratic Republic of the Congo), 21, 141 consciousness industry, 152n36 Conservative People’s Party (Konservative Folkeparti, Denmark), 38, 39 constituency and community-based museums, 3, 87, 109, 140. See also specific museums (e.g., Queens Museum of Art) contact zones, 8, 103, 135, 153nn42–43

continuity-change dichotomy, 9 Cook, Greg, 64 Cook, James, 20, 23 Cooke, Miriam, 131, 180n1 Coomaraswamy, Ananda Kentish, 57–58 Coomaraswamy, Ethel, 58 Cooper, Scott, 124–25 Copenhagen: cultural armature of, 34–40; diversity of, 36–38; foreign labor needed, 163n56; location and economy, 35; as national influence, 10, 34; schoolchildren’s museum visits in, 14–15 —cultural institutions: Danish Immigration Museum, 39–40. See also Museum of Copenhagen; National Museum of Denmark Copley, John Singleton, 59, 74 corporate practices: support for, 152nn36–37. See also funding issues cosmopolitanism: approach to and questions about, 12–13; art project participation as fostering, 79–80; concept, 6, 136, 142, 148n22; cosmopolitics as one aspect of, 6, 67, 137, 149nn25–26; multicultural and intercultural sources of, 147–48n20; partial type of, 6, 148n23; racialized spaces unsettled in, 103; reinventing museums in relation to, 8–9, 51, 152n34; sites for encouraging, 5, 147n15; tribal modernity and, 131–32. See also migrants and immigrants; universalism and universal values; and specific locales cosmopolitanism-nationalism continuum: cultural institutions’ places on, 3; earlier research on, 144–45n5, 149n26; folk-highschool idea on, 36–37; interdependence of cosmopolitan and national on, 136–38; nation’s internal diversity vs. global citizens on, 77. See also specific museums and locales cosmopolitan nationalism: concept, 144–45n5; in Qatar, 119–23; in United States, 11, 83, 87–90, 137 cosmopolitics, 6, 67, 137, 149nn25–26 Cotter, Holland, 64, 77 Council of Europe, 49, 166n95 Crick, Francis, 20 Culin, R. Stewart, 73, 176n102 Cullen, Deborah, 81, 82

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cultural armature: concept, 3, 83–86, 145–46n6; effects of, 9–10, 29; fostering changes in, 97, 110, 130–31; museum practice in relation to, 83, 137–38. See also cosmopolitanismnationalism continuum; diversity and diversity management regimes; and specific locales cultural capitalists, 171–72n48. See also Boston: elite families of cultural institutions: botanic gardens as, 70, 179n126; cognitive models and norms as shaping, 145–46n6; cosmopolitanism encouraged in practices of, 5, 147n15; disciplinary function of, 151–52n33; problemsolving function of, 22; for repositioning nation in region and world, 91; specific locale’s role in, 9–10. See also museums Cultural Institutions Group (NYC), 85, 86–87, 179n126 cultural omnivorousness, 149n25 cultural wealth, 145–46n6 cultural workers, 102–6. See also museum professionals culture: definitions of, 86–87, 111, 151n32; elites’ deployment of, 152–53n37; fluidity of, 79; in global and in everyday life, 134; industrial distribution of consciousness masked by, 152n36; museum representation of, 6–7; purity impossible in, 107; as site for achieving modernity, 131–32 Culture for All (Danish plan), 39 Cummins, Joan, 76 Cuno, James B., 2, 7–8, 139 curators: adjacencies concept of, 60; author’s interviews of, 155–56n54; backgrounds and training, 25, 26, 57; classification practices challenged by, 151–52n33; for contemporary global issues, 18–19; exchanges of, 80–82, 141, 177–78n114; generational divide in, 43; neoliberalism and budget cuts for, 44; reluctant to discuss citizenship, 42; statements and photos of, included in exhibition, 68, 174n83; visitor expectations and funding issues for, 83–84. See also exhibition and museum practices; and specific museums Curie, Marie, 20 Curley, James Michael, 55

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Dahne, Ulf, 26, 27 Dalzell, Robert F., 54–55, 168–69n25 Damsholt, Tine, 161–62n50 Dana, John Cotton, 171n46 Danish Immigration Museum (Farum, Copenhagen), 39–40 Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti), 38–39, 47 Danish Refugee Aid organization, 163–64n62 Danish Royal Committee, 26 Darieva, Tsypylma, 149n26 Daugbjerg, Mads, 143–44n4, 144–45n5, 157n3, 158–59n15, 161n49 “Declaration of Integration and Active Citizenship in Danish Society” (Denmark), 39 “Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums,” 143–44n4 definitionism concept, 125 Deleuze, Gilles, 125, 154–55n45 Democratic Republic of the Congo, 21, 141 Denmark: attitude toward immigrants in, 37–40, 163nn55–56; battlefield reinvented as peace site in, 144–45n5; citizenship laws in, 38, 161–62n50, 163–64n62, 164n65; colonial past of, 21, 35; Copenhagen’s influence on, 10; on cosmopolitanism-nationalism continuum, 10–11, 15, 26–27, 29, 36–37, 39–40, 136–37; cultural armature and geopolitics of, 34–40; Danishness in, 26–29, 45–46; diversity of, 11, 27–28; in EU but opted out of euro, 156n55; “fatherland” meanings in, 36, 161–62n50; folk-high-school movement, 35, 36–37, 165n87; German defeat of, 35–36; homogeneity and national identity of, 11, 28–29, 39–40, 45–49; icon of nationalism of, Plate 3, 24–25; immigration policies in, 38, 45, 163–64n62, 165n77; motto of, 35–36, 37; Muhammad cartoon debacle in, 38; museum renovation cycle in, 25–26; national anthem of, 14; number of museums in, 158n9; population, 28, 37, 161n49; prehistory and peasant culture celebrated in, 28–29, 162–63n54; public funding for some museums in, 158n9; Sweden’s relationship to, 12, 35; Swedish museums’ approach compared with, 42–49. See also Copenhagen; and specific museums Derby, Elias Hasket, 61

Destination X (exhibition), Plate 4, 19, 40–41 Detroit Institute of Arts, 51 Dezember, Michelle, 119, 125, 126 Diaz, Pedro José, 75 DiMaggio, Paul, 171–72n48 directors: administrative vs. gallery time of, 50; on critical thinking, 44; international conventions used by, 17–18; reluctant to discuss citizenship, 39 Discovery Channel, 44 diversity and diversity management regimes: components and complexity, 3–5; cosmopolitanism-nationalism continuum and, 136–37; cultural diversity defined, 18; differences in, 11; migrants’ role in, 133–34; moral significance of, 147–48n20. See also cosmopolitanism-nationalism continuum; cultural armature; migrants and immigrants; and under specific locales Dixon, Katie, 85 Doha (Qatar): connecting global art world to, 125–26; development of museums and economy in, 91–93, 95; historical context, 116–17; museum ecology of, 115; name of, 188n84; opportunities in, 112–13; Qatar interchangeable with, 10, 188n85; as rentier state, 118; Salt Lake City compared with, 128; Singapore’s relationship to, 12, 93, 130; state-managed ethnic and racial diversity of, 11. See also Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Islamic Art; National Museum of Qatar; Qatar; Qatar Museum Authority; Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum Doha GOALS (Gathering of All Leaders in Sports, 2013), 122 Doha News, 155–56n54 donors: activities, exhibitions, and direction influenced by, 69, 86; highlighted in exhibitions, 61, 68; for New Danish Prehistory exhibition, 24; for refurbishing New York City panorama, 78. See also censorship; collecting and collections Dorchester Company, 54 Dow, Arthur Wesley, 57 Dubai (United Arab Emirates): arts festival in, 125; Doha distinguished from, 124; as entrepôt, 118

Duchamp, Marcel, 151–52n33 Dutch West India Company, 22–23 Dybbøl (Danish battlefield), 144–45n5 East India Marine Society, 64–65, 174n77 Eckhout, Albert (Dutch painter): ethnographic portraits by, 23–24, 170n39; expedition to Brazil, 22–23, 75; noted, 15; The Tarairiu Woman, Plate 2, 23–24, 25 Ecuador, 80, 137 education and schooling: art education in Qatar, 123; art education in Singapore, 104–5; folk-high-school movement, 35, 36–37, 165n87; “free schools,” 47, 165n87; professional museum training, 8–9; Qatar’s Education City and plan for, 118, 119, 121; reforms in Singapore, 102. See also museum educational programming Edward Ingersoll Brown Fund (Boston), 86 Egypt: Mosque of Ahmad Ibn Tulun (Cairo) in, 113; objects of, 7, 83, 92; Qatar’s investment in, 118–19, 122 Ekenstam, Thure Reinhold, 16 Eklund, Klas, 32 El Museo del Barrio (NYC): controversies of, 84, 140; on cosmopolitanism-nationalism continuum, 83, 137–38; credit for establishing, 87; Cultural Institutions Group membership of, 179n126; exhibition collaboration with Queens Museum, 80–82, 177–78n114; story of transnational lives at, 51, 80 Emancipation Proclamation (U.S., 1863), 75 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 55, 56, 75, 88, 169n30 Engelen, Jean-Paul, 112, 118, 121 Enhedslisten (Danish leftist party), 164n65 equality: collectivism distinguished from, 165n82; immigrant minorities and, 48–49; individualism and, 46–47, 165n82 Ericsson, John, 31 Esplanade Theater by the Bay (Singapore), 102 Essex Institute (Essex Historical and Essex Natural History societies merged), 65, 174nn77–78. See also Peabody Essex Museum ethnicity: cosmopolitanism and tolerance of, 6, 149nn25–26; as means of empowerment in U.S., 53; national identity based on, 45–49;

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ethnicity (continued) New York’s celebration of, 84–85, 178n122; place of birth vs., 163–64n62. See also classification and hierarchies; diversity and diversity management regimes; migrants and immigrants; race ethnography: multisited, 138–39; museums focused on, 3; objects collected and displayed, 25–28, 159n17; relocating collections, 17. See also classification and hierarchies; repatriation Etnografiska Museet (Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm): “foreign” collections held in, 157n4; location, 19; plan to relocate collections of, 17; stakeholders’ help in developing exhibitions at, 44–45; totem pole repatriated from, 135 —exhibitions: Bringing the World Home, 19–22; on Kuwait, 42–43; on Native Americans, 45; Trafficking, Plate 1, 22 Euben, Roxanne Leslie, 147–48n20 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, 166n95 European Union (EU) membership, 11, 156n55 exhibition and museum practices: approaches to studying, 2–4, 10–13, 155–56n54; curators’ statements and photos included, 68, 135, 174n83; current debate about, 7–8; current events and, 42–43; department store techniques, 176–77n104; directed connections between galleries, 63; directors’ and educators’ guides, 104, 186n70; hours and accessibility issues, 73, 77, 82, 126, 134, 178n119; labeling decisions, 104, 113–14, 129; “middle” way in, 40–42; renovation cycles and, 25–26; salon style for paintings, 61; similarities across museums and countries, 134–35; “talking heads” on computer screens, 106; trade-offs in, 140. See also adjacencies or pairings in exhibitions; curators; museum educational programming exhibitionary complex, 151–52n33 exhibitions: as art form, 73; collections from sister museums, 57; as display of artifacts and those who make them, 151–52n33; experiential, emotional style in, 16–17; immigrant and homeland artists paired in,

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79; internationalization of, 137–38, 154–55; as interpretive acts, 68; permanent, 18, 42; “real estate” in, 7; stakeholders’ help in developing, 44–45; traveling, 67, 74. See also exhibition and museum practices —denmark: Becoming a Copenhagener, 39; Brazilian ethnography, 25; ethnographic portraits, Plate 2, 23–24, 25, 135; Kølbjerg Woman and Egtved Girl, 24; New Danish Prehistory, 15, 24–25, 28–29, 41; The Peoples of the World, Plate 2, 23–24, 159n17; Pow Wow, 159n16; The Stories of Denmark, 15, 27–28, 41; The Sun Chariot, or Solvognen, Plate 3, 24–25; Treasure Chamber, 159n17 —qatar: Another Look, 126–27; “Between the Past and the Future” room, 128; Ferozkoh: Tradition and Continuity in Afghan Art, 114; Hajj, 114; Hey’Ya: Arab Women in Sports, 124; Olympics, 124; Portrait of a European Gentleman (unknown artist), Plate 12, 114; Saraab, 126; schoolchildren’s artworks, 126; Tea with Nefertiti, 92 —singapore: Art Garden, 185n67; Patterns of Trade, 94; Raw Canvas, Plate 10, 105; The Singapore Show, 105, 186n70 —sweden: Bollywood, 19; Bringing the World Home, 19–22; Destination X, Plate 4, 19, 40–41; HIV/AIDS, 44; Horizons, 141; on Kuwait, 42–43; on Native Americans, 45; Sister of Dreams, 18; A Stolen World, 40, 164nn70, 72; Trafficking, Plate 1, 22 —united arab emirates, 129 —united states: Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, 80–82, 177–78n114; Connecting Cultures, 76–77; Dangerous Curves (guitars), 174n81; Fresh Ink, 68, 114; Global Patterns, 174n83; K’iché burial urns, Plate 5, 59, 62, 63; A Nation of Nations, 53; Permission to be Global, 68; Sensation, 85; Speed, Style, and Beauty, 174n81. See also American Identities; Art of the Americas Wing expeditions: American, 74; British, 75–76; Dutch, 22–24; Swedish, 20–21 Exxon Mobil Corp., 120–21 fairs. See arts festivals; world’s fairs Faroe Islands, 35, 161n46 Farquhar, William, 95, 97

Farrell, Betty, 173n68, 173n71 “fatherland,” 36, 161–62n50 Feldman, Jackie, 144–45n5 Fenellosa, Ernest Francisco, 57, 172n49 Ferrell, Heather, 127–28 Fibiger, Thomas, 143–44n4, 158–59n15 FIFA World Cup (2022), 92, 112, 119–20, 124, 127, 191n121 Finkelpearl, Tom, 78, 80 Finland: migrants from, 33–34; Nazi relations with, 31; role in Congo, 21 folkhemmet (“people’s home”), 31, 48–49 folk-high-school movement (Denmark), 35, 36–37, 165n87 Foner, Nancy, 84, 178n122 Fontanales-Cisneros Collection (MFA), 68 Foucault, Michel, 151–52n33 Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (Council of Europe), 49, 166n95 Franklin, Benjamin, 59, 74 Frederick II (king of Denmark), 35 Frederick III (king of Denmark), 23 Frederik VII (king of Denmark), 37 Freudenburg, William, 145–46n6 Friends of the Museums (Singapore), 94–95 Fromherz, Allen, 118, 123 From Pole to Pole (Hedin), 21 From Third World to First (Lee), 98 Frykman, Jonas, 31 funding issues: censorship and, 84–85; cities’ differences in, 85–86; for museums in future, 139–40 Furnivall, John Sydenham, 182–83n33 Fyfe, Gordon, 153n41 Gama, Vasco da, 95 Gardner, Andrew, 190n101 Gardner, Isabella Stewart, 57, 107 Garland, Judy, 52 Garrison, William Lloyd, 56 Gaskall, Ivan, 153n41 Gates Foundation, 122 Geary, Chris, 68, 174n83 General Treaty of Peace (1820), 116 Georgetown University in Qatar, 121 “German Feud” (Denmark), 36 Germany: artistic production investments in,

105; heimat concept in, 37; migrants from, 29–30. See also Nazi Germany; Prussia Ghana: Denmark and, 27, 35, 158–59n15 Gillespie, Marie, 147n15 Gilman, Benjamin Ives, 57, 171nn46–47 Gilroy, Paul, 149n26 Giuliani, Rudy, 85 Glass, Phillip, 185–86n68 Glistrup, Mogens, 47 Global Art Forum (2013), 125 global art world: consciousness industry and, 152n36; current wave of, 115; governance of museums and, 8–9; Qatar’s connecting to, 123–27; Singapore’s connecting to, 103–4, 125; traditional criteria of quality, rarity, and beauty in, 151n32. See also arts festivals; biennials; exhibition and museum practices; museum professionals global citizens: earlier views of, 5; El Museo’s goal for, 81–82; friction of diverse encounters of, 153n43; hopes for developing, 2, 67; obstacles to promotion of, 83–84. See also citizens and citizenship; migrants and immigrants; transnational lives Global City for the Arts project (Singapore, 1992), 102 globalization and global processes: approaches to studying, 12–13; “curator” of, 43; dialogue about effects of, 80; inequality in, 6; “internal,” 144–45n5; multisited ethnography of, 138–39; museum world situated in, 2–4, 9 global museum assemblages: concept and function, 8–9, 134, 153–54n44; historical practices in, 154–55n45; interdependence evidenced in, 135–36; mobile professionals’ roles in, 134–35; multisited ethnographic approach to, 138–39; museums’ incorporation of different elements of, 83–87 “God Save the Queen” (song), 98 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 5 Goh, Ching Lee, 185–86n68 Goh, Chok Tong, 99, 100, 188n83 Goh, Keng Swee, 101 Goldschmidt, Meir Aron, 36–37 Goode, George Brown, 52, 150n28 Gothenburg (Sweden): museums display of cosmopolitanism, 10–11; trading connections of, 30

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Gothenburg City Museum, 40. See also Museum of World Culture Graham, Augustus, 70, 83 Grande, Edgar, 149n26 Great Britain: East India Company of, 95–97, 116–17; expedition to West Indies, 75–76; “headscarf issue” in, 183n39; as “maritime police,” 116–17; national anthem, 98; Qatar’s investments in, 91; Singaporeans living in, 101, 184n44. See also London Greenblatt, Stephen, 67 Greenland, 35, 161n46 Greve, Henrich R., 145–46n6 Grinnell, Klaus, 18–19, 48 Grundtvig, N. F. S., 36–37, 47, 162n52, 165n87 Gruner-Domic, Sandra, 149n26 Guardiola-Rivera, Oscar, 125 Guattari, Félix, 154–55n45 Guggenheim Museum, 79, 115 Gulf War (1990–91), 42–43 Gullestad, Marianne, 48 Gustav II Adolf (king of Sweden), 15, 29 Gustav III (king of Sweden), 30 Haacke, Hans, 152n36 Habibie, B. J., 187n78 Hagelund, Anniken, 165–66n88 Hall, David, 74 Hall, Deborah, Plate 8, 74–75, 82 Halle, David, 86–87 Hannerz, Ulf, 149n26, 155n47 Hanseatic League, 29, 35 Hansen, Per Christian, 24–26, 28, 44, 45, 47, 135 Hao, Sheng, 63, 68 Harkness, Geoff, 192n131 Harlem. See The Studio Museum in Harlem Hartigan, Lynda, 66 Harvard University (earlier, Harvard College): Boston’s founding myth and, 87; Emerson’s address to Phi Beta Kappa Society, 55; founding, 54; governance and funding, 169n28; museum course at, 171n47; print collection of, 170n42 Harvey, Penelope, 152n36 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 179–80n139 Hazelius, Artur Immanuel, 15–17, 157nn2–3 Hazelius, Johan, 16

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Healey, Augustus, 70 Hearst, William Randolph, 75 Hedetoft, Ulf, 45 Hedin, Sven, 21 Heiberg, Peter Andreas, 36 heimat (concept ), 37 Heinö, A. J., 46 Hellerman, Steven L., 90 Hendrix, Jimi, 174n81 Henkel, David, 106, 107 Herodotus (historian), 115 Hirshler, Erica, 60–61, 63, 67, 140 Hirst, Damien, 92–93 Hochtief (German construction firm), 121 Holger Danske (opera), 36 Holland. See Netherlands Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 55, 75 Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, DC), 168n16 Holst, Karen, 32 Hong Kong, 97, 99, 101 humankind: display of cultural heritage of, 6–7; liberation mythology, 152n36; mobility of, 19; trafficking in, Plate 1, 22 human rights approach, 18, 90 Human Rights Watch, 120, 189–90n99 human trafficking exhibition, Plate 1, 22 hybridity and hybridization: balancing boundaries with, 103, 110–12, 186n70; embraced at same time as reifying boundaries, 93, 108–10, 130 Ibrahimovic, Zlatan, 121 iconic objects. See objects: iconic identity: as historically and culturally specific, 135–36. See also language issues; specific locales Ignatieff, Michael, 87–88, 90 immigration policy: on asylum, 160n39; differences across countries, 45–49, 165n77, 166n97; on enhancing migrants’ movement, 167n99; integration policies compared with, 164n75; museums influenced by, 48–49; potential conflict over, 165–66n88; practical convergence vs. discursive divergence in, 45; recognition of minorities, 49, 166n95. See also migrants and immigrants; specific countries

imperialist projects: British East India Company and, 95–97, 116–17; classification as justification for, 6–7; Dutch West India Company, 22–23; Eurocentrism in, 148n22. See also classification and hierarchies; colonialism imprinting, 145–46n6 India: American trade with, 64; in ChineseMalay-Indian-Other classification, 99–101, 108, 110, 184n51; exhibition about, 109; MFA’s ties to, 57–58; Sanskrit cosmopolis in relation to, 5, 148n21 Indian Heritage Center (Singapore), 109 Indian Kevorkian Hyderabad carpet, 114 installations. See exhibitions institutions. See cultural institutions Integration Act (Denmark, 1999), 163–64n62 “Intellectual Declaration of Independence” (Emerson), 55 Internal Security Act (Singapore), 183–84n43 International Committee on Museums, 8–9, 135 internationalism: multiculturalism in relation to, 79; Palme’s support for, 17, 32, 47–48; Wilson’s support for, 89 International Migration Outlook (OECD report, 2012), 49 Internet, 39, 41, 43–44, 156 Iraq: migrants from, 34 Iraq War (first, 1990–91), 42–43 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston), 57, 107 Islamic ethos: architectural sites important in, 113; travel and cosmopolitanism in, 5, 147–48n20; Wahhabi interpretation, 115. See also Museum of Islamic Art; Muslim people; Qatar Iwasaki, Hitomi, 79–80 Iyer, Pico, 133 Jamaica: British study of, 1 Japan: cultured pearls invented in, 117; MFA’s sister museum in, 57, 172n50; national anthem, 98; Qatar’s natural gas contracts in, 121; Singapore and Malaysia occupied by (WWII), 97, 98 Jarl, Birger, 29, 30 “Jasmine” (Mohammed al-Ajami), 120 Jawi Peranakan people, 187n74

Jek, Yeun Tong, 184n48 Jenkins, Richard, 46 Jerusalem (Israel), 122 Jewish people: as migrants, 33, 37, 160n37; Pirkei Avot of, 141, 193n9; recognized as minority in Sweden, 49, 166n95; Singapore exhibition on, 187n77 Josephson, Ernst, 15 J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles), 124 Judt, Tony, 12–13 Kamrava, Mehran, 118–19 Kant, Immanuel, 5 Karell, Sven, 40 Karolik, Maxim and Martha, 61, 68, 87 Kennedy, Thalia, 114 Kennedy family, 55 Key, Francis Scott, 52 Khaled, Rana, 192n131 K’iché burial urns (Maya), Plate 5, 59, 62, 63 Kimball, Moses, 170n39 “Kimigayo” (song), 98 Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 151–52n33 Klein, Barbro, 157n4 knowledge, 4–5, 7, 147–48n20. See also classification and hierarchies Know-Nothing Party (American Party), 56 Koch, Ed, 85 Koh, Michael, 95, 107, 186–87n71 Kold, Christen, 165n87 Komai, Ray, 72 Kong, Lily, 110, 185n67, 187n77 Konservative Folkeparti (Conservative People’s Party, Denmark), 38, 39 Kouoh, Koyo, 125 Kreuger, Ivar, the “Match King,” 31 Krishnan, Gauri, 109 kunstkammern (cabinets of curiosities), 23, 26, 170n39 Kwa, Geok Choo, 98 Kwok, Kenson, 93–94, 102, 108 Kymlicka, Will, 149n26 labor. See workers Labour Front (political party, Singapore), 97–98 LaFarge, John, 57 Lahikainen, Dean, 65, 174n78 Lam, Wilfredo, Untitled, 69

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Lane, William H. and Sandra B., 171n65 Langewiesche, William, 89 language issues: English vs. native language (spoken at home), 84–85; multilingual museum labels, 129; museum classes in, 78; in Singapore, 100, 103, 104, 107, 108; translations of, 80 Larsson, Carl, 15 Latour, Bruno, 149n26, 154–55n45 Lavezzi, Ezequiel, 121 Law of Indigenous Rights (Denmark, 1766), 161–62n50 Lawrence, Timothy Bigelow, 170n42 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 72, 179–80n139 Lee, Hsien Loong, 99, 100 Lee, Jane, Raw Canvas, Plate 10, 105 Lee, Khoon Choy, 101 Lee, Kuan Yew (Harry Lee), 97–99, 108, 188n83 Lee, Terence, 112 Lehman, Arnold, 50, 71–72, 76, 77, 167n1 Lennon, John, 174n81 Leo, Petrina, 112 Leopold II (king of Belgium), 21 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community, 78–80 Lester, Raymond, 78 Levy, Daniel, 144–45n5 Liberty Bowl (Revere), 59–60 Lim, Charles, 105–6, 186n70 Lin, Weiqiang, 184n46 Lindegren, Amalia, 16 Lingham, Susie, 107 Linnaeus, Carl, 19–20 “lion city.” See Singapore Lipsitz, George, 13 living across borders: meanings of, 4–5, 19; Queens biennial as, 79. See also boundaries and borders; transnational lives Lobell, Jarrett A., 24 London: British Museum in, 2, 27, 143–44n4; diversity of, 4; Qatar’s investment in, 118 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 88 Lopez Cuenca, Rogelio, 41 Louis XIV (king of France), 23 Louvre (Paris), 2 Lowell, James Russell, 88

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Macdonald, Sharon, 144–45n5, 153n41 MacGregor, Neil, 2, 5, 6, 139, 143–44n4 “Majulah Singapura” (song), 98 Malaysia: in Chinese-Malay-Indian-Other classification, 99–101, 108, 110, 184n51; exhibition about, 109; “headscarf issue” and, 183n39; Japanese occupation of, 97, 98; multiethnic character of, 106; Perak Museum for artifacts of, 187n72; Singapore expelled from union, 98, 101; trading history of, 95–96 Mali, National Museum in, 141 Mandle, Roger, 114, 128–29 Mångkulturellt Centrum (Multicultural Center, Stockholm), 41–42, 45, 140 Manhem Society (Sweden), 16 “A Manifesto for the Arts” (Singapore, 2013), 188n83 Marcgraf, Georg, 23 Maritime Experiential Museum (Singapore), 181n11 Markovits, Andrei S., 90 Marshall, David, 97–98 Martin, Barbara, 69, 87 Marx, Karl, 5 Massachusetts: Asian trading connections of, 59, 64–65; cosmopolitan seaports of, 64–65; early economy of, 168nn23–24; tensions and divisions in, 55–56. See also Boston; Peabody Essex Museum Massachusetts General Court, 56 Massachusetts House of Representatives, 59 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 170n42 mass media: Al-Jazeera network and, 115, 118, 122–23; Internet and, 39, 41, 43–44, 156; learning about world through museums vs., 25–26, 44; nationalistic claims reinforced via access to, 144–45n5; on Qatar, 91–92. See also specific newspapers Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (Doha): completed, 113; curiosity about, 12; dual stories of, 129; free days, 126, 134; goals, 125–26; noted, 119; programming, 126–27 —exhibitions: Another Look, 126–27; Saraab, 126; schoolchildren’s artworks, 126 Matlack, Timothy (portrait of ), Plate 6, 60, 82 Maya, K’iché burial urns, Plate 5, 59, 62, 63

Mayflower (ship), 54, 168n21 McClellan, Andrew, 151n32 Medelhavsmuseet (Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm), 17 Medieval Sinhalese Art (Coomaraswamy), 58 Medvedeva, Maria, 173n68, 173n71 Mellon, Andrew, 51–52 Melville, Herman, 65, 179–80n139 memory cultures, 144–45n5 memory traces, 145–46n6 MENA (Middle East nervous anxiety), 125 Mendel, Gregor, 20 Menino, Thomas, 85–86 Merritt, Elizabeth E., 62 Merry, Sally, 153–54n44 methodological approach, 10–13, 155–56n54 Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), 7, 51, 71, 140, 179n126 Mexico: colonial era in, Plate 7, 60, 72; foreign currency in, 4. See also pre-Columbian art MFA. See Museum of Fine Arts MIA. See Museum of Islamic Art Middle East nervous anxiety (MENA), 125 Migrant Integration Policy Index, 165n77 migrants and immigrants: acculturation of, 74, 176–77n104; as art patrons, 61; asylum policies and, 160n39; challenges in relation to, 11, 19, 34, 140–41; family reunification requirements, 38, 163–64n62, 164n65; as future citizens, 33; as living across borders, 4–5; museums’ representation of, 75–76, 78–82; needed as labor, 31, 33, 101, 163n56; number of, 4, 133–34, 142; objects of travelers vs., 40–41; Qatari residents distinguished from, 123, 129; remittances home, 4, 146n11; residential segregation of, 34, 38, 42, 55, 97, 99; sea nomads as, 95, 181n13; Singapore’s longtime residents distinguished from, 103, 186n70; venues for exploring, 42–49. See also assimilation; diversity and diversity management regimes; immigration policy; language issues; transnational lives; workers Minangkabau people, 107 Minto, Lord (Gilbert Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound), 96 Mirrer, Louise, 86–87

MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), 170n42 mobility. See migrants and immigrants; transnational lives; travel and travelers modern traditionalism, 192n131 Molotch, Harvey, 145–46n6 Monck, Christopher (Duke of Albemarle), 1 Monroe, Dan, 10, 51, 65–67, 84, 176n102 Montebello, Philippe de, 8 Morgan, J. P., 51 Morrison, Samuel Eliot, 54 Morse, Edward Sylvester, 57, 172n49 Moses, Robert, 78 Mosque of Ahmad Ibn Tulun (Cairo), 113 Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, Sheikha, 121, 124–25 Muhammad bin Thani bin Muhammad, 116 Multicultural Center (Mångkulturellt Centrum, Stockholm), 41–42, 45, 140 multiculturalism: critiques of, 33–34; internationalism in relation to, 79; New York’s flavor of, 84; Singapore’s identity of, 99–103, 184nn47–48, 51; Swedish social democratic twist to, 33, 48; teaching children about, 109; U.S. hierarchy in, 53, 168n16; ways of doing, 149n26. See also cosmopolitanism; diversity and diversity management regimes; pluralisms and multiple voices Multiculturalism Policy Index, 165n77 Mumford, Lewis, 9 Muñoz, Adriana, 18 Murakami, Takashi, 134 Murray, Grace, 125–26 Museo del Prado (Madrid), 61 museum architecture: accessibility issues, 77; priorities evidenced in, 7; “starchitects” for designing, Plate 11, 8, 134 museum educational programming: author’s interviews of professionals in, 155–56n54; championed at Brooklyn Museum, 74; championed at MFA (early twentieth cen.), 171n46; as cosmopolitanizing residents, 104; on immigration, 42; on Islamic art and artists, 114–15; on multiculturalism, 109; similarities across museums and countries, 126–27, 134–35; as training museumgoers, 123. See also exhibition and museum practices

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235

museum effect, 7 Museum Explorers’ Club (Queens Museum), 78 museumgoers: accessibility issues and hours for, 73, 77, 82, 126, 134, 178n119; attendance data on, 173n71; author’s observations of, 155–56n54; changing tastes in exhibition styles, 25; community members welcomed as, 78–82; cosmopolitanism encouraged for, 8–9; creating identities but not rights and responsibilities of, 110; creating next generation of, 185n67; curators’ views and expectations of, 43–45; demographic shifts of, 62; expectations of, 63, 83–84, 140; museum as experienced by, 7–8; own culture recognized by, 50; report on younger visitors’ views, 173n68; typical Danish, 39; understanding of museums, 153n41; volunteer opportunities for, 94–95; workers as, 17, 52, 57, 129. See also exhibitions; museum educational programming Museum of African Art (Washington, DC), 53 Museum of Copenhagen: Becoming a Copenhagener exhibition of, 39; expectations of, 140; national belonging as topic in, 45 Museum of Ethnography (Gothenburg), 17 Museum of Ethnography (Stockholm). See Etnografiska Museet Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (Östasiatiska Museet, Stockholm), 17 Museum of Fine Arts (MFA, Boston): artists’ conversations with ancient objects in, 134–35; Atlantic Monthly’s connection to, 88; Brooklyn Museum compared with, 82–87; on cosmopolitanism-nationalism continuum, 50–51, 57–58, 60–62, 63, 69, 82–83, 137, 172–73n66; donors’ influences on, 86; educational vs. contemplative approaches in, 171nn46–47; founding, 51, 56, 87, 170n42, 171n43; free days, 82, 126, 134; funding, 140; hours and accessibility, 82, 178n119; lacunae in collections, 68–69; mission and motto, 56–57, 67, 134; openness fostered, 68, 135, 174n81; Rajput painting collection, 58; recent acquisitions, 69, 174–75n85; restructuring, 62–63; shifting view of art at, 171–72n48; South Asian galleries redesigned, 68; visitors’ expectations, 83–84

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—exhibitions: Dangerous Curves (guitars), 174n81; Fresh Ink, 68, 114; Global Patterns, 174n83; K’iché burial urns, Plate 5, 59, 62, 63; Permission to be Global, 68; Speed, Style, and Beauty, 174n81. See also Art of the Americas Wing Museum of History and Technology (Washington, DC), 52 Museum of Islamic Art (MIA, Doha): aesthetics and organization, 113–14, 135; architect, 112–13, 121; artists’ conversations with ancient objects in, 135; curiosity about, 12; dual stories of, 128–29; exterior view, Plate 11; mission, 114–15 —exhibitions: Ferozkoh: Tradition and Continuity in Afghan Art, 114; Hajj, 114; Portrait of a European Gentleman (unknown artist), Plate 12, 114 Museum of Man (envisioned), 53 Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities (Medelhavsmuseet, Stockholm), 17 Museum of Natural History (NYC), 179n126 Museum of World Culture (MWC, Stockholm): cosmopolitan citizens fostered in, 17–18, 29, 92; curator for global issues at, 18–19; curiosity about, 12; forward-looking stance of, 47–48, 141; funding, 140; schoolchildren’s visits to, 15; universalist ethos of, 53 —exhibitions: Bollywood, 19; Destination X, Plate 4, 19, 40–41; HIV/AIDS, 44; Horizons, 141; Sister of Dreams, 18; A Stolen World, 40, 164nn70, 72 museum professionals: community organizers as, 78–79, 80; confidentiality agreements of, 191n119; as cultural workers, 102–6; in global museum assemblages, 134–35; mission as contact work, 8, 153nn42–43; role in creating narrative, 128; spiralists or parachutists vs. local, 9, 129–30, 134; transnational class of, 8–9, 155n46. See also curators; directors; exhibition and museum practices; museum educational programming museums: city and place in, 9–10; constituency and community-based, 3, 87, 109, 140; as contact zones, 8, 135, 153nn42–43; current challenges for, 62–63; debates on, 7–9,

42–45, 126; definitions of, 42–44; dual roles of, 134; enlightenment model and development of, 170n39; ethnographic objects from other cultures in, 25–28, 159n17; free days at, 82, 126, 134, 178n119; functions of, 6–9, 8; future role of, 139–42; immigration policy as influence on, 48–49; as “mausoleums,” 151–52n33; national ethnography and archeology in, 25–27; nation as imagined in, 5; reciprocity as key paradigm shift in, 79, 141; rethinking model and meaning, 8–9, 25–26, 130, 152n34; similar artifacts in both ethnographic and art museums, 151n32; as slow medium, 42–43; types of, 2–3; as universal vs. national, 143–44n4. See also classification and hierarchies; cosmopolitanism-nationalism continuum; donors; exhibition and museum practices; funding issues; museumgoers; museum professionals; and specific museums Museums and Society 2034 (American Association of Museums report), 62 Music Museum (Stockholm), 15 Muslim people: exhibitionary silences and, 187n77; free schools of, 165n87; “headscarf issue” and, 183n39; as migrants, 33, 34, 38; suspicions of Singapore’s Chinese-origin population, 187n78; travel of, 5, 147–48n20. See also Islamic ethos; Museum of Islamic Art; Qatar MWC. See Museum of World Culture Myrdal, Alva, 32, 47 Myrdal, Gunnar, 32, 47, 87 Nagoya Museum of Fine Arts (MFA’s sister museum, Japan), 57, 172n50 Napoleonic Wars, 35 Nassau-Siegen, Johan Maurits von, 22 nation: cities’ always in context of, 10; “cultural wealth” of, 145–46n6; museums as performance of culture and belonging in, 6–9; number of people living outside the category of, 133–34; rentier state type of, 118; social contract of citizen and, 5 National Art Gallery (Singapore), 94, 186–87n71 National Arts Council (Singapore), 102, 103, 185–86n68

National Center of Afro-American Artists (NCAAA), 174–75n85 National Defense Service (Sweden), 33 National Endowment for the Arts (U.S.), 62 National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), 51–52 National Herbarium (Washington, DC), 52 National Heritage Board (Singapore), 95, 104–5, 181n11 National Historical Museum (Stockholm), 41, 45 nationalism: in continuum with globalism, 2–3, 143–44n4; cosmopolitan depictions in, 3; expressions of pride vs. discomfort with, 45–47. See also cosmopolitanism-nationalism continuum; objects: iconic National Mall (Washington, DC). See Smithsonian Museum; Washington (DC) cultural institutions National Minorities Law (Sweden, 1998), 166n95 National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, DC), 53, 168n16 National Museum of Denmark (Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen): budget cutbacks and national globality policy of, 158–59n15; coin collection of, 26, 28–29; Danish Modern History collection in, 27–28; ethnographic objects displayed in, 24–28, 159n17; lack of explanation for ethnographic portraits in, Plate 2, 23–24, 25, 135; Native American collection of, 159n16; objects loaned to parish museums (stiftsmuseum), 37; prehistory and peasant culture celebrated in, 28–29; schoolchildren’s visits to, 14–15, 29, 159n17; visitors’ expectations of, 140 —exhibitions: Brazilian ethnography, 25; ethnographic portraits, Plate 2, 23–24, 25, 135; Kølbjerg Woman and Egtved Girl, 24; New Danish Prehistory, 15, 24–25, 28–29, 41; The Peoples of the World, Plate 2, 23–24, 159n17; Pow Wow, 159n16; The Stories of Denmark, 15, 27–28, 41; The Sun Chariot, or Solvognen, Plate 3, 24–25; Treasure Chamber, 159n17 National Museum of Fine Arts (Stockholm), 15 National Museum of Qatar (Doha): construction of, 91; dual stories of, 129; plans for, 113; traditional values and the modern in, 127–28; types of exhibitions in, 92–93

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—exhibitions: “Between the Past and the Future” room, 128; Tea with Nefertiti, 92 National Museum of Singapore, 109–10, 187n3 National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, DC), 45, 53, 168n16 National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, DC), 168n16 National Office of Cultural Heritage (Denmark), 39 National Sports Day (Qatar), 122 National Unity Front (Qatar), 117 National University of Singapore, 98, 187n72 National Zoological Park (Washington, DC), 52 Native American art: acquisition of, 176n102; American art roots in, 63; Brooklyn Museum’s collection, 72–73, 75; Danish collection, 159n16; demonstrations of, 74; materials on, 172–73n66; MFA’s collection, 59, 63–64, 68–69 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (U.S., 1990), 176n102. See also repatriation and restitution claims Native American people, 45, 52 Natural History Museum (Washington, DC), 52 Nazi Germany, 31, 47 NCAAA (National Center of Afro-American Artists), 174–75n85 Neel, Alice, 72 “Negaraku” (song), 98 neocolonialism, 107, 130 neoliberalism, 44 Nepenthes rafflesiana (pitcher plant), 96 Netherlands: Amsterdam’s cosmopolitanism, 112; Portuguese Brazil occupied by, 22–23. See also Eckhout, Albert; Post, Franz Newark (NJ) Museum, 171n46, 176–77n104 New Democracy Party (Sweden), 33 New New Yorkers program (Queens Museum), 78, 79 New York Botanical Garden, 179n126 New York City (NYC): Boston’s relationship to, 11–12; Brooklyn as part of, 70–71; cultural affairs support in, 85–86; culture as defined in, 86–87; immigrants and newcomers in melting pot of, 9, 84, 86–87, 178n122; Metropolitan Museum of Art in, 7, 51, 71, 140, 179n126; Museum of Natural History in, 179n126; national context of, 11;

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panorama of, 78; population, 84–85, 178n123. See also Brooklyn Museum; El Museo del Barrio; Queens Museum; The Studio Museum in Harlem New York City Board of Education, 81 New York Daily News, 77 New York Department of Cultural Affairs, 85 New York Times, 64, 77, 175–76n97 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 89 Nobel, Alfred, 31 Nordenskiöld, Adolf Erik, 20–21 Nordic welfare model, 45–46 Nordiska Museet (Stockholm), 15, 16–17, 19, 41, 157n4 Norman, Wayne, 149n26 Northwestern University in Qatar, 121 Norway: Danish loss of, 35; joke of, 47; Swedish loss of, 21 Nouvel, Jean, 127, 128 Nowicka, Magdalena, 149n26 nudity, 124 Nung-Hsin, Hu, 79 objects: as art vs. artifact, 27–28, 44, 135, 159n17; of foreign origin but national treasures, 24–25; iconic, Plate 3, 15, 24–25, 59–60; similar examples in both ethnographic and art museums, 151n32; similarities vs. connections of specific, 66; of travelers vs. refugees, 40–41. See also artworks; exhibitions O’Connor, Thomas H., 54, 55 Ofili, Chris, 85 Okakura, Kakuzō, 172n49 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 72 Olwig, Karen Fog, 163n55 Olympics: Qatar’s first delegation to, 122; Qatar’s museum for, 113, 124; Youth Olympic Games (Singapore), 104 Ong, Aihwa, 139, 154–55n45 openness. See cosmopolitanism Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 34, 49 orientalism museum (planned), 123–24 Ortiz, Raphael Montañez, 81 Oskar I (king of Sweden), 30–31 Östasiatiska Museet (Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm), 17

other and otherness: ethnographic portraits’ influence on constructing, Plate 2, 23–24, 25; exhibition’s exploration of exhibiting, 159n16 Ottoman Empire (later, Turkey), 34, 116 Paerregaard, Karsten, 163n55 pairings. See adjacencies or pairings in exhibitions Palme, Olaf, 17, 32–33, 47, 54 Pan-Arab Games (2011), 122 pan-Scandinavianism, 16, 47, 157n2 PAP (People’s Action Party, Singapore), 97–98, 99, 100, 111, 130, 184n51 Paracas Collection, exhibited in A Stolen World, 40, 164nn70,72 Paris, Louvre in, 2 Paris Saint-Germain soccer team, 121 Park, Robert, 9 Parnet, Claire, 125 Pastore, Javier, 121 Patel, Samir S., 24 Paternosto, Cesar, Staccato, 69 patriotism as embarrassment vs. virtue, 46–47 Paulsen, Krista E., 145–46n6 Peabody Academy of Science, 64–65 Peabody Essex Museum (PEM, Salem, MA): on cosmopolitanism-nationalism continuum, 66–67, 83; global and regional perspectives of, 64; mission, 51; origins, 65–66; particular context of, 10, 83–84; traveling exhibits, 67 Peale, Charles Willson: portraits by, in Boston Museum, 170n39; Timothy Matlack portrait by, Plate 6, 60, 82 pearl trade, 116, 117, 127, 189nn90, 92 Pedersen, Lykke, 27 Pei, I. M., Museum of Islamic Art by, Plate 11, 112–13, 121 Pelly, Lewis, 116 PEM. See Peabody Essex Museum People’s Action Party (PAP, Singapore), 97–98, 99, 100, 111, 130, 184n51 The Peoples of the World (exhibition, National Museum of Denmark), Plate 2, 23–24, 159n17 Perak Museum (Singapore), 187n72 Peranakanamania, 130

Peranakan Chinese people, 108 Peranakan Museum (Singapore), 108, 187n74 “Percent for Art” law, 85 Peruvian textile collection, 40, 164nn70, 72 Petrilli, Michael, 175–76n97 Philadelphia: personality of, 9 Philadelphia Museum of Art: Sixty-Ninth Street branch, 176–77n104 Pieris, Anoma, 182–83n33 Piso, William, 23 pitcher plant (Nepenthes rafflesiana), 96 Pizarro, Francisco, 75 pluralisms and multiple voices: definitions of, 182–83n33; tactics for including, 44–45, 53. See also diversity and diversity management regimes; language issues Plymouth (now MA), founding of, 54, 168n21 Poland: cosmopolitan nationalism in, 144–45n5; migrants from, 34 Pollock, Sheldon, 148n21 Portrait of a European Gentleman (unknown artist), Plate 12, 114 Post, Franz, 23 Powell, John Wesley, 52 Pratt, Mary Louise, 153n42 pre-Columbian art: American art roots in, 63; Brooklyn Museum’s collection, 73–74, 75; K’iché burial urns (Maya), Plate 5, 59, 62, 63; materials on, 172–73n66 Prior, Nick, 153n41 Progress Party (Denmark), 47 Prussia: Denmark defeated by, 35–36. See also Germany Ptolemy (geographer), 116 Puah, Benson, 102, 103–4, 107, 111 public-private partnership model, 85, 86–87, 179n126 Puerto Rican diaspora, 81–82 Qatar: Arab (selective) cosmopolitanism of, 11, 91, 92–93, 119–23, 125, 129, 130–32, 138, 142; cultural armature of, 123–28, 130–31; Doha interchangeable with, 10, 188n85; economic and social development, 117–18; foreign investment by, 91, 118, 120–21, 122, 180n1; foreign labor force in, 119–20, 189n98, 189–90n99, 190nn101–2; historical context, 91–92, 115–17, 189nn90–

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Qatar (continued) 91; lifestyles of Qataris, 119, 122, 191n116; mediator role of, 118–19, 121–22; museum visiting encouraged in, 114–15; oil and natural gas of, 93, 117, 118, 120–22; political dissent and government response in, 120, 190n102; political rights of citizens and noncitizens, 92, 130; rebranding museums in, 155–56n54; Singapore compared with, 115; symbol of (desert sand rose), 127; thobe and abaya vs. Western clothing in, 129, 131. See also Doha Qatar Airways, 118 Qatar Charity, 122 Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development, 121 Qatar Labor Ministry, 190n101 Qatar Museum Authority (QMA, later Qatar Museums): dual stories of, 128–29; museums planned by, 113, 123–25; rebranding and renaming of, 155–56n54; secrecy of, 131, 191n119; silences and absences in museums of, 131–32. See also Mathaf; Museum of Islamic Art; National Museum of Qatar; Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum Qatar National 2030 Vision (report), 118, 120, 189n94 Qatar Olympic and Sports Museum (Doha), 113, 124 —exhibitions: Hey,Ya: Arab Women in Sports, 124; Olympics, 124 Qatar Symphony Orchestra, 114 QMA. See Qatar Museum Authority Queens (NY): diversity of, 78 Queens International (biennial exhibition), 79, 114 Queens Museum (earlier, Queens Museum of Art): artists’ conversations with ancient objects in, 135; community partnership and accessibility, 77, 78–80; on cosmopolitanism-nationalism continuum, 83–84, 137–38; exchanges and collaborations of, 80–82, 141, 177–78n114; funding, 140; possibilities for, 84; renovation and renaming, 77–78; story of transnational lives at, 51, 80 —exhibition: Caribbean: Crossroads of the World, 80–82, 177–78n114

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Queens Public Library, 78, 80 Qur’an: on diversity, 147–48n20 race: attendance data and, 173n71; demographic shifts and, 62–64; empowerment vs. divisions, 52–53; ethnicity conflated with (Singapore), 183n37. See also classification and hierarchies; diversity and diversity management regimes; ethnicity; migrants and immigrants Raffles, Thomas Stamford, 95–97, 106, 187n72 Raffles Institution, 98 Raffles Library and Museum (Singapore), 95, 106, 187nn72–73 Rao, Hayagreeva, 145–46n6 Raw Canvas (Lee), Plate 10, 105 Raymond Lester Associates, 78 Reagan, Ronald, 32 reciprocity as key paradigm shift, 79, 141 Rectanus, Mark W., 154–55n45 Reddy, Prerana, 80 religious beliefs: civil religion defined, 89–90; display of objects sacred to, 45; Grundtvig’s opposition to Lutheranism, 36; minorities in Denmark, 37; Puritans’ “city on the hill” idea, 53–55; Singapore’s treatment of, 183n41; sun as a god, Plate 3, 24–25 Renaissance City Report (Singapore, 2000), 102–3 repatriation and restitution claims: of Andean textiles, 40, 164nn70, 72; context of, 176n102; “Declaration” as anticipatory countermeasure, 143–44n4; rejection of arguments for, 43; of totem pole, 135 Report of the Advisory Council on Culture and the Arts (Singapore, 1989), 102 Reuther, Walter, 32 Revere, Paul, 59–60, 64 Ripley, S. Dillon, 53 Rockefeller, John D., 51 Rogers, Malcolm, 62, 68, 134, 173n67, 174n81 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 51 Rosoff, Nancy, 176–77n104 Ross, Denman Waldo, 172n49 Rovisco, Maria, 149n26 Royal Dutch Shell, 120–21 Royal Opera (Sweden), 30 Rubio y Salinas, Manuel José (portrait of ), Plate 7, 60, 82

Ruggie, John, 90 Rydell, Robert, 52, 150n28, 171n47 Sachs, Paul, 171n47 Saito, Hiro, 149n25 Salem (MA): personality of, 10; trading and tourism in, 64–65. See also Peabody Essex Museum Salt Lake City (Utah): Doha compared with, 128 Sandahl, Jette: exhibitions under, 39; international conventions used by, 17–18; as mobile museum professional, 134; on multiple voices, 44; on museum narratives, 128, 141 Sanskrit cosmopolis, 5, 148n21 Sargent, John Singer, 60–61 Schiller, Nina Glick, 149n26 Schissler, Hanna, 144–45n5 Schleswig, 35, 161nn46, 49 Schmidt, Garbi, 163n56 Scott, Virginia, 155–56n54 Serrano, Jose, 78, 79, 80 Sharjah Art Museum (United Arab Emirates), 129 Sharp, William, 78 Sheikh, Muhammad Khalid, 121 Sherman, Daniel J., 151n32 Simon, Bob, 92, 121–22 Singapore: art and culture for nation building in, 101–3, 184nn47–48; Asian (selective) cosmopolitanism of, 11, 102–8, 110–12, 131, 138, 142; Banyan tree metaphor for government in, 183–84n43; boundaries and distinctions in, 103, 186n70; brain drain concerns, 184n45; British rule then self-government of, 97–98; cultural armature of, 103–6, 130–31; diversity of (multiracial national model), 11, 93, 99–102, 109, 130, 182–83n33, 184nn47–48, 51; Doha’s relationship to, 12, 93, 130; economic miracle of, 99; expelled from Malay union, 98, 101; geographic location and trading connections, 94–95, 96–97; “headscarf issue” in, 183n39; heritage centers in, 109, 140; immigration and population of, 99–101, 182n32, 184nn43–46; interchangeability of city and state in, 10; museums’ role in, 95, 132, 181n11; national anthem, 98; organizational ecology of, 108–10; penal system, 182–83n33;

political rights of citizens, 93, 130; population, 98; private museums noted, 181n11; Qatar compared with, 115; recruitment of top talent and companies to, 93–94; rojak salads metaphor in, 106–7, 110, 111, 128; as secular state but religiously diverse, 183n41 —cultural institutions: ArtScience Museum, 181n11; Esplanade Theater by the Bay (Singapore), 102; Friends of the Museums, 94–95; Indian Heritage Center, 109; Maritime Experiential Museum, 181n11; National Art Gallery, 94, 186–87n71; National Arts Council, 102, 103, 185–86n68; National Heritage Board, 95, 104–5, 181n11; National Museum of Singapore, 109–10, 187n3; National University of Singapore, 98, 187n72; Perak Museum, 187n72; Peranakan Museum, 108, 187n74; Raffles Library and Museum, 95, 106, 187nn72–73; Singapore History Museum, 187n77; Singapore Institution, 106. See also Asian Civilizations Museum; Singapore Art Museum Singapore Art Museum: in city’s organizational ecology, 108; as cosmopolitanizing residents, 104–6; focus, 186–87n71; international connections, 185–86n68; lengthy labels in, 104, 135; origins, 102; unity in diversity narrative in, 109 —exhibitions: Art Garden, 185n67; Raw Canvas, Plate 10, 105; The Singapore Show, 105, 186n70 Singapore Arts Festival, 104, 185–86n68 Singapore Biennale, Plate 10, 104 Singapore Grand Prix, 104 Singapore History Museum, 187n77 Singapore Institution, 106 Sister of Dreams: People and Myths of the Orinoco (exhibition), 18 60 Minutes (television program), 91–92 Sjørslev, Inger, 25 Skansen (Stockholm), 15, 16–17, 19 Sklair, Leslie, 155n46 slavery, 124–25 Sloane, Hans, 1–2 Smithson, James, 52 Smithsonian Museum (Washington, DC): as creating democratic America, 52; folklife festivals, 53; governance and oversight,

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2 41

Smithsonian Museum (Washington, DC) (continued) 167n6; mentioned, 11; racial lines in, 52–53. See also specific museums —exhibition: A Nation of Nations, 53 social democracy (Sweden), 17, 31–32, 33, 38, 47, 49 Social Democrats (Danish political party), 38, 39 Sombart, Werner, 90 South American objects: Brooklyn Museum’s collection, Plate 9, 72–75, 82; K’iché burial urns (Maya), Plate 5, 59, 62, 63. See also pre-Columbian art; Spanish colonial art South and Southeast Asia: British East India Company in, 95–97; British rule of areas in, 97–98; collection of objects from, 68; cosmopolitanization of, 148n21; sarong kebaya outfit in, 108; Singaporean art in context of, 104–6; Singapore’s regionalization drive in, 99. See also Singapore Soysal, Yasemin, 144–45n5 Spain, Bilbao museum, 91, 115 Spanish American War (1898), 88–89 Spanish colonial art: American arts influenced by, Plates 6 and 7, 59–60, 63, 73; Brooklyn Museum’s collection, 72–74; women’s portrait in, Plate 9, 75, 82 Sparrman, Anders, 20 Spinden, Herbert Joseph, 71, 73–74, 176n102, 176–77n104 sports: in Boston, 55; Qatar’s role in, 121, 122. See also FIFA World Cup Sri Lankan decorative arts and crafts, 58 “starchitects”: use of term, Plate 11, 8 “The Star-Spangled Banner” (song), 52 Stayton, Kevin: on American Identities, 72, 74, 75; on Brooklyn Museum’s mission, 71–72; on Connecting Cultures, 76; on funding, 85; on future of museums, 141 Stinchcombe, Arthur L., 145–46n6 Stockholm: cosmopolitanism in museums of, 10–11; cultural armature and geopolitics of, 17, 29–34; museum complex in, 19; number and diversity of museums in, 10, 15; population, 30, 34, 160–61n41; residential segregation of immigrants in, 34, 42; schoolchildren’s museum visits in, 14–15 —cultural institutions: Academy of Sciences,

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43, 157n4; Multicultural Center, 41–42, 45, 140; Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities, 17; Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities, 17; Music Museum, 15; National Historical Museum, 41, 45; National Museum of Fine Arts, 15; Nordiska Museet, 15, 16–17, 19, 41, 157n4; Skansen (Stockholm), 15, 16–17, 19; Stockholm City Museum, 42, 45; Strindberg Museum, 15; Swedish History Museum, 15; Vasa Museet, 15, 19. See also Etnografiska Museet; Museum of World Culture Stockholm City Museum, 42, 45 Strindberg, August, 20 Strindberg Museum (Stockholm), 15 The Studio Museum in Harlem: credit for establishing, 87; Cultural Institutions Group membership of, 179n126; educational materials of, 81; exhibition collaboration with Queens Museum, 80–82, 177–78n114; story of transnational lives at, 80 Suez Canal, 95, 97 Sully, Thomas, 170n39 Sun, Yat Sen, 109 The Sun Chariot, or Solvognen (Bronze Age sculpture), Plate 3, 24–25 Sun Yat Sen Nanyang Memorial Hall (Singapore), 109 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (National Endowment for the Arts report), 62 Svanberg, Fredrik, 41 Svensson, Birgitta, 48 Svensson, Thommy, 17 Sweden: asylum policy of, 160n39; centralized political culture of, 47; civic idea of national identity, 45–49; colonial past of, 21, 29–30; on cosmopolitanism-nationalism continuum, 10–11, 15, 29, 41, 136–37; cultural armature and geopolitics of, 29–34; Danish museums’ approach compared with, 42–49; Denmark’s relationship to, 12, 35; diversity of, 11, 17, 19, 48; equality discourse in, 46–47, 165n82; in EU but opted out of euro, 156n55; homogeneity of, 11, 35–36, 46; industrialization and urbanization in, 15–16; minorities recognized in, 49, 166n95; Nazi Germany’s

relations with, 31, 47; place in world, 17–20, 29; population, 17, 19, 34, 160n40; post-WWII immigration to, 31, 33–34, 160n37; pubic funding for museums and collections, 22, 158n9; rethinking museums and collections in, 17–18; romantic nationalism in, 16, 157n3; stereotype of immigration policy in, 45, 165n77; Swedishness in, 32–33, 41. See also Gothenburg; Stockholm; and specific museums Sweden (Childs), 31 Swedish Academy, 30 Swedish Democrats (political party), 34, 49 Swedish East India Company, 30 Swedish History Museum (Stockholm), 15 Swedish Museum Association, 41 Swedish National Museums of World Culture, 17 Swedish Social Democrats (political party), 31–32, 47, 49 Sznaider, Natan, 144–45n5 Tager, Jack, 168n24 Tan, Boon Hui, 104–5, 110, 186–87n71 Tan, Kenneth, 111 The Tarairiu Woman (Eckhout), Plate 2, 23–24, 25 Tarfon, Rabbi, 141, 193n9 taxonomies. See classification and hierarchies Thatcher, Margaret, 32 Thirty Year War (1625–29), 35 Thomsen, Christian Jürgensen, 26 Thoreau, Henry David, 179–80n139 Thorning-Schmidt, Helle, 38–39, 164n65 Tiffany Studios, 75, 78 Tingsten, Herbert, 46 Tomlinson, Barbara, 13 Townshend Acts (1767), 59 Trägårdh, L., 165n82 transnational lives: American Identities story in context of, 72–74; Art of the Americas story in context of, 63–64; capitalist class and, 155n46; as everyday and ordinary, 4–5; human trafficking and, Plate 1, 22; as living across borders, 4–5, 19, 79. See also boundaries and borders; cosmopolitanism-nationalism continuum; global citizens; migrants and immigrants; museum professionals transnational social fields, 8–9 travel and travelers: early explorers, 20–21; exhibition on, Plate 4, 19, 40–41; learning

about world through museums vs., 25–26; nation’s efficacy in attracting, 145–46n6; objects collected and brought home, 21–22 Treaty of Stralsund (1370), 35 tribal modernity, 131–32 Trkulja, Jelena, 123, 127 Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, 153n43 Turkey (earlier, Ottoman Empire), 34, 116 Turnbull, C. R., 97 Turner, Bryan S., 149n26 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 89 Twain, Mark (Samuel Clemens), 9 Tybjerg, Karin, 23–24, 27, 44 Ulfstrand, Anna, 42 UNESCO, 18 United Arab Emirates. See Dubai; Sharjah Art Museum United Kingdom. See Great Britain United Nations: cultural diversity defined by, 18; headquarters (1946–50), 77; Universal Declaration of Human Rights signed, 18 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 40, 163–64n62 United States: cities’ support for arts in, 85–86; “city on the hill” idea in, 53–55; cosmopolitanized nationalism in, 11, 83, 87–90, 137; cultural armature of, 87–90, 179–80n139; diversity and diversity management regimes of, 53, 69; international influences on art of, 58–62, 63, 172–73n66; Latinization in, 84; museum development in, 170n39; national anthem, 52; origins of some museum collections in, 51–52; population, 62; post-WWII social problems in, 32; Qatari military base used by, 121; redefining art of, 79–80; Singaporeans living in, 101, 184n44. See also specific cities and museums Universal Declaration of Human Rights (U.N.), 18 universalism and universal values: beauty and truth as, 57; commitment to, 87–88, 93; critiques of, 18, 111, 115, 141–42; language of, 164n72; meanings of, 6; museums envisioned in terms of, 53, 143–44n4; sport as, 122, 124; Swedish values as, 46–47, 165n82, 166n97. See also cosmopolitanism University College of London in Qatar, 121 University of Cambridge (England), 98

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U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (Washington, DC), 168n16 U.S. Natural History Museum (Washington, DC), 52 Valdemar (king of Denmark), 35 “vanishing red man” theory, 176n102 Vare, Robert, 88–89, 179–80n139 Vasa Museet (Stockholm), 15, 19 Velázquez, Diego, 61 Venstre (Danish political party), 38 vernacularization, 153–54n44 Viborg Stiftsmuseum (Denmark), 37 Vida, André, 125 Vikings, 14, 24, 29, 34–35 Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, 121 visitors. See museumgoers Volkswagen Group, 121 Volleyball Club World Championships (2012), 122 Wahlquist, Håkan, 42–43 Walker, William S., 52, 167n11 Walsh, Marty, 86 Ward, Gerald W. R., 68–69, 174n84 War of 1812, 56 Washington, Booker T., 72 Washington, George, 88 Washington (DC) cultural institutions: Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, 53; Art and Industries Museum, 52; Holocaust Memorial Museum, 168n16; Museum of African Art, 53; Museum of History and Technology, 52; National Gallery of Art, 51–52; National Herbarium, 52; National Museum of African American History and Culture, 53, 168n16; National Museum of the American Indian, 45, 53, 168n16; National Museum of Women in the Arts, 168n16; National Zoological Park, 52; Natural History Museum, 52. See also Smithsonian Museum Watson, James D., 20 Watson, Oliver, 113 Webb, Alban, 147n15 Weinstein, Laura, 68 Weld, Charles Goddard, 172n49 Wherry, Frederick F., 145–46n6 Whitman, Walt, 72, 179–80n139 Wildlife Conservation Society, 179n126

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Wilk, Richard, 12, 157n58 Williams, William, Deborah Hall portrait by, Plate 8, 74–75, 82 Wilmotte, Jean-Paul, 113–14 Wilson, Robert, 185–86n68 Wilson, Woodrow, 88–89, 90 Winther, Ole, 39 Winthrop, John, 53–54, 168n22 The Wizard of Oz (film), ruby slippers in, 52 Wong, Hannah, 94, 107 Wong, Vicky, 109–10 workers: cultural, 102–6; exhibition about, 109; foreign labor force as, 31, 33, 84, 92, 100–101, 111, 119–20, 182n32, 184n46, 189n98, 189–90n99, 190nn101–2; library and classes for, 69–70; as museumgoers, 17, 52, 57, 129; museums’ role in institutional distribution of, 83–84; recruiter fees, 189n98; shortage of, 31, 33, 101, 163n56; traditional vs. modern relationships, 189n94; transnational lives of, 4–5. See also living across borders; migrants and immigrants; museum professionals World Bank, 4 world culture: debates about, 17–19. See also cosmopolitanism; globalization and global processes World Cup, FIFA (2022), 92, 112, 119–20, 124, 127, 191n121 World Exposition (Paris, 1878), 16 World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893), 75 world’s fairs: 1939, 77; 1964, 77, 78; 1992, 152n36. See also arts festivals; biennials World War I, 31 World War II, 31, 47, 97, 98 writing, power of, 179–80n139. See also Atlantic Monthly Yeoh, Brenda, 111, 184n46 Yoon, Jason, 79 Young British Artists movement, 85 Younis, Ala, 125 Youth Olympic Games (Singapore), 104 Youtz, Philip, 176–77n104 Zorn, Anders, 15 Zubrzycki, Geneviève, 144–45n5 Zuni objects, 73, 74, 75

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