Desegregating the Past: The Public Life of Memory in the United States and South Africa 9780231542517

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DESEGREGATING THE PAST

ROBYN AUTRY

DESEGREGATING THE PAST The Public Life of Memory in the United States and South Africa

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A complete CIP record is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-231-17758-0 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-231-54251-7 (e-book)

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Mary Ann Smith Cover image: ©Shutterstock

For Kevin, because I remember

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix List of Museums Visited xi List of Abbreviations xv INTRODUCTION: DESEGREGATING THE PAST

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From Selma to Soweto (and Beyond) 5 Identifying with the Past 8 Consensus-Driven Memory 14 Museums: Between History and Memory 17 Desegregating the Past 22 Note on Terminology 25 1. MEMORY ENTREPRENEURS: HISTORY IN THE MAKING

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Historical Capital 29 Making History Social 32 Making History Black 48 2. THE CURATED PAST: REMEMBERING THE COLLECTIVE South Africa: Showing Citizenship 68 United States: Recasting Blackness 85

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3. MANAGING COLLECTIVE REPRE SEN TATIONS

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Transforming Older Museums 109 Developing New Museums 124 4. MEMORY DEVIANTS: BREAKING THE COLLECTIVE

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Whose Simulated Past? 147 History as Avant-Garde? 165 CONCLUSION: MUSEUMIFICATION OF MEMORY

Notes 197 Selected Bibliography Index 239

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ACKNOWL EDGMENTS

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who studies the stories we tell about ourselves, I hesitate to do so in writing, so I’ll keep mine brief. While the titles and roles of the people I’d like to thank—graduate school advisors, friends, colleagues, students, family—may be familiar, the actual people are extraordinary. I often felt misplaced in the sociology program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Luckily, I made a couple of wonderful friends, including Gay Seidman, who served as my advisor. Her humor, intellect, and generosity were without bound. I was also fortunate to cross paths with Mara Loveman, whose approach to the study of race, willingness to work closely with me, and eventual friendship were transformative. I also gained from the encouragement of Tara Becker, Erik Wright, especially at a time of crisis, Heinz Klug, Jim Sweet, and Tom Spear. I am indebted to the curators, museum directors, researchers, and tour guides who talked openly with me about their work—what they hoped to achieve, where they feared they’d come up short. While I question the broad politics of what they do, there is not one individual whose insight and dedication failed to impress. The highlight of this fieldwork, other than visiting South Africa for the first time, was touring black history museums with my sister Angela, who waited as I traveled at a snail’s pace taking photographs and notes. While I did not snag the national grants and fellowships that turn heads,

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this research was financially supported by a number of sources. I received several grants from the University of Wisconsin, including the Advanced Opportunity Fellowship and multiple Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships to try to learn Zulu and Xhosa. I was especially honored to receive two memorial awards: the Stanley J. Tarver Memorial Award and the Scott Kloeck-Jenson International Travel Award. I also benefitted from a postdoctoral fellowship in the sociology and history departments at the University of Minnesota, where I was welcomed enthusiastically by Ron Aminzade, Mary Jo Maynes, Teresa Gowan, Kevin Murphy, Cawo Abdi, Michael Goldman, Rachel Schurman, Josh Page, David Pellow, and Joachim Savelsberg. I am also thankful for the time I spent as a fellow at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities and at Yale University’s Center for Comparative Research. Thanks to John Levi Martin, who I doubt even remembers me, for nudging me toward book editors at a conference, and walking me over to meet Eric Schwartz, who I would later work with at Columbia University Press. I’m thankful to Eric and to Lowell Frye, along with everyone else at CUP, including the anonymous reviewers for their time and interest. I am also indebted to the eagle eye of my sister Angela Autry Gorden and Catherine Capellaro for copyediting earlier drafts. Jennifer Autry, my wonderfully creative mother, helped with the digital images. For many of the same reasons as in graduate school, I often feel misplaced at Wesleyan. Luckily, I have badass students who are sharp, funny, and refreshingly offbeat. Thanks especially to my research assistants Lina Breslav, Dorothy Ajayi, and Grace Carroll. I also have a few badass colleagues turned amazing friends, namely Jonathan Cutler and Greg Goldberg, who make me laugh endlessly and push me to think and rethink what I thought I already knew. This book is far better for their input. This trip down memory lane concludes, per usual, with my family, both chosen and given. You know who you are, and you know what you mean to me. Every thing.

LIST OF MUSEUMS VISITED

SOUTH AFRICA Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg, opened in 2001, Member of International Coalition for Sites of Conscience Constitution Hill Number Four Prison Museum, Johannesburg, opened in 1964, Member of International Coalition for Sites of Conscience Cradle of Humankind, Gauteng Province, opened in 2005 District Six Museum, Cape Town, opened in 1994, Member of International Coalition for Sites of Conscience Freedom Park, Pretoria, opened in 2004 Hector Pieterson Memorial Museum, Soweto, opened in 2002 KwaMuhle Museum, Durban, opened in 1928 Mayibuye Center, Cape Town, opened in 2001 MuseumAfrica, Johannesburg, opened in 1933 Nelson and Winnie Mandela Home, Soweto, opened in 1997 Origins Centre, Johannesburg, opened in 2006 Robben Island Museum, Cape Town, opened in 1997 Slave Lodge, Cape Town, opened in 1998 South African Jewish Museum, Cape Town, opened in 2002 South African Museum, Cape Town, opened in 1825 Voortrekker Monument, Pretoria, opened in 1940

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Workers’ Museum, Johannesburg, opened in 2010, Member of International Coalition for Sites of Conscience

UNITED STATES African American Civil War Museum, Washington, D.C., opened in 1992 African American Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, opened in 1976 African American Museum and Library at Oakland, Oakland, California, opened in 1994 African American Museum of Iowa, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, opened in 1994 African American Panoramic Experience Museum, Atlanta, Georgia, opened in 1978 American History Museum, Washington, D.C., opened in 1964 Anacostia Community Museum, Washington, D.C., opened in 1967 Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Birmingham, Alabama, opened in 1992, Member of International Coalition for Sites of Conscience Black American West Museum, Denver, Colorado, opened in 1971 Black Holocaust Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, opened in 1988 (Closed 2008) California African American Museum, Los Angeles, California, opened in 1981 Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, Michigan, opened in 1965 DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago, Illinois, opened in 1961 Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, Big Rapids, Michigan, opened in 1996 King Center, Atlanta, Georgia, opened in 1968 Museum of African American History, Boston, Massachusetts, opened in 1972 Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, California, opened in 2005 Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, California, opened in 1993 National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, opened in 1991, Member of International Coalition for Sites of Conscience

L I S T OF MUSE UM S V I SI T ED

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National Museum of American Indian, Washington, D.C., opened in 2004 National Park Ser vice Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, Atlanta, Georgia, opened in 1980 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., opened in 1993

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

AAAM AAM AAMA ANC APAC APEX ASNLH BAM BC BCRI BEE CEO COSATU CREATE DACST IFP MAAH MoAD MOT MUSA

Association of African American Museums American Association of Museums African American Museums Association African National Congress Asian Pacific American Center African American Panoramic Experience Museum Association for the Study of Negro Life and History Black Arts Movement Black Consciousness (movement) Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Black Economic Empowerment chief executive officer Congress of South African Trade Unions Commission for the Reconstruction and Transformation of the Arts Department of Arts, Culture, Science, and Technology Inkatha Freedom Party Museum of African American History Museum of the African Diaspora Museum of Tolerance Museums for South Africa Intersectoral Investigation for National Policy

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NAACP NAAM NCCHR NCRM NEH NHC NMAAHC NMAH NMAI NMC NPS NURFC NYHS PAC SADF SAHRA SAMA SCLC TRC UCT UDF UNESCO UWC VOC

L I S T OF A BBRE V I AT ION S

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Northwest African American Museum National Center for Civil and Human Rights National Civil Rights Museum National Endowment for the Humanities National Heritage Council National Museum of African American History and Culture National Museum of American History National Museum of the American Indian National Monuments Council National Park Ser vice National Underground Railroad Freedom Center New York Historical Society Pan-African Congress South African Defense Force South African Heritage Resources Agency South African Museum Association Southern Christian Leadership Council Truth and Reconciliation Commission University of Cape Town United Democratic Front United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization University of the Western Cape Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie)

DESEGREGATING THE PAST

INTRODUCTION Desegregating the Past It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards. —Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

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entrance of the Apartheid Museum located just outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, visitors face a dilemma: they must choose between two passageways marked in Afrikaans and English as “Blankes/Whites Only” or “Nie-Blankes/Non-Whites.” Generally, this causes a commotion, especially on days when large groups of schoolchildren and tourists descend, as visitors uncomfortably consider their options. On many occasions, people sort themselves and file into the separate entrances even if it means splintering groups that arrived together. This powerful moment speaks to the complacency still ingrained in us when it comes to the use of racial classification as a sorting mechanism as much as it does to our willingness to obey rules, whether those of the museum or society at large. Visitors are quickly reunited as the passageways join, but the initial entrance is unsettling and immediately places the visitor in a simulated space that feels more real and personal than most museum experiences. Filled with visual, textual, and audio material that depicts the settlement of Johannesburg after the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand and the racial nightmare that had just begun, in this somber memory space visitors confront the brutal history of colonialism and apartheid. Confined within the dimly lit mazelike museum—around each corner a new set of images, text, objects, and sounds—guests are effectively submerged. This total sensory

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Entrance to the Apartheid Museum; Johannesburg

experience is an emotional appeal for personal alignment that is inescapable as they pass a series of oversized mirrors placed midway through the tour. There is little relief as visitors exit the museum. Still reeling from the onslaught of graphic images, 131 hanging nooses, and survivors’ testimony outlining the staggering violence, they must now contend with the reality of museums as part of a competitive tourist industry. The roller coaster, the casino, and busloads of tourists all seem out of place. As one stands in the sprawling parking lot echoing with excited shrills of delight and terror emanating from the nearby theme park, the line between history and entertainment is anything but clear. How did the country’s first museum dedicated to telling the history of apartheid end up as part of the Gold Reef City recreational complex? As an offshoot of the casino, the museum was built to comply with national casino licensing regulations that mandated investment in a public project. Represented by Abe and Solly Krok—twin brothers who amassed their family fortune by selling skin-lightening creams at the height of apartheid—the casino developers pitched the idea of building a museum.1 With this peculiar trajectory, the Apartheid Museum illustrates that beneath the surface of sacred sites of memory lurks the profane.

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Indeed, revisiting the past is a lot more involved than meets the eye. Why revisit it at all? What makes some versions of the past more believable than others? What does it mean to know the past in the first place? Research on what is often termed “truth and reconciliation” tends to focus on transitional government structures, truth and reconciliation commissions, and disputes over the redistribution of political and economic resources—raising fundamental questions about the way societies reemerge and stabilize after periods of intense internal conflict. How is collective memory reconstructed in these fragile social contexts? What role does it play in resurrecting the inclusive rhetoric of nation? In the aftermath of state violence, how is nationhood reconstructed to acknowledge painful histories, while rhetorically drawing all citizens into an imagined unified community? In the United States after the civil rights movement and in South Africa after the antiapartheid struggle, citizens and governments alike have grappled with an impossible task: the desegregation of the past. Ostensibly, the ability to fashion a shared past hinges on people’s abilities to come to terms with periods of conflict and violence—to settle the historical record, so to speak. This does not necessarily involve the types of truth telling, confession, and witnessing that we recognize in debates about postconflict negotiations and transitional justice.2 It does, however, demand constructing some form of social consensus over what happened and its placement in, or confinement to, the past. This consensus or its illusion involves fitting past events into a narrative of nation that contextualizes difficult moments as regrettable but as paving the way for the current improved, if not altogether peaceful, state of affairs. As classic studies of nations and nationalism have shown, museums and other sites that convey a shared past are essential to imagining nation and to restoring a sense of wholeness and unity to other wise heterogeneous and even divisive societies.3 I started this project interviewing curators and museum directors about the promise of historical museums to revise, confront, reconcile, and heal. I often encountered puzzled looks and responses from staff more preoccupied with the material aspects of content development or the mundane realities of operating a museum. Considering that museums have become some of the only public spaces where

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periods of conflict are openly discussed, the fact that these material aspects were so crucial in how they were created and maintained raised a new set of questions about the making and unmaking of collective memory narratives. Once representations are produced, how are they maintained over time, by whom, and with what resources? Touring black history exhibitions, sometimes guided and other times self-directed, I recognized that what was on display was the familiar narrative of black identity formation that I had been consuming and encouraged to identify with as long as I could remember. While I recognized it as a collective identity narrative, it did not always resonate with my personal understanding and experience of blackness. The details of this personal accounting are less important than my awareness of a gap, an identity gap or dissonance, which led me to reconsider the practical and ideological work of museums in promoting specific orientations toward imagined pasts as markers of collective identity. This study seeks to examine the way history museums have emerged as sites where collective representations of painful periods are displayed. In both the United States and South Africa, the exhibition of histories of racism, oppression, and intolerance should not be taken for granted. The inclusion of these events as part of the national story remains contentious and uneven within each country and across different types of museums. Throughout this book, I explore this unevenness in terms of agitation around the development of museums, as well as examining the content itself. This approach treats museums themselves as objects of analysis as much as their installations and programming, as I seek to explain why some representations of the past appear more empowering, threatening, nostalgic, or authentic, than others. I show how particular forms of racial subjectivities—or ways of making sense of the world—are elevated as inevitable, the morally righteous products of history. Through museums and a variety of other socializing agents, we learn to orient ourselves to each other and the social world at least partially through our tangled, and oftentimes ambivalent, relationships with the past.4 Such an interpretive treatment of museum content and practice highlights the social construction of moral worth deeply embedded in the act of representation and narrativity as attempts are made to create order by making sense of the past.

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On the one hand, this comparative approach seeks to explain similarities and differences in the way history is constructed in South Africa and the United States. However, this is not a traditional comparison where patterns and mechanisms are contrasted across the two settings to test general theories about the world. Instead, in order to understand how the past is staged across the twenty-nine museums included in this study (thirteen in South Africa and sixteen in the United States) as a cultural phenomenon, I juxtapose the aesthetics and politics of representing two very different histories in two very different countries that nonetheless invoke each other. This introductory chapter begins with a discussion about logic of comparison. Next, I link debates about historical representation to deep-seated tensions between multicultural and universal strands in national culture. I consider how these deliberations about the relationship between history and national culture also inform our understandings of collective memory. Finally, I take up the question of museums as sites of memory that exist at the intersection of symbolic and material worlds.

FROM SELMA TO SOWETO (AND BEYOND) For more than three decades, freedom struggles shook the core of U.S. and South African societies, challenging established systems of racial segregation and exclusion. While the antiapartheid struggle reached its crescendo during the 1980s, well after the height of the U.S. civil rights movement, the tactics and moral logics of resistance that challenged white racial domination are routinely compared.5 The demands of these democratic movements reverberated throughout both countries, triggering a collective reassessment of social norms and values, leading to the demise of outright racial rule with the passage of key civil rights legislation during the 1960s in the United States and the first democratically elected president in South Africa in 1994. Prompted by these immense upheavals, black cultural activists and their allies interrogated the restrictive social boundaries that denied them citizenship, including those that shut them out of museums and other public culture institutions claiming to represent national culture. Their agitation provoked heated debate about the participation and

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representation of historically marginalized communities at museums and sparked a reconceptualization of museum-society relations. From Hollywood films to scholarly monographs, parallels in the way ideas about race and racial difference organize South African and U.S. societies have fascinated observers for decades. In particular, the 1980s marked the growth of comparative investigations into the structures and implications of racial domination in both places. This rich tradition of comparative work reflects on the peculiar, but oddly familiar, histories of race as a principle for organizing society. The centrality of black-white racial dichotomies in both countries spawned critical insights into processes of colonialism, segregation, and apartheid, and collective mobilization and resistance.6 At times these studies point us in different directions about the causes of de facto segregation in the United States and how it differs from South African apartheid, but there is general agreement about the centrality of racist thought in fomenting lasting social divisions. As historian Greg Cuthbertson puts it, “South Africa’s racial madness finds therapy in American segregation, as both societies seek asylum in multicultural democracy.”7 More recent work expands this comparative lens to include other cases, most notably Brazil and Israel, to further explore how racial difference became an organizing principle across societies with very different histories.8 Other studies draw attention to lesser known aspects of the central themes—slavery, colonialism and conquest, racialized capitalism, segregation and apartheid, and black politics— in the comparative literature, such as Ivan Evans’s innovative study linking forms of social control and segregation to differences in U.S. and South African cultures of unofficial or extralegal forms of racial violence and terror.9 Granted, racial and ethnic categorization are contentious everywhere, but there are few places where the idea of race has been mapped along a rigid white-black dichotomy that so deeply structured social relations. In fact, South African and U.S. history are typically invoked whenever racial formation, classification, and resistance are discussed in comparative perspective. Indeed, U.S. and South African societies figure as centrally in comparative studies as they do in our popular racial imaginations. The United States-South Africa comparison promises to shed light on the deep tension between imagined truths and reconciliations after social ruptures caused by the freedom struggles. In South Africa,

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a “negotiated revolution” ushered in a new democratic order charged with the monumental task of uniting a deeply fractured society to halt civil unrest, rampant distrust, and economic collapse during the 1990s. A postapartheid national mythos was inscribed into a new set of institutional arrangements, from the newly established Constitutional Court to the redrawing of provincial and municipal boundaries.10 Radical changes in the political and economic sphere were accompanied by efforts to confront the brutality and trauma of the colonial and apartheid regimes on a national level. Of course, museum development has not been the only cultural platform for such engagements. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was the first and most visible and comprehensive effort to come to terms with a traumatic past through publicized confessions, interrogations, and survivor accounts. Despite its limitations,11 the TRC delivered the rhetorical power of reconciliation as a transformative force, one that could harness a collective memory of violence for the foundation of a new national identity.12 In contrast to the dramatic restructuring of South African society, the U.S. civil rights movement yielded less radical reforms in a very different sociopolitical setting. On the one hand, it prompted the passage of key legislation that desegregated public spaces and institutions, opening the space for the growth of a black middle class and increased political representation. Yet the United States did not pursue any national-level dialogue or convene truth commissions to confront that nation’s history of slavery, racial violence, and segregation.13 More than any other platform, commemorations—from naming streets and schools to debates about reparations—have sustained public conversations about legacies of racial segregation and America’s slave past.14 Lacking nationally structured channels for these confrontations with the past—and in the absence of more radical restructuring of society—the memorial landscape of the United States has been somewhat bifurcated along racial lines, especially since the growth of the black history movement. In the post-civil rights and postapartheid eras, race and racism remain key areas for comparative research because both societies still display festering racial divisions and inequalities despite new political dispensations, socioeconomic gains, and rhetoric of inclusion. Indeed, the idea of race and racial difference is implicitly and explicitly

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woven into policy solutions for these dilemmas, marking the need for continued comparative research. However, this is not a comparative study of racialization or racial logics in contemporary U.S. and South African society, nor is it a comparison of their histories. Rather, I draw on these cases to better understand the representational project attempted in many societies that have undergone mass atrocities: the construction of collective memories that correspond to specific notions of collective identity that minimize unrest. In both settings, the struggle to achieve an inclusive society has involved revisiting and restoring key moments from the national past that inform presentday social life as part of understanding the dynamics of contemporary political debates in the aftermath of racial conflict and challenge. However, as sociologist Barry Schwartz cautions, it is imperative to interrogate the basis and politics of official or traditional histories.15 We must also unpack the way alternative accounts are produced. Although black history museums represent movement toward exposing the “symbolic violence” integral in reproducing systems of inequality, this book is neither an endorsement nor a celebration of the revisionist impulse to revisit the past. And it is not an evaluation or a critique of the historical accuracy of revised accounts.16 Rather, it is an examination of how and why history is constructed in museums—settings with an air of secular sacredness. And it looks at the ways identity narratives can mask the material or political-economic and institutional aspects of revision and museum work, irrespective of the content on display.

IDENTIF YING WITH THE PAST What difference does the past make in our lives today? Beyond understanding how present-day social relations and institutions are shaped by historical events, we also turn to the past to help construct and assert our identities. What does it mean to be American or South African in the twentieth-first century? How does that meaning vary across racial-ethnic, gender, or religious communities? We typically conflate collective and personal identities, assuming that the latter represent idiosyncrasies or variations on the overall collective experience. To a large extent, the way we think about the past conforms to

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the logic of collective or public life: it is not so much that we mine the past for evidence to support contemporary understandings of society; rather, we share an impulse to use an aspirational lens to gaze at the past. Collective memories represent shared knowledge about the past that helps explain the nature of group membership and identity.17 This is the ambitious project of collective memory: to see the past through the present as a means to draw people into a collective narrative that transcends the individual. In both the United States and South Africa this process has entailed a ner vous balancing act between the imperatives of national unity and the politics of difference or diversity. South African sociologist Ran Greenstein has commented that despite similarities in the way that race and racial conflict have figured so centrally in the national histories of both countries, actual patterns of racial identity formation differ, with a more consolidated version of black identity emerging in the United States compared to South Africa.18 Greenstein is less interested in why collective identities or collectives matter to people than he is with ahistorical readings of them by academics and politicians alike. While I consider and compare how collective identity and experience is narrated in museums, I also question the underlying yearning for collective identification as a way of grappling with difficult emotions, such as fear, disappointment, shame, and grief, all of which reside at the heart of public life. Remarking on our narrative tendencies in the face of pain and suffering, Saidiya Hartman writes, Loss gives rise to longing, and in these circumstances, it would not be far-fetched to consider stories as a form of compensation or even as reparations, perhaps the only kind we will ever receive. The loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them. So it is tempting to fill in the gaps and to provide closure where there is none. To create a space for mourning where it is prohibited. To fabricate a witness to a death not much noticed.19

Yet, there are any number of ways to tell stories that represent the past; those deemed restorative of the collective may or may not resonate with individuals’ subjectivities or relationships to the past. This is especially true of stories that minimize the more ambiguous, ambivalent, and elusive qualities of life for both the living and the dead.

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The fact that collective memory-making is a contentious project is unsurprising, given the way that such “stories of peoplehood” demand selective ways of thinking about social identities and group membership.20 Indeed, the struggle for cultural recognition that is regularly contrasted with the politics of redistribution rests at the center of debates about the representation of the past, particularly of divisive periods. Although cultural matters are routinely viewed as primarily discursive or symbolic, it is clear that material aspects or political economic implications call into question their separation from discussions about structural change and redistribution. It is difficult to separate demands for the end of forms of cultural domination that support ideologies of hate and systems of oppression from equally powerful demands for socioeconomic justice.21 This terrain became particularly treacherous in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s with the so-called culture wars, an umbrella term used in reference to a wide range of public debates and controversies about national identity and values ranging from bilingual education to gays and lesbians in the military. Others use the phrase “identity politics” to refer to that period as a continuation or a new wave in the mobilization around group identities that took off during the 1960s and 1970s. During this period, traditionalists and progressives invoked the imagery of war in reference to the struggles around the way national histories were constructed and represented in the public realm—from school curricula to museum exhibitions. The so-called history wars were waged among people who saw themselves in a contest over the future of the country as much as its past. Yet, the hegemonic, heroic, and celebratory narratives of U.S. history and expansion were never fully accepted by all residents, certainly not by women and people of color. Yet direct challenges to these imperialist narratives began to appear in mainstream media as civil unrest grew and mass protests gained national attention in the 1970s, signaling a weakening of the “invisible hand” that supported earlier forms of cultural domination. Some viewed this opportunity to view history from the perspectives of those at the margins as a welcome retreat from the illusion of national consensus, whereas others viewed the inclusion of counternarratives as an indication of the unraveling of society. This public mood translated into an increase in the production and consumption of popular history, evident in the spike in museum

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attendance from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. As Eric Foner points out in Who Owns History?, since the 1970s there has been a growth in public interest in historical material that has translated into an explosion of historical documentaries, feature films, and heritage sites.22 The type of mass appeal for dramatic television series like Roots signaled not only a thirst for historical information; it also signaled a sense of longing for origin stories, and it represented an effort to understand the more recent strug gles around identity and representation through the past. At the height of these public debates about national history and culture, public cultural institutions like history museums became leading sources of information about the past. Adults became far more likely to visit a museum than to read historical scholarship.23 One of the most visible indicators of how deeply the public expected to identify with museum exhibitions as reflections of their own perceptions of self and national identity came with reactions to the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay exhibition in 1995.24 At this time, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum had to alter its display about the atomic bomb because it was seen as too sympathetic toward the Japanese and presented U.S. military might in a less-than-favorable light.25 This type of reaction helps us understand the politics involved in presenting historical material that resonates strongly with individuals’ senses of personal and collective identity. In effect, conflict and violence become stylized artifacts rearranged to explain what it means to belong to different social groups. And these artifacts become the primary vehicles through which histories of violence and intolerance are displayed, particularly those that are relatively recent. Professional historians were not immune to this shift in orientation to the past and in popular interest. The use and construction of consensus-driven national histories as a way to describe and celebrate nation faced serious challenges during the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. Consensus-driven history was preoccupied with telling deceptively cohesive stories of the national past in ways that celebrated traditional social values and norms—such as gender divisions and gender roles—in how historical topics were devised, studied, analyzed, and ultimately presented. Themes like conflict and social division were discussed through familiar tropes like the Horatio Alger myth, whereby anything was possible in the United States if one

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worked hard enough. The many voices and experiences sidelined and altogether ignored in this tradition took center stage during the social protests of the 1960s and 1970s. During that time, social history became a key site where alternative visions of the past and its relation to contemporary society were articulated. Indeed, the “new social history” movement became an impor tant vehicle to assert uplifting, proud, and optimistically emancipatory identities for people at the margins of mainstream society. Although the language of cultural wars and clashes is usually reserved for conversations about American identity—and it certainly captured the public imagination for decades—it can be extended to other settings, because these are essentially arguments about the limits and meaning of belonging in relationship to discourses about social difference and multiculturalism. This tension between the universal imagery of nation and the particularism of diversity has been a mainstay in countries of the Global North and South. Across Europe, divergent ways of defining national identity exist, all of which have been called into question in one way or another by rising demands from immigrant communities. Throughout Latin America, the complexities and contradictions of national identity across racial and ethnic groups are also evident in conflicts around defining national culture and classifying populations.26 In South Africa, in par ticular, with the collapse of apartheid and its associated ways of defining national identity, history, and culture came an urgent push to recast the past to better suit a reconstituted notion of nation and of “the public.” The new social history movement in South Africa gained traction during the 1970s and 1980s as progressive academics sidestepped professional conventions to assemble histories that included the voices of people who had been written out of the national story as a way to rationalize state oppression.27 Current public historical and museological approaches to creating more inclusive national narratives reflect heightened interest in lived experience and embodied knowledge—which involves the expansion of public programming and outreach efforts, as well the growing use of oral histories, sound archives, dance performances and other forms of intangible culture that break new representational ground. In South Africa, people have paid a great deal of attention to the way history should be rewritten, taught, and studied as

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part of social transformation. For instance, social transformation is not just about political and economic change; it also involves reinventing cultural symbols and traditions that resonate not just for the survivors and their descendants, but also for the former perpetrators and their descendants.28 Indeed, in South Africa the close association between symbolic and material forms of injustice is particularly visible due to the way cultural domination and imperialism dovetailed with efforts to forcibly assimilate indigenous populations. In the United States, the obliteration of indigenous communities has meant that very little content in recent debates around representing national culture has been sensitive to issues surrounding indigenous identity and life. As it has been in other settings, new generations in the United States and South Africa pressed against older ways of thinking about the past as they sought a history that resonated with their lives and with changes underfoot. Yearnings for representations of collective identities rooted in shared historical experience or consciousness reflect anxiety about changing contours of belonging in the context of political and demographic shifts. The United States saw the rise of new social history and South Africa witnessed an expansion of social history as ways to challenge previous historical accounts that excluded the majority population or treated them not as subjects but as objects of history. In both places, previous consensus-driven histories whitewashed national history, glossing over the genocidal nature of colonial conquest and expansion, and diminishing the exploitation that allowed for capitalist development. The critique of earlier modes of historical production was that they were elitist and exclusionary and that these alternatives offered something different, and history museums were places where these efforts took form. However, it is a mistake to accept these alternative histories as necessarily radical or even unconventional. They may be produced with different people in mind and they may in fact be produced by different categories of people, yet the outcome is still centered on a desire to reach consensus about what happened and to reproduce the logic of race and nation as meaningful categories of existence. Because historical accounts typically create an illusion of historical continuity and the resilience of collective life by “chronicling extraordinary events that embody our deepest and most fundamental values”29 it is

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a mistake to accept the ones that resonate more with the rhetoric of inclusion as natural and unproblematic. The desire to construct a history that resonates with people on a deeply psychic and emotional level, orienting them toward socially acceptable identity claims and assertions, remains intact. Considering that these are recent histories with living memories, at times museums have experimented with bringing in individuals to recount personal narratives or “living memories” as a way to complement more conventional displays. For example, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) sponsored a virtual “memory box” that allowed people to record their personal experiences and encounters. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI) relies on former freedom fighters to provide personal reflections for curious guests as they make their way through the gallery space. In South Africa, where the history is even more recent, museums have developed a number of initiatives to include personal accounts, ranging from the use of former political prisoners as tour guides at Robben Island Museum to the collection and display of personal testimony from residents who survived the notorious residential evictions at the District Six Museum. In addition to these intimate accounts, this study also considers how and when people speak out against museum developments and collective representations. These considerations reveal how the almost-primordial longing to identify with the past is as much a personal issue as it is a collective one.30 How does this desire for a representative past shape conceptions of a shared or collective memory? What does it mean to refer to memory as a collective phenomenon?

CONSENSUS- DRIVEN MEMORY Despite the fact that multicultural or pluralistic approaches are regularly presented as opposing ways of viewing society, they are not incompatible with more traditional consensus-driven models of social life. Indeed, revising earlier triumphant and homogenizing histories does not necessitate the opposite—the production of nonconsensus histories; rather, a new consensus is sought. This time, consensus revolves around the most socially productive ways to manage differ-

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ence, to weave diverse voices and volatile events into a national portrait. In this respect, the struggle for recognition discussed above can feed into the standardization of a collective narrative of social difference as categories like race and ethnicity are not refuted, but rather the logic supporting them is revised. In the aftermath of conflict, this revision can restore the consensus society or the forms of peaceful public life premised on our consent to be members of a shared society, to be a part of the collective. In fact, the act of mutual agreement over which aspects of the past will be publicly acknowledged is a defining element of collective memory.31 By interrogating the “collective” of “collective memory,” this book revisits some of the earliest conceptions of social life in sociology. The power of collective representations and forms of remembrance were paramount in Emile Durkheim’s study of different types of societies. He analyzed the way members of societies elected to represent themselves, subscribe to rituals, and uphold tradition and the way these actions correspond to the relative strength or weakness of social norms, shared values, and a moral community.32 In other words, these representations were “social facts” that fortified society by elevating and justifying socially acceptable forms of behavior over those deemed deviant. Later, Durkheim’s student, Maurice Halbwachs, stressed that the line between personal and collective memories is imagined because our present identities and social positions shape how and what we remember (and forget).33 This logic can be extended to characterize how and what we remember (and forget) as a collective. The relation of this claim to the previous discussion of identity claims and cultural domination is evident in sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel’s insistence that all collectivities or societies exhibit “rules of remembrance” that shape patterns of recognition and misrecognition.34 People belong to various memory communities defined by personal ties and familial connections as much as by social categories like race and ethnicity.35 Understanding these rules can shed light on how social consensus about difficult historical periods is sought, constructed, and disputed. Collective representations, according to Durkheim, were instrumental in revealing how the line between sacred and profane was established and observed as a guide for human behavior in any given society. Like him, I am less interested in the historical accuracy or

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alleged authenticity of these collective phenomena—in this case, museum exhibitions—than in how their assemblage bolsters claims about the social world and how we are meant to navigate it. In other words, I consider how the sacredness of the collective is restored not only despite difficult histories, but also because of them. Through a variety of museum developments and displays, I also consider the work or the production of the collective as sacred. Unlike Durkheim, I argue that the symbolic and material cannot be distinguished because consensus is illusory and efforts to fi x the past to a narrative regardless of how many marginalized or dissident voices are included are inherently homogenizing, as details are always glossed over in epic narratives of race and nation. This glossing over of fine details is more than an unintended consequence of narrativization. On a more profound level, scholars have commented on the way dissident or anticolonial histories come at a cost; they tend to minimize or diminish the experiences of some in the ser vice of a larger goal, such as the end of racial oppression.36 In other words, mobilizing around racial justice can overlook the fact that members of a racial group may also be marginalized along other social lines, including gender, sexuality, and disability. To the extent that silencing such intersectionality is intentional, pursued in the name of securing ostensibly more core goals, they are considered strategic. Indeed, postcolonial and subaltern studies scholar Gayatri Spivak uses the term strategic essentialism to refer to a tendency to downplay internal group differences in the interest of advancing political goals.37 Such comments raise questions about who among the marginalized is in the position to define these goals and determine which forms of simplification are deemed necessary and which amount to yet another instance of symbolic violence. The desire to construct and broadcast consensual accounts about a collective past should be interrogated along these lines. More introspective concerns around identity and identification with the past must be balanced with the more banal aspects of representation that takes place within institutional settings like museums. Consensus-driven collective memory has a great deal in common with the shifts in historical thinking and scholarship discussed earlier. The central criticism of the historical tradition was that it was too reductionist, both politically and psychologically. In short, the issue

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was that there was a conflation between how one identified politically and with individual preferences, beliefs, and sentiments. The alternative historical project was bent on exposing these values and assumptions that made the grand histories possible—to expose on whose backs they were crafted and at what cost. This is a valuable lesson for those interested in collective memory, especially in the way it gets constricted or represented in the aftermath of intense national conflict. One of the key motivations is to expose such silences and breathe life into alternative ways of thinking about and memorializing the past that were repressed or unfathomable under previous sociopolitical regimes. Sharing many affinities with the new social history movement of the 1970s and 1980s in the United Kingdom, the Popular Memory Group derided the historical status quo as a manifestation and justification for socioeconomic inequality and advocated the use of oral history and amateur historians to access the memories and stories of disenfranchised groups, especially the working class, minorities, women, and LGBTQ communities.38 Since then, others have stressed the rising importance of everyday people—not only members of socially marginalized groups—in shaping collective memory or representations of it at museums and memorials.39 However, just as with historical production, such memory work should not be considered an alternative to the consensus project discussed earlier, but rather as a variant of it. This book shows how the alternative accounts presented in museums dedicated to representing previously silenced histories and experiences are still involved in the project by reproducing the collective as sacred along with circumscribed interpretations of group identities and differences. From national to local, at history museums of all sorts, this project entails positioning itself as sacred public space where the backstage political, economic, institutional, and ideological work of creating and maintaining that space is benignly assumed or actively masked.

MUSEUMS: BET WEEN HISTORY AND MEMORY This book is focused on the role of museums in communicating national identities and culture, and it is motivated more by a concern

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with the production and politics of representing the past than with the past itself. As James Young demonstrated with his study of Holocaust memorials, commemorating violent histories is complicated by the desire to neither avoid nor celebrate pain and trauma.40 This paradox takes center stage at museums where practices of remembering (and forgetting) are institutionalized as part of the public life of memory. Sometimes they are located at historically significant sites, like where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee; or sometimes they develop out of grassroots activism like the District Six Museum in Cape Town, located near the iconic mixed-heritage neighborhood that was bulldozed during apartheid. Museums such as these are considered “sites of memory” or places where memory “crystallizes and secretes itself,” according to French historian Pierre Nora. He and others have argued that the proliferation of museums, monuments, and memorials are signs of a postmodern predicament or crisis: a sense that we are losing our connection to the past.41 He focuses on these sites as alternatives to the types of accounts produced by professional historians who strategically sort through the past.42 Yet, as mentioned earlier, sociologists view memory as also being produced, selective, and constructed. And museums, while certainly sites where collective memory is on display, also incorporate historical scholarship and even professional historians as researchers, curators, and consultants. The line between history and memory is less distinct than is often assumed, and museums surely operate within the murky overlap between the two spaces. This somewhat precarious position is exacerbated by contemporary expectations that museums balance pressing demands to observe, acknowledge, and even celebrate difference—while at the same time emphasizing what all visitors have in common. Popular discourse around historical museums treats them as simple transmitters of information about the past revealed through the distillation of complex scholarship into linear and seemingly agreed-upon visual narratives.43 Such consensus-driven practices tend to create an illusion of harmony and unity by relying on familiar tropes and cultural scripts that resonate with the status quo. However, this impression is difficult to sustain when the memories involve unresolved or traumatic historical episodes; public representations of

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these periods are often more likely to provoke controversy than to deepen unity. Yet, this does not preempt museums from working to fit these difficult periods into tidy narratives; to do other wise would be to disrupt one of the fundamental tasks of museums. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, the emergent field of museum studies or “new museology” has flourished by positioning museums as theaters where identities are performed, ideologies interrogated, and cultural symbols reinvented. Unlike more traditional studies of museum conservation practices and administration, museum studies involves a deeper examination of the hidden assumptions and biases embedded in museum collections and exhibitions.44 Research in this subfield of memory studies focuses on both the production and consumption of museum content, from the exhibitions and guided tours to interactive technologies and public programming.45 As a whole, museum studies powerfully refuted commonly held beliefs that museums were value-free by tracing the ways some group experiences and their cultural and artistic traditions had been systematically ignored or marginalized in mainstream museums. In particular, some began to question the ritualistic nature of museums and the function they served for society by looking at public programming and forms of engagement (or disengagement). Carol Duncan investigated museums as secular “ritual structures,”46 while Duncan Cameron emphasized that community engagement, historical revision, and social interpretation had transformed museums into public forums that hardly involved any essential museological practices, such as acquiring and collecting material objects.47 All of this work came at the time when rhetoric about the culture war was at its height. Museums have played a critical role within these processes. Museum developers often succumb to an urge to create an illusion of consensus by showcasing seemingly agreed-upon narratives. For example, a variety of discursive, visual, and technological moves are involved in presenting a narrative of South Africa’s apartheid past that appears consensual and discourages disagreement over the accounts at museums like the Apartheid Museum.48 Another way to see museums is to view them primarily as educational institutions, and in fact, most museums, especially historical and cultural museums, consider public education to be a key aspect of their mission. While these museums are a primary source of historical information for the public,

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they must compete with other venues where information about ongoing racial violence is publicized, particularly through social media sites. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, for example, museums are structured in such a way that injustice is treated as an object of history, rather than continuous or ongoing. While museum exhibitions, like television programming and films, are far more responsive to historical revisions than school curricula, which are more tightly regulated and monitored, they showcase content, in this case racial conflict, that appears resolved. As an object on display, the imagined past is controlled, the sharp edges rounded. As cultural products of modernity, museums face a conundrum in contemporary life characterized by a fragmentation, hybridity, multiplicity, and virtual realities. Such postmodern conditions call the authoritative power and practices of the museum into question. In Simulacra and Simulation, postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard observed that today’s “museum, instead of being circumscribed as a geometric site, is everywhere now, like a dimension of life.”49 What role do museums play in a time of hyperreality or simulated reality when mass-produced reproductions abound, when the line between the object and its display is no longer relevant as our perceptions become reality? If we are indeed surrounded by simulations and are part of them ourselves, what does it mean to visit a museum in the first place? Some museum scholars contend that the museum as a distinct social institution need not be cast aside, that instead its work should be reinvented with more emphasis on interpretation, personal experiences, and engagement as opposed to object-driven exhibitions mounted by experts.50 This line of questioning raises issues about the social construction of authenticity as much as it does about the future of museums as legitimizing social institutions. Yet, these are not concerns of postmodernists alone; sociologist Erving Goffman observed that social life is characterized by a series of manufactured or produced performances.51 For Goffman the question is not whether such per formances are authentic—indeed, authenticity is always imagined—but rather whether they are deemed credible by audiences. Accordingly, the museum is the setting within which a variety of performances are displayed by curators, tour guides, and visitors, as well as less visible actors, such as donors. These productive and consumptive per for-

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mances are the basis for the generative power of museums even today. The fact that people continue to visit museums and treat their performances or displays as somehow distinct from the ones they encounter in their everyday lives makes them an ideal site for studying the stories we tell ourselves about the past. The development of historical and cultural museums offers a promising window through which to understand how new historical information is incorporated or marginalized in the mainstream, as well as how revised accounts are institutionalized. This sociological perspective supplants that of the museum critic, who is more concerned with the accuracy of museum content and the depth of historical knowledge; I explore a broader set of questions about the relationship between social change and cultural representation, along with other organizational and institutional dynamics that shape the choices museums must make—including pressures like tourism and urban development, as well as national culture. I draw on these themes to understand similarities and differences in the way the past is represented in U.S. and South African museums. Even more than outlining rules of rebellion or the basis of social order, museum exhibitions blur the line between individual and collective, as we are meant to identify on an almost primordial level with the past. In fact, the power and efficacy of the collective story is the extent to which we take it on as our own story, our own memory, our own identity; we are meant to identify with the past. In museum exhibitions devoted to difficult material, this is evident in the way identity narratives are used. We are each located within the narrative and we belong to the collective to the extent that we not only accept but also identify with the collective representations. In postconflict settings, the consensus society is premised on our acceptance of a common way to contextualize the past. For democratic societies and in the wake of the power of the social history movement, the project of consensus-driven collective memory is to craft collective representations that accommodate difference, but do so without disrupting the notion of a collective or a mutual consenting public. At museums, this is generally achieved through the use of identity narratives, the multiplication of identities and stories to reflect those identities that all conform to similar conventions of storytelling.

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DESEGREGATING THE PAST In both South Africa and the United States, museum professionals contend with the challenges of displaying unifying collective narratives in the context of long histories of racial antagonisms. At first glance, however, this comparison would suggest an almost perfectly inverted story: similar black-led movements for nonracial citizenship triggered a radical social reorganization with black-majority rule in one case and a more modest integration of a small black minority into a white-dominated society in the other. However, these demographic facts do not account for similarities in the way that museums dedicated to preserving these histories have emerged at the fore of debates about national and racial identities, reconciliation, economic development, and public culture in both countries. Desegregating the Past illustrates that similar concerns over representation and access to resources and audiences shape how and why traumatic histories are preserved, edited, and displayed in the public realm. Indeed, the comparison of the politics of representing U.S. and South African societies vis-à-vis their troubled pasts revolves around an investigation of the dilemmas facing museums as they exhibit and promote collective representations as sacred, authentic, and incontrovertible. All of the museums in this study are dedicated to commemorating the histories of struggles to desegregate and upturn racial logics in the United States and South Africa. Yet, in doing so they also contribute to a wider, more profound social project about the ordering of time, the segregation of the past from the present and future. That is, they locate or orient the present in relation to what is defined as the past. Through chronology and narrative structure, the past is rendered both visible and knowable, an object to be contained. The ephemeral nature of memory and its off-kilter, dizzying rhythms, along with the unevenness of identity or subjectivity is effectively tamed, a casualty in the pursuit of digestible moral lessons to be projected onto other imagined periods: the present and the future. The coercive power of how time should be regarded or organized, by way of history-making and collective memory projects, and how we should orient ourselves toward both, is evident in moments of resistance or among those I refer to as memory deviants who openly refuse to abide by conventional styles and tropes used to represent the past.

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Chapter 1 explores the role of memory entrepreneurs—those individuals and organizations that create and seize opportunities to shape collective memory52—in revising historical content. It asks: If history is written by the victors, then who revises it? I answer this question by identifying the key actors involved in positioning museums as sites of revision, paying attention to how their institutional locations and interests help explain the cultural politics of revision. I discuss revision in terms of historical content as a gateway to a deeper consideration of revision as a source of renewing social consensus and reshaping public (historical) space. This chapter links the cultural work of museums dedicated to preserving histories of violence to long-standing criticisms of mainstream history and museum culture. The chapter compares the development of a family of black history museums operating in opposition to whitewashing of U.S. history to the overhaul of national museums after the fall of apartheid in South Africa. It outlines how this social environment paved the way for the construction and ultimately the standardization of certain types of revision and collective narratives. In chapter 2, I examine how violent histories are recounted through the lens of group identity formation in exhibitions. I discuss how relying on the conventions of collective storytelling—the rules and norms around both plot and structure—blunts the sharp edges of history. This chapter analyzes the visual and discursive turns used to construct a metanarrative of group identity forged through collective trauma. In South Africa, this collective experience is articulated as a national one, whereas in the United States interrogation of the society’s racist past is the purview of so-called ethnic or black museums. In other words, American histories of racial oppression are converted into a narrative that depicts how blacks were transformed from racial subjects to citizens. On the other hand, in South Africa the long history of colonial rule and racial subjugation is told as part of the story of national transformation from a racial dictatorship to a liberal democracy. Despite some differences in framing and racial versus nationalistic allusions, the overall narrative structure, sentiment, and approach are similar: both emphasize personal humility, collective perseverance, and the inevitability of democratic rule. Chapter 3 treats the museum not only as a site of memory, but also as a site of employment. It considers how the collective representations

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require management over time, focusing on some of the banal or profane dimensions of memory work: the budgets, the political wrangling, staff composition and training, and construction costs and woes. Museum curators and directors must contend with a cluster of political-economic and institutional factors that deeply determine their capacity to represent the past. I found that all the museums I studied faced related concerns about funding, attendance, membership development, and exhibition design. This chapter examines how these issues affect displays across relatively older (civil rights and apartheid-era) museums compared to ones founded during the 1990s and 2000s. By comparing the myriad ways that liberal ideologies such as constitutionalism, inclusion, and citizenship intersect with material considerations—such as budgets and building design— this chapter investigates the diverse types of work involved in constructing collective memory. It also addresses the influence of the tourism industry on the public life of memory. Building on the previous discussion, chapter 4 asks: What can deviant forms of remembering tell us about the normative project of collective remembrance? This chapter draws on newspaper articles, blogs, and interviews to explore the world of memory deviants who refuse to engage in socially responsible forms of remembering and the identity constructions implicit in them. This chapter investigates the limits of constructing a consensus-driven collective memory through the lens of dissenting voices, particularly those of the people meant to identify with revised collective narratives. From journalists and politicians to artists and torture survivors, I consider such resistance as evidence of the need for counterpublic (historical) spaces. I compare and contrast how competing interpretations of the past and its role in contemporary society inform debates about multiculturalism, reconciliation, and empowerment. This chapter also examines how the illusion of a consensus-driven collective memory is shattered through various modes of artistic expression that deviate from the curated past discussed in chapter 1. In doing so, this chapter also considers the differences between subverting memory conventions in history museums compared to art museums and galleries. Finally, in the conclusion, I revisit the puzzle of collective memory and the politics of representation or the “museumification of memory.” I argue that memory and identity become artifacts in the interest of

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reconstituting the collective in the aftermath of prolonged and intense conflict. The conclusion also questions the motivations for and implications of the construction and production of consensus-driven narratives as the basis of collective memory. Ultimately, it considers the extent to which museum practices can transcend the familiar visual and discursive language of racial and national identities that is itself rooted in histories of oppression and exclusion.

NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY While I use common terms such as “race,” “true,” “real,” “collective,” and “nation,” this book calls them into question as ideas, not things. In par ticular, although race, ethnicity, and nation operate as powerful social identities and categories, they are socially constructed. Every society has different ways of classifying populations and people use any number of ways to internalize, reinvent, or reject official classifications. These schemes vary both across time and space, which complicates cross-national comparison. For example, coloured is a label with resonance in both countries at various periods (at least tonally), but with wildly different meanings. In South Africa, it is an official racial designation created during apartheid to classify people of mixed descent—generally indigenous, Dutch, Indian, and African—and a rich cultural heritage and identity has formed around it; the term “coloured” is not typically considered offensive, despite its origins in apartheid classification schemes. In contrast, the term “colored” in the United States had been considered a polite way to refer to people of African descent before it became closely linked to the discursive and visual culture of Jim Crow laws and is now considered derogatory.53 These labels are fraught and have become points of contention in debates around the representation of history and culture. Although the naming and renaming of groups lends legitimacy to the flawed notion that there is some correct or authentic way to reference human differences, I use the latest census classifications for both countries to refer to racial, ethnic, and national groups.

1 MEMORY ENTREPRENEURS History in the Making

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is written by the victors, then who revises it? Another set of victors do, those that see themselves as speaking on behalf of the subaltern or those social groups that have been historically excluded or effectively erased from conventional historical accounts. These memory entrepreneurs do more than revise history; they actively create and then popularize it.1 Unlike the memory deviants discussed later, entrepreneurs present themselves as representatives of a reconstituted collective in need of safekeeping. The popularization of their revised or alternative accounts through public cultural sites like museums aids in the conversion of historical narratives into the stuff of collective memory. As the targets of this work, we are meant to personally identify with these narratives as they become part of the public life of memory and group identity. This revisionist crusade is led by those who have the most at stake in cultivating this shared (revised) sense of the past among diverse individuals. We can revise and resubmit any number of interpretations about that past, but who dedicates their time to this and which versions attract the most attention, becoming hegemonic representations of the subaltern? Unpacking these issues requires us to rethink revision as a collective memory enterprise that requires high levels of coordination between multiple social actors.

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Indeed, the revision of national histories never occurs spontaneously nor in a vacuum. In South Africa and the United States, it occurred alongside the freedom struggles and within the contours of historiographical innovations. The desire to revise and resubmit history should not be taken for granted nor should the practices used to do so. Revisionists generally frame their work as morally and socially imperative. By interrogating their motivations and interests, the normative underpinnings of revision, like all historical production, become evident. Rather than viewing revisions, even those we are sympathetic toward, as necessary or true, we should be attentive to the selective or subjective nature of revision. Treating it as a corrective that brings us a step closer toward the truth about the past obscures its social construction as much as its group-making aspirations. Because historical revision is a social fact, who does the revising is just as impor tant as the outcome. Indeed, the black history and social history movements should be understood as collective memory projects as they sought to intervene in the public’s historical consciousness by having them identify personally with new or alternative narratives, embracing them as though they were their own. Understanding the wider social context of revision does more than explain how new opportunities to resubmit the past were seized and created by enthusiastic memory boosters. It also illuminates how the push for revisionist accounts traces back to the desire to reconstitute collective identities, so that identity formation becomes the primary vehicle through which histories of violence and conflict are navigated. Taken together, I discuss this work as a form of memory entrepreneurship whereby various civic leaders and progressive historians work not to obliterate history or collective identities as a path toward personal freedom, but to revise them. In both countries, revised narratives produced by professional historians located within academia preceded efforts to strategically popularize these collective accounts through museums. In South Africa, the social history movement of the 1970s and 1980s radically transformed historical production and eventually became a body of evidence or source of knowledge animating the transformation of established history museums and the creation of new ones during the 1990s and 2000s. In the United States, the development of the black historical scholarship intended to correct distortions and address gaps in mainstream

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work eventually extended beyond academia. This extension included the theming of black history as a specific type of museum. Despite the more overtly national character of the social history-based revision in South Africa compared to the more racial basis of the black historybased revision in the United States, they are far more similar than not. At the most basic level, race and nation are intrinsically relational and interwoven in both places with each collective identity informing the other. Even more, the revisions in both cases are fundamentally vindicationist, motivated by a deep-seated desire to be recognized by dominant society. This longing is as profound as it is practical in terms of professional recognition and institutional survival.

HISTORICAL CAPITAL Three years into his presidency, Nelson Mandela reflected on the newly created public holiday Heritage Day as an occasion to commit to transforming national museums. He lambasted established institutions for excluding the majority population and for reproducing racial stereotypes, remarking that “the demeaning portrayal of black people in particular—that is African, Indian, and Coloured people— is painful to recall.”2 During that address, he asked: Having excluded and marginalised most of our people, is it surprising that our museums and national monuments are often seen as alien spaces? How many of our people have visited the country’s museums? How many have gone to see one of our monuments? In other countries, such places throng with citizens.

Mandela reasoned that “with democracy, we have the opportunity to ensure that our institutions reflect history in a way that respects the heritage of all our citizens.” His comments shine a light on the emotive and transformative power many of us regard museums as possessing or representing, seeing them as statements about social value and worth. His remarks also position museums and public representations of shared culture, identity, and history alongside politics; with political change comes a new stream of narratives to bolster a new national ethos.

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While the link between such efforts to reshape memorial landscapes in the United States and South Africa and revisionist historical production is complicated, the intellectual products of progressive historians figure centrally in the public presentation of the past at museums. Radical history arose during a time of massive social unrest in both countries. For many progressive professional historians, it marked a departure from conventional research topics, questions, and methodologies. But we should bear in mind that it did not obliterate them; rather it replaced them with an alternative set. Much of this innovation involved re-creating or supplementing archives with the personal accounts, traditions, and oral histories of people whose presence was less visible or more likely to be distorted or truncated in traditional sources. In this sense, the 1970s ushered in an age when culture and politics intersected with innovations in history-making and memory work. This hybridity grew out of crisis, the crisis of a collective representation that could no longer withstand mounting evidence of social fissures. Progressive historians challenged traditional national or political histories from above by attempting to tell history from below in ways that blurred distinctions between history, oral history, anthropology, and folklore. Yet, we should understand the grassroots image of their work as aspirational or as branding; revision has been packaged as originating from below when in fact it represents the enterprising activities of a diverse set of intellectual, cultural, and community leaders and professionals. Their ability to influence the historical record was possible only through the accumulation of certain forms of cultural power and capital. In his work on sites of memory, French historian Pierre Nora briefly used the concept of historical capital to characterize how subjugated groups possess “reserves of memory” but have little power to affect the dominant historical record.3 Notwithstanding Nora’s problematic juxtaposition of real and authentic memory against the fabricated or produced histories of modern society, his observation that sociopolitical power is directly linked to sociocultural power is crucial. However, he assumes this power is located within groups rather than individuals. It is not the ordinary person that rewrites history or even necessarily has a desire to do so; it is the memory entrepreneur who capitalizes on this opportunity as they gain access to sociopolitical and cultural spaces and resources.

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Although the concept has been overlooked in references to Nora’s work, it is one that social scientists should be especially interested in given its clear implications for the way we discuss social and cultural capital. In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, political scientist Robert Putnam famously argued that U.S. public life has suffered from diminished social trust and civic engagement since the 1960s.4 According to Putnam, this disengagement or “decapitalization” has resulted from an array of social transformations related to mass society and technological change. Many have taken issue with his diagnosis and others are less concerned with the apparent unmooring of a fundamentally exclusionary mainstream.5 Indeed, the weakening of certain types of social bonds and elements of public life has created openings for new forms of expression and ways of being. New historical narratives can take shape within these spaces, so that declining historical (or social) capital within some groups can correlate with increasing capital within others. Access to and deployment of historical capital helps to explain how, why, and when official historical records change in the context of wider social processes like democratization and social movement activity. As society changes, and as the boundaries of nation expand (or contract), so too do the ways national culture, identity, and history are represented. For example, in recent years it has become increasingly unacceptable and taboo to openly embrace racist-nationalist ideologies in U.S. and South African societies; it has also become more difficult to paint portraits of a culturally homogenous collective without risking immense and swift backlash from vast portions of the population rendered invisible or insignificant with access to a variety of social media, another source of historical capital. All of these aspects of historical capital lead us toward seeing revision through the lens of social power; yet, one need not accept that these revisionist accounts are particularly radical or even especially alternative: they are still preoccupied with the process of arriving at a consensus regarding memory and history. The parties seek consensus on how to best weave histories of differences and conflict into coherent narratives that ultimately celebrate the types of agitation that prompted the revisionist impulse in the first place. In both countries, the desire to locate certain forms of strife in the past and to fi x certain expressions of collective life and identity in museum exhibitions

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parallels the desire to view the forms of affiliation that led to the creation of the museums as part of a past state that prompted the current harmonious postconflict period during which conflict is a foreign country that we visit in museums.

MAKING HISTORY SOCIAL What makes history social? Why was the social more appealing than the racial to history makers in South Africa compared to the United States? While there was also a robust social history movement in the United States, one with linkages to its South African counterpart, it was not at the forefront of the revisionist work that ended up on display in black history museums. Generally, we think of social history as part of the people’s history movement, emphasizing the linkages between political, economic, and cultural phenomena and processes across time. In apartheid-era South Africa however, it was far more than a reaction to political histories in South Africa. Social historical production became an intellectual endeavor focused on resistance and social change, using grassroots history—history from below—as both an intellectual and cultural front of resistance. Who resides below and what does it mean to tell history from that vantage point relative to some other? These questions have been largely taken for granted by those involved in the revisionist movement of the 1970s and 1980s that would eventually find an outlet in museums. What did it mean to tell history from below? Below what and who would do the telling? How did this radical social history get mainlined as it became hegemonic itself? The nature of its popularization helps explain this— through films, documentaries, public talks, plays, slideshows, newspaper articles, and later museum exhibitions and school curricula. In the context of colonialism and apartheid it should come as no surprise that the production of historical knowledge has always been a contested site where state practices of domination and exclusion are rationalized, glossed over, or alternatively called into question. Calling history into question—and thus calling the scaffolding of white minority rule into question—became the primary objective of the social history revisionist movement in South Africa, led by Englishspeaking professional historians. Belinda Bozzoli, one of its early practitioners, describes this reactionary project in terms of fashioning a

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narrative that resonated with the majority population. Reflecting on the movement, she recalled that Afrikaner nationalists have constructed elaborate myths of origins and of national progress and redemption [that] have been imposed upon countless schoolchildren of all races. . . . The dominant ideas, although well thought-out and efficiently promulgated through schools and public media, and backed by a totalitarian state have not found a secure place in the hearts and minds of ordinary blacks.6

Accordingly, many social historians set out not to obliterate history, but to repurpose it in their image of the ordinary and in the ser vice of their various ideological commitments to the working class. These more progressive historians represented a challenge to the established history enterprise, which was dominated by Afrikaans-speaking professionals.7 The ascent of social history as a way of doing history and thinking historically advanced on the heels of a number of intellectual and social turns in South Africa and abroad. Locally, the 1976 Soweto student uprisings marked a moment of heightened protest and challenge to the state, adding urgency to calls for a revised treatment of national culture and history. Drawing on the social history movements in England and to a lesser extent the United States, these liberal historians sought to develop a counterhistory that stood out for its methods as much as its content. As an intellectual project, the South African social history movement reflected the ethos of the Marxist historical thought associated with English scholars like Shula Marks and E. P. Thompson.8 Indeed, many received their degrees and training in England before taking up positions at English-speaking universities, especially at the University of the Witwatersrand (more commonly known as Wits University) in Johannesburg, which would become the epicenter for the revisionist movement after the founding of the History Workshop in 1977. While they emphasized class and class analysis, mimicking their Marxist training abroad, they were more concerned with culture, not as an instrument of the ruling elite but as a source of knowledge and resistance among the dominated.9 This set of concerns led liberal historians to reorient South African historiography both methodologically and substantively. Recognizing that telling a new history required new techniques, these historians

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reached outside colonial archives as the sources of primary evidence, rethinking how the subjects and objects of history are presented in official materials, which tend to normalize colonial and apartheid state power. Instead, like the pioneers of the black history movement, they drew on more interdisciplinary techniques, particularly ethnographic ones, to produce new primary data sources to construct alternative narratives about the majority population. Recognizing that “South Africa is not a culture of literacy,”10 they paved the way for the incorporation of interviews, oral histories, and visual culture into historical production. Far from being unproblematically attained, mined, and leveraged as sources of evidence to prove the truth claims about the past,11 they did successfully re-canonize history-making. The subjects of history were no longer the purview of European colonists, settlers, and political leaders alone. Instead, black South Africans—regarded as objects or obstacles to be contained in nationalist histories—were to take center stage. These historians could have chosen any number of ways to conceptualize this move; in large part they elected to focus on black experience in cities. How can we account for this urban focus? Because urbanization was intimately tied to the process of South African industrialization and capitalist expansion, cities made a useful backdrop for the creation of these revised histories rooted in Marxist thinking. They drew the historical lens away from the my thology of rural life that characterized earlier work and concentrated on developing work that explained urban processes from the perspective of largely black workers. To construct this urban “people’s history”—or urban mythologies—historians sought to unearth the private and public lives of blacks working in and around large cities and townships. For example, they interviewed mineworkers about their working and living conditions as well as their everyday lives, which served as the basis for new scholarship that linked subjective experiences to more structural macroaccounts of capitalist development.12 They worked to make history social by defying more than professional conventions; they actively reimagined the nation to include those denied basic human and citizenship rights. Like the emergence and expansion of the black history movement in the United States, the institutional presence and capacity of social history in South Africa was enterprising: it spawned new faculty positions, academic departments and workshops, conferences, and

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publications. This expansion was far greater than that of black history though, as it became the preeminent historiographical mode during the 1980s, more reminiscent of the rise of progressive history in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s.13 As South African historian Colin Bundy argues, this surge was global in nature, drawing from intellectual currents and expatriate activities across Europe, such as French structuralism and Shula Marks’s seminar series at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London, and the rise of left-wing historiography in North America. They also produced an impressive body of historical work, attracting the attention of U.S.-based journals that hosted special issues devoted to their studies. As social historian Philip Bonner points out, even with the advancement of alternative conceptions of revisionist work, including revising social history, social history remains the primary mode of historical work, attracting the widest audiences and producers.14 Yet, unlike the U.S. case, this new historical work and the institutional apparatus supporting it were not explicitly, or rather consciously, racialized, neither in terms of the content nor in terms of its producers. While the focus was on the lives and histories of black South Africans, they were conceived of in terms of their class status more than their race, as race was treated as a vehicle for class domination and exploitation. However, the fact that the vast majority of historians engaged in this work were white was undeniable and hampered their ability to present themselves as representatives of marginal voices they wished to amplify. They were isolated from the booming Black Consciousness (BC) movement not only because of their ambivalence around the utility of race in explaining oppression or mobilizing resistance; more fundamentally, they were never invited to participate in BC (or Pan-Africanist) activities reserved for blacks only. Yet, social historians found plenty of organizations, such as the African National Congress (ANC) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), with predominately black membership bases interested in collaborations.15 This access helped social historians cultivate relationships with their new historical subjects—ordinary blacks—as they sought to both help shape and be of ser vice to collective resistance. As Bozzoli argues, this tactic also reflected the Gramscian faith in the role of intellectuals as social provocateurs capable of shining a light on the other wise obscured underpinnings of power.16

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Indeed, initially no pool of black scholars or family of black academic journals would develop like in the United States, reflecting the even greater degree of systematic exclusion that made replicating what a select few black scholars achieved in establishing the black history movement in the United States impossible in South Africa. Social historian Luli Callinicos commented that the system of exclusion and censorship was so repressive that no robust culture of black intellectual activity could have been afforded the institutional space to breathe and develop during apartheid.17 Would history have been made black rather than social had this not been the case? Not necessarily. Even as the number of black intellectuals increased as institutions like the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in Cape Town became dedicated to training nonwhite students, they remained committed to the revolutionary project of national liberation, not racial integration or assimilation. The revolutionary aspirations of liberal historians were most evident in their desire to popularize their work. While responsible for the expansion of academic programs and other forms in institutionbuilding, many historians were not satisfied by academic accolades alone; they were determined to reach general audiences. It is through this work that these historians engage in memory entrepreneurship as they produce and distribute historical narratives that the public is expected to embrace as its own, to finally see themselves in history. Indeed, while describing her interest in popularizing social history, Callinicos stated, There is a need both to explore subjective experiences and to locate them firmly in the larger, objective social forces. For the pursuit of ‘collective memory’ is complex . . . influenced not least by the extent to which an hegemony has been imposed upon or absorbed by members of a community.18

It is clear that she and others aimed to wield social history as a corrective to what they considered the rampant “false consciousness” forestalling social emancipation. The potential identification with history—not as social, but as personal—represents the early stages of collective memory construction. The History Workshop at Wits University supported historians and published popular series on local his-

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tory, worked with trade unions, and codeveloped comic books and film and television programming about urban and labor history to reach mass audiences through both print and visual media in multiple languages.19 As the social history movement gained popularity, reaching diverse devotees across academia and beyond, it also attracted critics, including those who noted that it did not have the mass appeal it boasted.20 The harshest denunciations have not come from conservative rivals, but from other progressive historians. These historians, particularly those affiliated with the UWC, viewed social historians at the History Workshop and elsewhere as being atheoretical, apolitical, and misguided in their treatment of oral history materials. Social history was only tangentially concerned with theory, immersing itself instead in its oral historical and ethnographic pursuit of data. Detractors also charged that while the movement was revolutionary in its use of alternative sources, it remained wedded to the conventional or mainstream need to produce evidence.21 This commitment meant that oral histories were only superficially engaged as testimony and mined for quotes to verify and animate the thoughts of the producer, the professional historian. We can certainly view social history’s need to prove itself as a form of vindication as the core of the hegemonic historical enterprise—the compulsion to find and present information as facts about the past—is retained. Those troubled by the way social and physical space along with identity were uncritically adopted called the evidentiary premise of social historical production into further question.22 According to South African sociologist Deborah Posel, as poststructuralist, postmodern, feminist, and postcolonial theory gained visibility during the late 1980s and through the 1990s, the limitations of social history to account for the nature of power and forms of social reproduction outside of class became particularly stark.23 Seeking to develop a revised revisionist history that avoided these pitfalls, historians at the UWC founded the People’s History Project in 1986. The program was deeply influenced by the BC, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and thinkers like Michel Foucault.24 This theoretical robustness led to interrogations about the nature of knowledge production and the social construction of expertise, which informed their revisionist approach. In addition to its theoretical engagement, its unabashed political stance and affiliation with the

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resistance movement distinguished the People’s History Workshop from the History Workshop. The UWC became a bastion for politically minded intellectual work after it gained autonomy following the establishment of a tricameral political system affording limited political rights to Indians and Coloureds in 1983.25 With their analytical focus trained on the dilemmas of historical representation and production, these scholars sought to popular ize their notions of history-making through a variety of local memory projects exploring the unevenness and multivocality of recollection through dialogue.26 While these engagements were less vertical than previous styles of interaction with ordinary people, they were still solicited and orga nized by professionals who later drew on their experiences in their academic work. Eventually this popularizing reflex of revisionist history found its way into the museum world, but similar to the eventual theming of black history at U.S. museums, this move should not be viewed as a direct progeny of their popularizing efforts. It came at a turning point for the revisionist effort and stands apart from earlier work outside of academia. Within academia, revisionist social history was coming under closer scrutiny if not attack. But wider developments really brought social history to its knees, provoking what some came to refer to as a “crisis of history,” drawing on the words of the head of the South African Historical Association. Questions about the ongoing relevance of a discipline whose defining characteristics were its opposition to the state and desire for social change triggered this identity crisis. What would it mean to be dissident toward a democratically elected government, to the ANC party, both of which had been accepted popularly as the face of the freedom struggle by that time? This reveals a tension with the history movement itself. On the one hand, it was committed to class analysis and class revolution, not national resistance or race-based politics. However, it was also deeply committed to being socially relevant and accountable through its work with various unions and community organizations. Yet, eventually the trade unions were in alliance with the ANC through COSATU and the ANC enjoyed overwhelming popular support. So, it was not that they could not see themselves as being oppositional to a new state power, it was that they could not see themselves as alienated from the public they wanted to be engaged with; such a development would surely undermine their ability to be memory entrepreneurs.

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It was in this climate of uncertainty that the History Workshop hosted its first museum-themed conference. Unlike its preceding conferences, it attracted museum professionals. While social historians turned some of their attention to reforming school curricula, they also settled on museums, monuments, and memorials as new revisionist opportunities. Public history, not necessarily popular history of the sort being promulgated earlier, became an area of renewal for the workshop. In 1992 the History Workshop co-organized “Myths, Monuments, and Museums: New Premises” with the South African Museum Association (SAMA). The conference served as a forum to deliberate on museum-society relations, the relevance of apartheid-era commemorative styles and museological practice, and the role of social historians in shaping new and revised museum content. Occurring in the midst of intense internal bickering within SAMA, it was attended by academics and museum professionals, who were urged to update their collections and exhibitions to reflect the entirety of the nation rather than a small racial minority.27 This History Workshop conference came on the heels of other key moments of dialogue between academics, museum curators and directors, cultural activists, and community organizers. Such occasions became an impor tant vehicle through which revisionist historical content and methodologies affected museum acquisition, collection, and exhibition practices as well as public programming. SAMA was already experiencing deep rifts over the need to transform and how to go about doing so. Indeed, Ann Wanless, museum anthropologist and former curator at the Africana Museum, pointed out that the museum establishment—and especially SAMA—was engulfed in conflict as more liberal and conservative traditions and political viewpoints resurfaced after years of suppression.28 Although many politically liberal members of the organization had long resented the way apartheid mandates constrained their work, especially the treatment of white Europeans as the subjects of history museums and everyone else as objects on display in natural history or anthropological museums, as state employees they were largely complicit.29 During the late 1980s the established (white) museum community had to confront such divisions and grapple with its future in a nonracial democratic social order, including questions about staff composition and intended audiences as much as about content.

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After being maligned as “the worst country on the face of the Earth” by American John Kinard, the longtime director of the Anacostia Museum in Washington, D.C., at its annual conference, members of SAMA signed the Pietermaritzburg Declaration, which stated: 1) That South African museums in their various programmes purposefully direct their efforts to promote the dissemination of information to and enjoyment of museums by all South Africans; 2) the South African museums actively assist all our various communities better to understand the circumstances of both their separate and common history so as to give them a clearer view of their present relationships and thereby how they can be more harmoniously involved one with the other in the future; 3) that South African museums sincerely strive to be seen to belong to all South Africans irrespective of colour, creed or gender; 4) that all South African be encouraged to express openly their views as to how the country’s museums may better serve the interests of all in South Africa.30

This sentiment was echoed one year later at the “Conservation of Culture: Changing Context and Challenges” conference in Cape Town where attendees discussed the relationships between culture, preservation, ideology and myth, and political interests, as well as cultural conservation from black and Muslim perspectives.31 Like the previous event, this one attracted political representatives including Chief Mangosutho Buthelezi, then minister of KwaZulu and head of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). He spoke about the tendency to use history and culture as a tool to divide and oppress: I am . . . aware that in our South African circumstances, what one can perhaps call the purity of culture, is contaminated by political parameters within which cultural identities have been made political identities, in circumstances in which the state has made culture inward-looking with a political we/they dimension which coincides with racist divisions.32

These highly charged meetings marked a turning point in the recognition or visibility of the entrepreneurial role that museum profession-

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als play in representing national identity. Formerly, this work was largely invisible and taken for granted by museum insiders, but the fall of apartheid necessitated conversations about the way historical information had been produced, not just displayed in the past. However, like the revisionist social historians there was little discussion about the work of museums, not to mention historians as always selective and productive; rather there was a sense that with democratization and by presenting a more racially inclusive portrait of society the true or real image of nation would emerge. This process of selection, editing, and of representation itself is what defines the entrepreneurial project of both historical revision and collective memory construction. Such storytelling preferences are also evident in the byproducts of cross-disciplinary or cross-field interactions at specific museums. Most notably, the Africana Museum, one of the leading state museums, approached the History Workshop for consultation on updating its historical displays, its public image, and its relationship to a broader audience. Wanless stressed that the museum’s radical reorientation was a result of new leadership in the museum and shifts in the administrative bodies at SAMA.33 Subsequently, the museum changed its name to MuseumAfrica, after finding that most blacks had negative perceptions of the museum and considered it a racist institution.34 Drawing on resources from the History Workshop, it reopened in 1996 with a series of exhibitions showcasing the local histories of gold mining, women’s and men’s work lives, and protest activity, among other areas.35 These additions reflected the priority that revisionist social historians placed on local stories, urban histories, and work. Criticisms about its patchwork presentation of local history36 echo some of the criticism of the social history movement—that it lacked synthesis. Other museums, such as the South African Cultural History Museum and the South African Museum,37 also began to transform during the 1990s by attempting to incorporate social historical narratives and eradicate the problematic distinction between human history and anthropology. The History Workshop has also been active in the creation of new museums like the Apartheid Museum and the Workers’ Museum where the social history perspective is clearly on display. The Apartheid Museum tells the history of South Africa through the lens of the

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discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand region and the subsequent development of the mining industry with its influence of settlement, migration, and various social relations, mimicking the focus of the social historians on local urban history and capitalism. Former History Workshop director Philip Bonner took the lead in crafting the bulk of text presented in the country’s first apartheid-themed museum. Similarly, Luli Callinicos played a central role in the making of the Workers’ Museum, much of which is based on her book Gold and Workers, which she wrote as member of the workshop. The conversion of the Old Fort Prison complex in Johannesburg into a museum and the site of the Constitutional Court also has ties to the social history movement. Lauren Segal, who cowrote Soweto: A History with Bonner at the workshop, directed the museum project.38 She continues her collaborations with the workshop through her own firm, the Trace Group, which is involved in a number of memorial projects and exhibitions across the country. Her enterprise illustrates the industry that has emerged to respond to market demand for revised and new museum content and styles of memorialization. Likewise, historians from the UWC have been involved in a variety of new museum construction, including most notably the Robben Island Museum and the District Six Museum in Cape Town. Just as the history movement at the UWC saw itself as distinct from the social history model advanced at Wits University, UWC historians see the cultural production at the District Six Museum as guided by an approach to historical knowledge production generated outside of academia.39 While it may function as one of a few “independent spaces of public scholarship,”40 it is nonetheless a representational project conceived by progressive academics and activists, not to mention a popular tourist destination. Outside of the revisionist social historians’ activities, why did we not see a similar wave of museum-building develop during the protest era in South Africa as we did in the United States? While some energy was channeled into reforming existing museums and galleries during the 1980s, new museum development reflecting the sentiments and themes of revisionist social historians did not unfold until the postapartheid era. First, South African museums were colonial enterprises with little to no connection to memorial practices that predated the arrival of Dutch and English settlers; it was only after

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democratization that they were seen as cultural inheritances to be confronted. Also, the higher levels of state repression, surveillance, and censorship codified into apartheid law undermined any such institution-building on the part of black South Africans. There was little civil society to support the creation of countercultural venues to showcase alternative histories outside of academia. Lastly, at the time many cultural activists were not working as memory entrepreneurs per se; rather they devoted their energies to direct protest action. In other words, both cultural production and consumption were deeply politicized and a source of debate across the various factions of the antiapartheid movement. One of the clearest examples of this was the declaration and later uneven observance of a sweeping cultural boycott. In the mid-1950s Father Trevor Huddleston—an Anglican priest from Sophiatown and vocal critic of the state—began calling for international artists and performers to boycott South Africa. Mostly targeted at international collaborators and audiences, the boycott became an official policy of the ANC as guilds of screenwriters, actors, and musicians across the globe pledged not to work in South Africa. Reflecting on the cultural (and eventually academic) boycott, a 1989 ANC position paper outlines that the action was intended to yield “the total isolation of the racist minority regime . . . through the virtual exclusion of South Africa for international entertainment circuits . . . and the stigmatisation of artists, cultural workers, sportspersons, and academics who continue to foster links with apartheid South Africa.”41 The logic behind the cultural boycott was that artists, at home and abroad, should not “entertain” apartheid, that patrons should not frequent venues supported by the state, and that outside countries should not host South African cultural workers without formal consent from movement leaders. The boycott reflected recognition that culture could be mobilized as “an important and dynamic dimension of this democratic offensive,”42 which would complement a host of other boycotts and strikes that effectively crippled the state. In contrast to the entrepreneurial work involved in the social history movement, this exercise of cultural capital involved actively avoiding institution-building and cultural production unless it was directly channeled into the liberation struggle through products such as protest posters and other artwork. In Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood:

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South African Culture and the World Beyond (1994), Rob Nixon explains how the idea of a boycott especially captured the imagination of resisters operating in exile and became a source of tension as it was unevenly upheld and restricted the activities of national artists and performers, many of whom had elected to remain unaffiliated with the ANC or any party though resolute in the opposition to apartheid.43 The boycott effectively became yet another layer of surveillance for artists already working under the watchful eye of the state. Regardless of one’s sympathies with the motivations for the boycott, it too should be understood as a collectivist project where individual will is suppressed in the interests of advancing the leadership goals and interests. This project required the construction of a central voice for South Africa’s varied cultural communities and was initiated by the United Democratic Front (UDF), an umbrella organization widely regarded as the internal stand-in for the exiled ANC. In 1987, the UDF created the Culture Desk to help monitor the cultural boycott, organize and represent cultural workers, and pull various artists and activists into one cohesive unit. Kenneth Grundy has shown that the Culture Desk’s affiliation with the UDF and the ANC led people to view it as a politically motivated arbitrator of cultural production and artistic expression, raising questions about the advisability of partisan control of the arts, especially for those whose loyalties rested with different resistance traditions, ranging from the Pan-African Congress (PAC) to the Azanian People’s Organization, which had its roots in the BC movement.44 Additionally, the UDF, though broadly respected as the voice of the antiapartheid movement, did not enjoy the same mass appeal as the ANC, partly because of its stronger presence in Indian and Coloured (a mixed ancestry ethnic group) communities to counter National Party attempts to co-opt those groups.45 The Culture Desk functioned for only a few years until the apartheid government lifted the ban in 1990, at which time its leader, Mzwakhe Mbuli,46 came into conflict with the ANC’s arts and culture division47 over the continuation of the cultural boycott and the appropriate relationship between cultural production and political aims. As the ANC transformed from an exiled organization with political aspirations into a legal and eventually ruling political party, the alliance between activists and cultural producers began raising difficult questions about accountability. Long excluded from established

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venues and state support, artists began to articulate a set of demands for the future democratic government during the late 1980s and early 1990s, including increased state support for their work, enhanced arts and humanities education, and investment in new democratic cultural institutions.48 On the one hand, the end of apartheid and the release of political prisoners meant that many cultural workers, who, according to Grundy, “were forced to be arts politicians and bureaucrats or else to do the bidding of politicians masquerading as artists,”49 were able return to their creative pursuits. Yet, state-supported arts and culture would place the ruling party in a position to translate the historical and cultural capital that accompanied the political transformation into new or rather revised narratives of nation. This would reproduce the relationship between the state and official culture established during apartheid with its highly centralized funding and oversight apparatus. Albie Sachs, then a lawyer and head of the Constitutional Committee of the ANC, delivered a daring address to fellow ANC leaders in 1989, which was subsequently published for a mass audience in the newspaper Mail & Guardian, where he eschewed the dogmatic view of culture as a movement weapon, as a diminution of the universal value of the arts and humanities: What are we fighting for, if not the right to express our humanity in all its forms[?] There is nothing that the apartheid rulers would like more than to convince us that because apartheid is ugly, the world is ugly. [We] are full of fun and romanticism and dreams . . . yet, if you look at most of our art and literature you would think we were living in the grayest and most somber of all worlds, completely shut in by apartheid. It is as though our rulers stalk every page and haunt every picture.50

In his appeal to free arts from the burden of communicating apartheid injustices as a source of mobilization, he simultaneously called on arts and culture to ser vice another collective project: celebrating and envisioning a postapartheid future defined by what is deemed a more positive, less damaged, image of self and community. To the extent that they are convincing, representations seduce one into thinking that they are real; that if the reflection is ugly, then that which is represented is ugly. To influence the direction of representation,

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including making public pleas in the national press, one must possess a certain amount of historical capital, particularly in the form of access. Within the enterprise of collective memory, politicians and political parties, particularly ruling parties, can wield tremendous influence over the style and manner of collective memory representations and construction compared to other types of entrepreneurs. This is especially the case in South Africa because of both the magnitude of the political transition and the higher degree of state centralized heritage and culture compared to countries like the United States. Beyond the transformation of established museums, the ANC developed policies that radically overhauled the national apparatus for public arts and culture. As the country approached majority rule, the ANC sought to streamline its operations, cutting back the extensive network of internal departments and committees that it had amassed during nearly thirty years in exile. Before the party could act, it had to navigate the existing (apartheid) heritage policy of the National Monument Council, which worked with the Department of National Education to fund cultural institutions, including monuments and museums. Highlighting the degree of political interest in representational work of museums, leading up to the first democratic election in 1994 we saw jockeying between the former regime and the ANC over the future of the country’s flagship institutions. The National Party sought long-lasting control even as its grip on the state was slipping by making hasty appointments and passing policies of its own, like the Museums for South Africa Intersectoral Investigation for National Policy (MUSA), which called for only modest changes in the collections strategies, overall structure, and mission of state-supported museums. However, their efforts proved futile under the new regime, which required all museums to update content and revisit hiring and staffing policies to ensure compliance with new government policies, such as Black Economic Empowerment (BEE).51 In 1996, the Department of Arts, Culture, Science, and Technology (DACST) released “All Our Legacies, Our Common Future,” a policy statement that laid out a new system to fund, administer, and promote national culture and heritage sites. Responding to earlier concerns from cultural activists, the document stated that the government would “secure free

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expression and redress . . . [through] an ‘arms-length’ relationship with the practitioner community.”52 This report also formally recognized new forms of memorialization and traditions, including intangible forms of storytelling and dance, effectively reorienting the national portrait without undoing the representational machinery itself. The historical revisionist movement found its way into government as many of its key entrepreneurs found themselves working within it in various capacities. For example, UWC historian Andre Odendaal, who was also the director of the Mayibuye Center, an antiapartheid archive, served as the spokesperson for the Commission for the Reconstruction and Transformation of the Arts (CREATE), a government committee charged with establishing new national heritage policy in 1994.53 Historian Ciraj Rassool has worked with the Department of Arts and Culture, the South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA), and the National Heritage Council (NHC). Social historian Luli Callinicos, one of the more active members of the History Workshop at Wits University, has also served as a council member at SAHRA and the National Monuments Council (NMC), and was appointed chairperson of the NHC by the ANC. During her tenure at the NHC, Callinicos presided over a series of “legacy projects” designed to insert new visual markers into the memorial landscape, such as the Sarah (Saartjie) Baartman Memorial, which honors the young Khoisan woman who, after being coerced into displaying her body in a sideshow referred to as the “Hottentot Venus” across London and Paris, died from respiratory disease in 1816, at which time her brain and genitals were pickled and exhibited at the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Mankind) for over 150 years.54 This and other legacy projects, according to Callinicos, are about “starting a new notion of heritage in South Africa . . . [but] they also make a contribution by building local economies.”55 Her remarks reveal the intersecting (and sometimes competing) interests of government agencies and political actors whose constituencies expect both symbolic and material forms of social transformation. One strategy to link the two has been to support museum and memorial projects in places outside of major urban centers and draw tourist revenue into rural areas, such as the birth homes of Nelson Mandela in the Eastern Cape and Chief Albert Luthuli, the first president of the ANC, in KwaZulu Natal.

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As the ruling party, the ANC exercises tremendous influence over the enterprise of collective memory, constructing the representations and revisions it endorses as true. Its platform of nonracialism has made it partial to the direction of the social history movement, which de-emphasized racial and ethnic differences as sources of solidarity. Historical revision along with other forms of cultural transformation get framed as a matter of national interest, so that historical production and display are presented in more nationalistic terms than social ones. The urgent need to restructure museums, monuments, and memorials was a refrain across numerous political speeches during Nelson Mandela’s presidency. For example, Dr. Ben Ngubane, then minister of the national DACST, remarked: While [museums], like many other [institutions] in our society, have been shaped by over 300 years of colonialism and apartheid, there has been much debate of late as to how they can be changed. Whereas these institutions have in the past negated and distorted the history and culture of the majority of South Africans, all now agree that they have to change and must play a role in the process of nation building.56

While museums entered South Africa and the rest of the continent as colonial enterprises, the postapartheid era would not entail a rejection of these forms of memorialization and preservation. Instead, they would become sites of revision with their symbolic and representational power left intact. As a memory entrepreneur with state power, the government retains its authority to direct the flow of public resources to support some versions of the past as true or more legitimate than others.

MAKING HISTORY BL ACK What makes history black? In the United States, efforts to establish and package a set of textual and visual narratives as “black history” would heavily influence public understandings of “blackness” as an identity and social category. As a specialized area of scholarship as much as a

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public history movement, the tenets of researching, telling, and showing history as black paved the way for the use of identity formation as a framework to confront and contextualize violence and conflict. During the early to mid-twentieth century, the efforts of a small but enormously influential and public-minded cluster of intellectuals demanded and ultimately created an intellectual space dedicated to filling a gap in historical scholarship: the complexity of experience among people of African descent in the United States. As sociologist Ron Eyerman argues, these intellectuals were shocked and disappointed that the worth and citizenship of blacks was systematically and ruthlessly denied even after emancipation and throughout the Reconstruction Era.57 While this space was initially reserved for college campuses and research institutes, it would eventually spill over into more publicly accessible spaces like secondary schools and museums. Yet, the development of black history scholarship and rise of the black museum movement during the 1950s and 1960s should not be understood as a continuous or coherent project. In fact, each sociocultural project represents distinct though complementary sources of the social construction of blackness. In both cases, this constructivist project was not merely or even primarily academic; at its core it was a groupmaking venture premised on the existence of a real black collectivity.58 Although distinct from each other, the primary goal of both the black history and black museum movements became the revelation of the nature of this imagined community. Historical production and memory work proved to be essential vehicles for the articulation of a black collective united by a shared past. However, this perspective was as much outward-looking as it was internal. To counter widespread popular accounts of blackness as pathological, black civic leaders revealed, or rather constructed, what they saw as the true nature of black identity. Indeed, the desire for mainstream recognition and legitimacy underlies the development of black history as a framework to think about the past along with its contemporary resonance. While the architects of black history were resolute in their commitment to black empowerment and consciousness-raising, they also actively reproduced conventional measures of success in their quest to secure the approval and acceptance of mainstream white society.

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This desire for validation is evident not only in how the emergent field of black history took shape and its contents, but also in how it was popularized. Historian Carter G. Woodson and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois are routinely referred to as the fathers of black history. Like any reference to the centrality of great fathers in the development of sociocultural, intellectual, and political life, the label connotes a patriarchal structuring of knowledge and power. The entrepreneurial activity around making history black was generated by a relatively small group of high-profile men with advanced degrees from prestigious colleges and universities that systematically excluded women.59 Without diminishing their achievements nor the largely unsung role that women played in early preservation efforts,60 it should be clear that the push to revise history by producing an alternative set of narratives was an elite male-dominated project. Some of the methodological conservatism, vindicationist agenda, and ideological biases of these new accounts reflect the conventional training of its producers who were institutionally located within academia. For example, the early scholarship of both Du Bois and Woodson was designed to meticulously disprove popular conceptions of black inferiority and cultural insignificance. In The Philadelphia Negro and Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois used qualitative and quantitative data to upend prevailing thought about the backwardness of black family, economic, and political life.61 Similarly, Woodson’s early work, such as A Century of Negro Migration and The Mis-Education of the Negro, stands out for his meticulous use of rare data to establish a historical foundation to explain black experience.62 Likewise, University of Chicago–trained sociologist E. Franklin Frazier advanced social historical approaches to the study of black family structures, adding to the blossoming scholarship that would anchor the historicization of black identity popularized in museums. In The Negro Family in the United States, for example, Frazier famously argued that blacks were quintessentially American, not the national “others” they were generally regarded as.63 Although these and other early studies in black historical scholarship were far from unitary, they were all impassioned efforts to dislodge and then reconstitute public understandings of black identity. Beneath this urgency to establish progressive narratives about black achievements, respectability, and potential is a yearning to be accepted and viewed favorably by dominant society.

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In this respect, they were determined to recast the public image of blacks by recoding the past to position blacks as active historical agents with a long record of achievement and promise rather than long-suffering victims or social burdens. In addition to redefining blackness and filling in the perceived gaps of U.S. history, early black history scholarship was pathbreaking in terms of the level of analysis and wealth of evidence presented despite incomplete and missing archival material. For example, in The Philadelphia Negro Du Bois carefully created his own data by interviewing household members door to door and compiling their responses alongside census data. Such efforts, rare at the time, supported Woodson’s claim that black historians needed to produce histories twice as good as other historians because of who they were as much as what they were studying.64 Yet, unintentionally, they and other early practitioners in the burgeoning field of black history were reproducing logics and methods of inquiry of the status quo, reinscribing them with legitimacy as the principal, if not universal, arbitrators of value. More than reflecting some deep commitment to positivism or the scientific methods of knowledge production, they were determined to master conventional tools and modes of evaluation to vindicate blackness. Black feminist, writer, and activist Audre Lorde famously questioned this approach, cautioning that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. . . . They may temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”65 Progressive social change, in Lorde’s vision, requires redefining and relocating social power away from deeply racist, patriarchal, and heterosexist structures. For every fissure apparently sutured through black historical accounts, new ones were created because there are as many ways to perceive an omission or distortion as there are ways to fill it. The act of producing any historical knowledge generally masks this selectivity in the name of fact-finding. As Roderick Ferguson argues, the black history enterprise or “machinery” elevates a way of thinking, writing, and imagining intended to “withhold [invisible blemishes] from conversation and out of sight.”66 Anything that deviates from mainstream scripts about social progress, respectability, and morality is rendered a shameful concession to mainstream portrayals of black pathology. But what does it mean to seek the approval, respect,

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and acceptance, if not admiration, from above in a fundamentally unequal society? It means magnifying that which does not offend and effectively erasing ideas, bodies, and voices that deviate.67 In this respect, the ongoing revision of blackness through the auspices of black history is a disciplining enterprise designed to control members as much as to impress outsiders. Attempting to vindicate blackness echoes and effectively reaffirms the status quo, demanding inclusion rather than transformation. Like the South African social history movement, the U.S. black history movement infiltrated a number of legitimizing institutional spaces. It began through the intellectual labors of a relatively small group of black male scholars at prestigious historically black universities like Howard University and Atlanta University, where they helped shape library and archive collections, research institutes, and graduate programs. Woodson and his associate Jesse Moorland established the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) in 1915, which published the Journal of Negro History,68 the first academic journal dedicated to black historical scholarship. While it served as an alternative venue for the publication of work by a growing group of black historians largely excluded from conventional journals, it also operated as a gatekeeper, controlling which types of scholarship would be included in the field to reach broader audiences. During his tenure at Atlanta University, Du Bois helped organize the Atlanta Conference on Negro Problems and cofounded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) with activists such as Ida B. Wells and Mary White Ovington. Much of Du Bois’s research reached beyond academia and into public domains because of his direct involvement in public policy campaigns. He also founded, and retained editorial control over, the magazine Crisis published by the NAACP and targeted at nonacademic audiences. Yet, Carter Woodson was involved in popularizing efforts that most closely resemble those of the historians active during South African apartheid. The ASNLH established local chapters in urban areas with a large concentration of black residents, including the Bronx, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Woodson’s vision positioned the general public as consumers of the black historical scholarship, which would be repackaged through talks, films, workshops, and newsletters. He

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also turned to the public as a source of artifactual evidence or material objects of everyday life. In 1916 he stated that we [the ASNLH] are directing our attention to transcribing or making available local documents scattered throughout the country among white and colored people . . . letters, pamphlets, and the like. We hope to prosecute this work vigorously as many of these documents are being thrown away and if we do not soon so something to preserve them, they will be lost to history.69

This fear that the evidence to prove the social value of blacks was endangered was palpable at the time and it motivated Woodson’s preservation work for decades. But which objects would be collected? And how might people be convinced that what they considered trash should be reassigned in the interests of vindicating blackness? The will to preserve would be better understood as the will to construct—not every thing gets preserved from the infinite past; a story or a narrative is assembled and only those objects that support and animate it are treated as precious artifacts. In this vein, ordinary people are being told what to remember and how via what they should want to preserve—told that what they thought was garbage is valuable. Who makes these decisions? In this sense the memory entrepreneurs are revising not only official racist histories, they are also revising how individuals are meant to think of themselves in relation to the past vis-à-vis their group membership. This is a critical moment in the conversion of black history as an academic enterprise into a collective memory project. Through the ASNLH, Woodson grew increasingly focused on ordinary people, whom he implored to participate in revising history. They were called into this group-making project through the ASNLH, which had opened its doors to the public in unprecedented ways relative to other intellectual organizations; however, this does not mean that their work was grassroots or driven by so-called ordinary people. In reality, nonacademics were invited to participate in a history movement already in the making, one conceived and articulated by black intellectuals. These intellectuals may have been sidelined in mainstream academic circles but they were at the vanguard of black intellectual life.

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Indeed, Woodson and his team were instrumental in shaping black public historical space through the creation of Negro History Week, which later became Black History Month. Determined to secure an even wider audience for his work, Woodson organized a campaign to introduce black history into public school curricula. The campaign was part of his larger agenda to prove the civility, if not the humanity, of black Americans by influencing national historical consciousness. In 1926 he used the Journal of Negro History, which he’d cofounded ten years earlier, to state his case, arguing that if a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated. The American Indian left no continuous record. He did not appreciate the value of tradition; and where is he today? The Hebrew keenly appreciated the value of tradition, as is attested by the Bible itself. In spite of worldwide persecution, therefore, he is still a great factor in our civilization.70

The primacy given to history and historical memory is clear, as is the preference for specific forms of history-making that cement collective narratives across generations as the basis of social reproduction. Woodson and his supporters contended that access to a quality education that reflected the lives and experiences of all Americans, including those historically marginalized, should be a basic right.71 Initially, Negro History Week was a relatively small affair organized by the ASNLH, whose representatives urged state education departments and local school districts to adopt their lesson plans and programming. During the 1976 Bicentennial, the U.S. government officially dedicated February to the study and celebration of black history in all public schools, an emergent national tradition now observed across many private industries as well.72 Black History Month, like many official commemorative acts, has been commercialized and unevenly observed and is not without its critics. Commenters like historian John Hope Franklin insist that the instructional mission of the occasion remains urgently needed.73 However, Franklin was concerned that the style of celebration and the discussions it provoked were of little relevance to contemporary issues of racial inequality, racism, and other forms of intolerance in the

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United States and beyond.74 Other critics, such as poet and literary scholar Tyrone Williams, charge that Black History Month represents a willful acceptance to remain marginal in the larger story of U.S. history. Williams states that for blacks, the implementation of black history month represents a retreat from the frontlines of cultural warfare. Yes, warfare. Having failed to implement black values, practices, and achievements in the arts, sciences, and business curricula of the predominant learning institutions, we settle for the crumbs of a black history month.75

In fact, Williams and others view the event as largely destructive because it creates an illusion of inclusion, reducing potential discontent by allowing people of color occasional moments of cultural recognition. Irrespective of whether one considers Black History Month as a productive or destructive collective exercise in history-making, its elevation to an official or state-sponsored commemorative event showcases how the selective narration of blackness positions it as simultaneously distinct from and emblematic of national ethos. On the one hand, despite its growing institutional presence and eventual incorporation into mainstream school curricula, the black history movement did not have the same transformative effect on conventional historical scholarship as the South African social history movement during the 1970s and 1980s. Yet, this is only partially the case. Leveraging black history as a vehicle to vindicate—or rather construct—blackness through tales of the ingenuity, creativity, and potential of Americans of African descent extended the territorialization of historical production, in this case along explicitly racial lines. In other words, the racial and ethnic theming of the past has become a staple of historical knowledge production without necessarily overturning the implicit biases of ostensibly nonethnic historical genres, such as military history. Further, the standardization of black history as a specialized area solidified as a wave of more mainstream progressive and revisionist historians gained traction during the 1960s and 1970s, with proponents vowing to showcase the experiences of the working class, women, racial and ethnic minorities, and gay and lesbian communities by telling history from below.76 Indeed, this U.S. radical history movement shared a good deal in common with the

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black history movement, with both regarding historical revision as a moral imperative to redress prejudices built into conventional historiography that effectively naturalized existing social inequalities. The popularization of black history was not the only collective memory enterprise shaping the way histories of conflict, violence, and oppression became public narratives. Although these public narratives get presented through the language of black collective identity and memory, they reveal as much about the social construction of whiteness and nation given that each of these social categories is fundamentally relational. Just as a shared understanding of past trauma became central in the making of black identity, identity formation became a popular vehicle to contextualize and periodize violence as an historical object. This tendency is especially evident with the emergence and spread of black history as a type of public cultural performance through museums. Similar to the influence of the academic setting that black history scholarship emerged within, the institutional location of museums has deeply shaped the black collective memory enterprise. Like the South African case, the narratives produced through the black history movement became the subject matter of museum exhibitions during a time of heightened social protest and urban unrest. Our penchant for tidy stories that follow chronological time makes it tempting to see that museum movement as a continuation of the black history movement; however there is no clear or direct line to draw between these two collective memory projects—the black history and black museum movements—as there was in South Africa in terms of the role of historians. The black public historical space cultivated during the first half of the twentieth century was dramatically enlarged and altered by the founding of nearly one hundred new black history museums between 1950 and 1980.77 Similar to the transformation of South African museums as public historical spaces, black history museums did rely on this input of professional historians and their output. However, the museum movement was shaped more directly by the presence of a diverse set of civil rights and black cultural activists who saw black history as a useful source of material and ideological resources to support their more presentist communityorganizing agendas.

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Indeed, neighborhood and cultural activists with little to no formal museological or historical training were at the vanguard of this movement, particularly in its beginning stages. They embraced black history as a group-making project oriented toward cultural transformation. The eclecticism of the resistance movement, from the more integrationist stance of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC) to the more radical politics of the Black Power movement, did not detract from the general consensus around the utility of cultivating an identification with black history narratives among adherents who would be encouraged to locate themselves on a historical trajectory of black achievement.78 Initially, these new history museums— whether they were founded by individuals with more assimilationist or separatist dispositions—were oriented toward black audiences and located in predominately black segregated neighborhoods. However, more than the pioneers of black history scholarship, these community activists were drawn to the mobilizing and consciousnessraising potential of black iterations of history, and tended to emphasize cultural connections to Africa as a place of origin. In addition to the influence of black empowerment thoughts, the black museum movement was also profoundly shaped by the Black Arts Movement (BAM), which unleashed a new wave of artistic and literary expression that surpassed the Harlem Renaissance in scope and popular appeal. Like the black history movement, BAM was a reaction to exclusion from mainstream cultural venues and the virtual erasure of contributions of black artists, writers, and performers from American aesthetic traditions.79 Despite the influence of the resistance struggle on the black history and arts movements, neither should be seen as a mere instrument of struggle politics. As Fath Davis Ruffins observes, both encompassed a wide range of cultural producers and consumers with diverse political allegiances and aspirations, including those who were not politically active at all.80 Still, the founders of newly created black history museums did indeed have roots in community-organizing work of various sorts. The first four black history museums founded independently of any college or university in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, and Washington, D.C., were all founded by local black civic leaders of various stripes. These memory entrepreneurs each recognized the power of appropriating

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one of the most respected and established cultural institutions— one that had historically excluded blacks and other minorities. Museums promised greater access to local residents who could be mobilized to participate in various group or community-building projects through the museums, which also promised to lend legitimacy to their social agenda. During a time of escalating protest and rioting, museums became safe havens for community organizers and proved to be effective public education and outreach agents. But who were these founders? First, they were overwhelmingly male,81 which follows the earlier tendency for black male public intellectuals dominating the construction of black history as an academic field and later as a public history campaign. Male leadership was a paramount in the creation of early museums like the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum (later renamed Anacostia Community Museum) in 1967 in Washington, D.C., and Detroit’s International AfroAmerican Museum in 1965—headed by youth counselor, activist, and assistant pastor John Kinard and local physician and outspoken critic of segregated hospitals Charles H. Wright, respectively. While the museum founders worked closely with a number of people, men and women alike and across racial lines, the original black history museums tend to be attributed to the efforts of enterprising and dedicated male community leaders. One important exception is the founding of the Ebony Museum of Negro History in Chicago (later renamed the DuSable Museum of African American History) in 1961. Neighborhood activist and art teacher Margaret Taylor Burroughs spearheaded the development after leaving the Southside Community Arts Project. She and her husband collaborated with professional Marxist historian Eugene Feldman who was trained at the University of Wisconsin, then a bastion of progressive historical revision in the 1950s. Together, they developed the museum’s collection, tracking down material objects from personal collections across the city and drawing on Burroughs’s personal networks in various art communities.82 Reflecting on the leadership, cofounder Feldman recalled that [Burroughs was] the one who called us together, the inspirer, the motivator. She made it her business to get acquainted with likeminded, history-interested persons. She was the unifier. All through

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the history of the museum she attracted people who gave artifacts, books, letters, documents of all kinds for our collection.83

Her distinctive position as one of the few prominent women to play a publicly visible and institutionally celebrated role in the first wave of black history museum-building should not cloud the fact that Burroughs was no ordinary urban resident demanding historical revision; she was a well-respected and networked community leader on the South Side of Chicago. Indeed, while these new museums are generally considered grassroots or community-based, they were not conceived by ordinary people, but by extraordinary leaders, many of whom exploited their connections to mainstream or dominant institutions to secure backing. For example, Burroughs acknowledges that she was embedded within an extraordinary social and professional network enriched by her time at Chicago’s elite Field Museum as a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) fellow, where she came into contact with seasoned museum professionals who shared ideas about how to launch and maintain a new museum.84 Around the same time, John Kinard was approached by Secretary of the Smithsonian S. Dillon Ripley to direct the Anacostia Museum in Washington, D.C. Just as Kinard’s reputation as a civic leader led to his nomination for the position, Charles Wright’s stature as a prominent Detroit-area doctor and vocal Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee supporter lent legitimacy to his efforts to establish the city’s first black history museum. In this vein, we clearly see historical capital—the ability to influence historical representations—as a resource belonging to select individuals with specific social locations and interests in group-making projects, rather than a resource belonging to everyone within such a group. These activists-turned-memory entrepreneurs sought to do more than merely broadcast or plainly present black history narratives; they were determined to present the past in such a way as to reconsolidate a black identity with local resonance. Reflecting on his early work in the museum Kinard stated, I have a fear more sociological than anything, a fright induced by circumstances, ones that don’t allow people full growth. Because

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circumstances determine so much, and an inner-city kid might have the paranoia that not only does the larger world not belong to you, but you don’t belong to you. Not to have a sense of identity is a fear.85

A trained sociologist, Kinard’s faith in the emancipatory power of such historical placement of the individual within a broader context echoed C. W. Mills’s assertions about the need to situate personal biographies within history and social structures. For Kinard and others in the black museum movement, however, the primary objective was to develop a historically grounded sense of agency among blacks, especially youth, so that they might not see their futures as predetermined by the color of their skin. Margaret Burroughs described her departure from the public school system as a rejection of mainstream curricula: “I just couldn’t see myself standing in front of a group of eager-eyed young black people and not being able to tell them something very positive about themselves.”86 These goals to intervene in how blackness would be represented for consumers of sociocultural and historical material help explain why a group of presentist activists turned to the past. Their enterprising spirit drove a new wave of institution-building and swept them into positions as museum directors, curators, and public programming staff. Like Woodson did with the ASNLH and the Journal for Negro History, they were able to expand the institutional base of black history by attracting resources from private and public sources. Museums require economic capital to keep their doors open and their staff paid. The museum proved to be a fortuitous organizational type for activists interested in community outreach and education. For example, acting on advice from contacts at the Field Museum in Chicago, Margaret Burroughs lobbied to locate the DuSable Museum in a vacant administrative building on state property, making it eligible for public financing.87 Effectively folded into the city government, the museum becomes a site for a par ticular type of revision, one that demands access to the mainstream rather than its disavowal. Burroughs would later serve as a city commissioner and encouraged representatives of other ethnic groups to follow her model. She advised those seeking to establish a Mexican Fine Arts Center to reconceive their institution, if not their mission, through the prism of museums, suggesting that the center be renamed the Mexican Fine

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Arts Center and Museum.88 Beyond a means to secure funding, the appeal of museums, whether redesigned or not, also betrays a need for validation or vindication using mainstream measures of success, respectability, and progress. What does it mean to build an infrastructure for countercultural work with the financial backing of dominant society? And why were local, state, and federal governments so amenable to lending financial support to these museums? Between 1965 and 1968 alone, some 300 race-related riots occurred across the country.89 In this context, both public and private entities gave generously to black museums, seeing these institutions as nonviolent local-based organizations without radical aspirations.90 In addition, white audiences for black history were growing along with demand for more positive images of blacks in the media. Surely, much of this increased demand at the time derived from a desire to imagine a harmonious society evolving out of the social turmoil splashed across new headlines.91 Indeed, funding for black museums increased throughout the 1970s, especially after the federal recognition of Black History Month during the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations. This created opportunities to expand staff, redesign exhibitions, generate new public programming, and secure larger and professionally designed facilities for existing museums.92 These new funding streams would support an ever-expanding museum infrastructure that would alter the enterprise of public history. A higher degree of professionalization and specialization defined this growing infrastructure. The enterprising vision of Burroughs, Wright, and Kinard reached far beyond their individual museums to influence a national black collective memory project. They created the first association for black museum professionals, the African American Museums Association (AAMA) in 1978 (renamed Association of African American Museums (AAAM) in 1997) as an alternative to the American Association of Museums (AAM), which “dealt with the white folks.”93 Ten years later, nearly every black museum was a member of the association (compared to only 14 percent attaining membership in the AAM) and over three-quarters received significant levels of assistance from the AAMA.94 Just like Du Bois, Woodson, and other celebrated black scholars who held steadfast to the institutional logic and modes of validation of the mainstream while developing alternatives sites to produce, publish, and distribute their work, Burroughs, Wright,

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and Kinard rejected a historically exclusive professional association, but not the professionalization of memory work more broadly, including imposing standards for accreditation and standardization of content through the AAMA. The AAMA’s establishment reflects a type of institutional mimicry motivated less by a rejection of the idea of expert knowledge, barriers to entry, and credentials than by frustration at being excluded. In effect, the need to validate their work and control resources to member institutions meant the association itself became a source of exclusion for those operating outside its domain. While the museum movement was always a top-down cultural movement despite its grassroots image, the museums would become even more so as they worked to maintain themselves during this stage of their institutional development. Also, black political leadership, especially at the mayoral level, was a driving force behind black museum development in the 1980s, as mayors worked to increase public awareness and raise the profile of black history and culture. This period also brought efforts to historicize the civil rights movement as part of the social construction of blackness vis-à-vis the past. The incorporation of a standardized civil rights account—one that emphasizes the role of Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC95—within the black history narrative contributes to the selective remembrance of violence and resistance by locating it firmly within a black identity formation narrative. Given the earlier popularizing efforts of the black history (scholarship) movement and the nature of black history narratives themselves, it is unsurprising that the cultural products of the black museum movement—its exhibitions, collections, programming—were eventually expected to appeal to audiences outside the black community. Indeed, the legacy of making history black is still imprinted on the more inclusive mandate of more recent museum development. Black history is presented as a specialized field, but one that should appeal to a wide audience. This appeal means that history is present in such a way as to convince the onlooker of black worth and value by stressing blacks’ involvement in various national events like wars and by focusing on black inventors, business leaders, etc. Again, this vindicationist model of representation tends to replicate the systems of recognition and social values of dominant society. In this respect, despite its Afrocentric inclinations or its affinities with black cultural

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nationalism, black public histories are fundamentally assimilationist and far more socially conservative than radical. This pattern is evident in discussions about attempts to integrate black history into the official national history of the Smithsonian. Initially conceived as a museum that would focus on the history of slavery in the making of the United States, the museum only became viable when its supporters shifted the focus to a more familiar vindicationist approach whereby the achievements of blacks and black cultural traditions would be showcased and celebrated.96 The move to establish a distinct museum showcasing black history rather than revising the National Museum of American History (NMAH) can be erroneously seen as evidence of separatism, when in fact it is evidence of the opposite. Despite political resistance and concerns within the Smithsonian about the need for a museum devoted to black history, the NMAAHC Act finally passed in 2003. Its first director, Lonnie Bunch, nicely articulated the convergence of black and national historical narratives, stating that if one wants to understand the notion of American resilience, optimism, or spirituality, where better [to look] than the black experience. If one wants to explore the limits of the American dream, where better than examining the Gordian knot of race relations. . . . African American culture has the power and the complexity needed to illuminate all the dark corners of American life and the power to illuminate all the possibility and ambiguities of American life.97

The passage of national legislation to create the NMAAHC is not the first instance of an explicitly racial-ethnic theming of the past at the Smithsonian. The National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) opened in 2004. Speaking about the need for a separate institution, founding director of the NMAI Richard West stressed that a different venue was necessary to communicate to audiences that the new museum marked a departure from the Smithsonian’s history of objectifying and stealing from indigenous people.98 Notwithstanding key additions, such as the Field to Factory installation about the Great Migration, this effectively positions the NMAH, not to mention U.S. history itself as an object, as too fraught to be fully revised—or alternatively, too sacred. In the absence of a more radical realignment

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of social power, such as the collapse of apartheid in South Africa, a whole revision of national history would prove far more controversial and potentially explosive than squeezing another museum onto the National Mall. ✴✴✴

How can we account for the many similarities in the projects in South Africa and the United States to make history black and to make it social, including their eventual theming at museums? Both ventures are fundamentally about the reorganization and rearticulation of nation; they involve explicitly reimagining both its boundaries as well as the meaning of membership. Making history black was never only or even primarily focused on blackness; rather it was preoccupied with what it means to be American. Conversely, South African social history was deeply invested in recasting the nation in the image of the majority population. In both cases, a set of memory entrepreneurs seized opportunities to take revisionist histories to wider audiences. Their popularizing efforts took many forms and eventually became or heavily influenced museum content. It is within these especially public sites, like museums, that the work of converting professional historical production into collective memories intended or assumed to resonate with consumers unfolds. The freedom struggle in both countries involved a deep interrogation and rejection of the ideologies and social values that rationalized centuries of oppression. This disavowal was coupled with an affirming impulse to broadcast alternative accounts of social life and shared history. A wider treatment of revision allows us to view it as an aspect of the project to restore the collective through social consensus over what happened. In this case, the restoration of the collective comes through the modification of public narratives that no longer parallel the social realities brought about with the breakdown of statesanctioned segregation, discrimination, and exclusion. What does the milieu of revision tell us about the ways that such troubling periods of violence get integrated into public historical narratives? This wider lens is crucial for understanding whether and how the public remembers periods of strife. The selective inclusion of periods of violence in public culture is a result of activists mobilizing against their

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exclusion from the national portrait. In both the United States and South Africa, public culture emerged as a key battleground where collective identity and political ethos have been contested. The museums themselves emerged through histories of dissidence and then came to chronicle and validate those struggles. In the United States, a robust network of black history museums emerged as an offshoot to the consciousness-raising efforts of the civil rights movement and to counterbalance the whitewashing of U.S. history and culture at mainstream institutions. In contrast, museum transformation occurred much later in South Africa and only after the formal transition to democracy. To some extent, this difference in timing helps explain why the collective representations in the United States employ more racial imagery than the more nationalistic ones in South Africa. However, this apparent difference in framing is diminished by similarities in the ways museums in both countries rely on identity formation narratives to grapple with difficult histories and by the fact that the ostensibly more racial character of the U.S. narratives conforms to the conventions of representing national history. Although the discursive framing is significant, this chapter has demonstrated that the political-economic context within which it occurs motivates historical revision as it unfolds against the backdrop of a ruptured or deeply fractured image of collective identity. In both cases, however, histories of violence, discrimination, and resistance have been converted into public narratives and commemorative work through the language and imagery of identity formation. The milieu of revision helps explain how the identity frameworks used to represent traumatic histories echo earlier social movement values and goals, which paved the way for alternative assertions of collective identity. It also helps explain how an apparent consensus seems to have been reached over how the past is curated in relation to racial and national identities. As the following chapters indicate, however, the reproduction of this shared past across time and museum projects is neither inevitable nor uncontested.

2 THE CURATED PAST Remembering the Collective

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history is a dark and bloody ground that is not for the faint at heart,” wrote William Yeingst and Lonnie Bunch in their study of the controversy surrounding the Smithsonian’s acquisition and exhibition of a portion of the Woolworth Lunch Counter from the infamous Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-in of 1960.1 The terrain of recent history is fraught with emotion as people struggle over whether to represent difficult periods that still resonate, and if so, in which ways and with what goals in mind. Despite the vast wealth of interpretations of past events, a high degree of consensus has arisen in the way museums represent violent histories. This convergence is impressive yet unsurprising considering the role of memory entrepreneurs in mining revisionist histories to support their visions of collective identity and social life. As a result, a consensus narrative that is treated as real was evident across South African and U.S. (black history) museums dedicated to curating histories of racialized violence and oppression. Indeed, histories are curated more than the past itself as the intellectual and cultural products of the black and social history movements are treated as artifacts. The fruits of this labor lie in the elevation and ultimate naturalization of historically grounded constructions of collective identity.

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Specific events, episodes, and people are skillfully arranged and juxtaposed to amplify some accounts while silencing others, lending an air of historicity to the construction of collective memory. The elusive past is retrofitted to an overall linear narrative arc that connects far-flung individuals, places, and times through the “social magic” of curation. As a member of the collective, the visitor is expected or imagined to identify with the narrative as much as learn from it. Through exhibition, curators and their staff are directly involved in producing history, not just showing it. They make decisions about the sequencing, placement, and scope of visual and textual materials that can alter meanings. Like many other museums, curators and directors at the NMAAHC in Washington, D.C., energetically cultivate this identification by creating platforms for guests to record their memories or donate family mementoes into a national “memory box,” strengthening the impression that one’s family stretches far beyond known relatives, let alone the walls of their home.2 Taken together, this assemblage of historical material sheds light on how difficult pasts are recast as moral lessons about the nature of public life. The social construction and affirmation of the collective is central to this moralizing endeavor. As such, the language of inclusivity is invoked to reveal the seeming inevitability of social progress—defined by the triumph of liberal democratic principles—in the face of adversity, allowing for the reduction of certain forms of conflict. In the United States, activists developed a network of black museums to showcase and reproduce what has come to be regarded as black history. In contrast, a mandate from the new democratic state in South Africa has led to efforts to revise the content of existing museums and create ones that present social histories relevant to a much larger imagined community than in the past. In both cases, however, identity formation narratives are used to explain how collective identities, largely racial and national, have been forged across time. This approach makes potentially shameful and divisive histories more palatable as they become the backdrop or a dark chapter in a longer story about the ultimate ascent of collective spirit. In the United States, histories of racial oppression are generally presented in the context of black identity formation. While the historically rooted identity on display is that of black Americans, it

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should be clear that given the relational character of racial formation, these displays actively construct other gender, national, and racial— especially white—collectivities. In any case, the metanarrative of black identity delves into the transformation of African-descended people from racial subjects to citizens—an account that emphasizes humility, modesty, and perseverance. In South Africa, on the other hand, the long history of colonial rule and racial subjugation is converted into a turning point for a national identity defined by the rejection of racial dictatorship and the inevitable triumph of majority rule. Despite some differences in framing and racial versus nationalistic overtones, in both countries history is curated into collective memories.

SOUTH AFRICA: SHOWING CITIZENSHIP During white minority rule, South African museums were unabashedly instruments of the state, colonial inventions designed to showcase and authenticate the supposed intellectual and cultural superiority of white Europeans. After the founding of the South African Museum in 1825, museums spread across the country, growing from personal collections and geological finds. Most early museums focused on the natural history of the country, seeing South Africa as a new country with no human history to record, especially in comparison to the breadth of European histories.3 Cultivating a shared identity among the diverse inhabitants of southern Africa was not a goal of the early colonists, who saw themselves only as subjects of history and viewed all non-Europeans as objects in the grand tale of colonial conquest. However, articulating a shared national identity and culture has now become a focal point for museums in democratic South Africa. This work has entailed constructing collective narratives that include people who have historically been—sometimes literally—at war with each other. In constructing a new national origins story, an identity formation framework is used whereby museum staff present difficult historical material, in this case the violence associated with apartheid and the liberation struggle, in the context of explaining the nature of group identity—this is an interpretive and representational decision. Within this framework, the violence of colonial rule is seen as a perverse

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suppression of shared humanity with internal contradictions and vulnerabilities that would eventually succumb to majority rule and normalization of society with the rise of democratic rule. Within this metanarrative, apartheid is routinely represented in museum exhibitions as a gross violation of human rights premised on the abuse of state power that eventually ended not only because of mass movements, but also because of the certainty of democracy. Rather than willfully elide or minimize past violence, museums represent it selectively as an integral part of the social history of South Africa. Violence is treated as an aberration or a tragic detour on the road toward majority rule, which would permit the restoration of the shared humanity of perpetrators and victims alike. The narrative begins with a portrayal of European encroachment on the Cape West Coast and early tensions between British and Dutch colonists. It focuses some attention on colonists’ contact with indigenous populations, but most of these limited displays center on colonial conquest and competition leading up to the Anglo-Boer War of 1880 (later renamed the South African War). Although colonialism figures prominently in the narrative formation of South African identity—including the arrival of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the Cape Colony—it is only recently that museums, like the Slave Lodge in the heart of Cape Town, have included history of the colonists importing slaves from the East and practices of indentured servitude against the indigenous population. Built in 1679 to house enslaved people, the Slave Lodge later became home to various colonial administrative offices as well as the Cape Supreme Court before becoming a cultural history museum during apartheid in 1960. After apartheid, the cultural museum was incorporated into the Iziko group of museums and was renovated to tell the story of Cape slavery after partnering with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Slave Trade Project, which provided both financial support and content development.4 By collaborating with UNESCO to renovate the site, slavery becomes an element of the founding story of South Africa despite being largely overlooked in revisionist social histories. The street level of the museum presents a short film about the hidden history of slavery in South Africa. A statement that captures the ideological mission of the museum accompanies the video:

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Slave Lodge Museum; Cape Town

Slavery is the most extreme form of control and subjugation of one person by another, most often enforced by violence . . . in many slave societies, such as the Cape, slaves were denied the most basic human rights, including the right to marriage and family life. With a history that epitomizes human wrongs, the Iziko Slave Lodge is taking up the challenge to become a focus for building a culture of human rights in the present.

This vision of a historically rooted commitment to universal human rights—narrowly defined in relation to the social reproduction of familial life—is structured around a description of enslavement as gateway atrocity that paved the way for subsequent injustices, such as apartheid. This description includes text outlining Cape slavery, along with images of freight ships, shackles, and re-created cargo spaces accompanied by a soundscape—all of which convey the cramped and inhumane conditions aboard the ships and in the lodge itself. The museum draws the history of Cape slavery into an audiovisual narrative reminiscent of portrayals of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in U.S.

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Top floor of the Slave Lodge Museum; Cape Town

museums, but the exhibition also highlights aspects of Cape history and culture, including intimate relationships between enslaved women, VOC workers, and Dutch settlers that many South Africans descended from. In an effort to reallocate ownership and social value, an emphasis is placed on the centrality of slave labor in the settlement of the Cape Coast. However, this reorientation of meaning stands in stark contrast to the upper level of the museum, which contains a vast silver, glass, and ceramics collection along with other assorted colonial-era ephemera that comprised the entirety of the space when it was the South African Cultural History Museum. Indeed, on this floor and across seven small rooms visitors can view the only substantial material object collection in the museum, which has not been brought into conversation with the slave narratives exhibited largely through audio and video clips and photographic reproductions on the renovated lower level. This disjuncture reflects the difficulty of museum transformation in the larger context of reconciliation in deeply divided societies where one group may hold certain items dear while another group becomes alienated by their presence.

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One the one hand, such segregated or rather variegated museum spaces reflect the inability to reconcile imperial and colonial histories with those of oppression, resistance, and human rights. Yet, it also suggests a strategy to preserve some earlier expressions of commemoration in an attempt to appease two unrelated audiences: those eager for a glimpse into the material culture of colonial domination and those with personal and nostalgic ties to a romanticized colonial past. In effect, the tepid preservation of an earlier collective memory project can become a distinctive feature of the museum. A comparable though far more celebratory treatment of the colonial past is on display in the basement of the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria, just thirty miles north of Johannesburg. Under neath the 130-foot-high granite tribute to the Afrikaners’ foray into the interior of the country away from British rule along the coast lies a dimly lit memorial space. Within it, visitors encounter various objects labeled as examples of Voortrekker heritage, including medical equipment and folk art. Like the upper level of the Slave Lodge, the material is presented ethnographically with no political or social history context. Despite

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Basement exhibition at the Voortrekker Monument; Pretoria

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this nostalgic harkening back to a past that many find deplorable, both sites have been officially recognized by the democratic state and included within its heritage apparatus.5 Clearly, new and transformed museums do not evenly or uncritically reproduce revisionist histories. However, the social histories produced about life during apartheid and forms of resistance to it comprise the bulk of new museum content and serve to anchor the postapartheid metanarrative of contemporary national identity within which internal strife is located in the past. For example, after setting the stage by reconstructing colonial settlement and the growth of the mining industry after the discovery of gold and diamonds, the Apartheid Museum offers a detailed account of the ways that racial categorization came to organize every aspect of life in South Africa. Despite being located within a sprawling recreational complex that includes a casino and theme park, the Apartheid Museum is a fitting site, due to its close proximity to an abandoned mine. Curated chiefly by social historians at Johannesburg’s Wits University, the museum portrays the history of the mining industry and the havoc it wreaked on countless South Africans— through the brutal hostel system designed to draw men out of rural areas and into cities to work in mines to the passbook laws that monitored their movement between the regions, along with all other “nonEuropeans.” The exhibition details how this economic growth entailed the expansion of the bureaucratic state and its coercive capacity to control its population with a host of policies designed to stave off democratic rule, which ultimately proved untenable as the system collapsed under the pressure of a multifaceted liberation movement with supporters inside the country and beyond. Like walking through the pages of a massive history textbook, the visitor encounters walls of text with accompanying images that extensively outline how South Africa’s ascent as a continental powerhouse during the colonial and apartheid periods was premised on racial and economic exploitation. In doing so, it manages to toe the line between representing atrocity and celebrating local iterations of nation. For example, it proclaims in large text: No other place in Southern Africa contained such a varied cultural mix. It was this robust blend of nations, races, cultures, and

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languages that gave Johannesburg its unique character. The energy that this generated was to drive much of South Africa’s subsequent history.

This allusion to the imagery of the dynamic “rainbow nation” indicates how history, in this case social history, is curated through the lens of the present. The city is elevated in this imagery as both a product of and solution to the social consequences of centuries of population, cultural, and economic transfers and fissures. Compared to the United States, there is a stronger impulse (and incentive) to represent the darkest sides of racial oppression as a form of public acknowledg ment, if not atonement, for some of the more clandestine aspects of apartheid brutality. This greater demand reflects the larger potential audience and smaller anticipated backlash, as well as the significance of state incentives and mandates. For example, in 2006 the South African government helped finance a pioneering exhibition at the Apartheid Museum to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the Soweto uprising titled “Deconstructing Apartheid.” The exhibition centered on photographer Peter Magubane’s images of June 16, 1976, the day police violently attacked students demonstrating for better education. The police response appalled the world and triggered township uprisings across the country.6 Most visitors to the museum were surely familiar with the general history and even some of the images, particularly the iconic image of the slain Hector Pieterson. What made the exhibition so wrenching was the experience of confronting eighty-eight images of the brutality, suffering, and chaos of that single day under apartheid en masse. In the South African context, such sudden acts of exposure can be especially traumatic as museum visitors collectively encounter the extent of state violence that was censored from public airwaves and newspaper headlines. The Soweto exhibit also reflects a shift in the criteria for what is considered suitable museum content as part of the larger project to recast national history and culture as expressions of the democratic principles that anchor the postapartheid social contract. The role of specific leaders, especially Nelson Mandela, and organizations like the ANC and UDF looms large in the social construction

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of collective memories of resistance. These figures are presented as central in the collective effort to topple authoritarian rule, similar to the prominent role that Martin Luther King Jr. and the SCLC play in American civil rights memory. However, unlike in the United States, in South Africa the more radical political transition has meant that ANC-dominated political departments and heritage agencies have had strong influence over the way revisions are recast as national in character, as opposed to racial. Accordingly, the story of the freedom struggle has become one of national liberation as the movement heroes have been recast as national heroes in the postapartheid period. For example, in December 2007, the government-sponsored Freedom Park officially opened less than three miles away from the Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria. Reminiscent of the recessed design of Great Zimbabwe—the ruins of the ancient capital city of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe—the architecture, design, and commemorative point of view at Freedom Park signal a departure from the Eurocentric styles of memorialization. Freedom Park’s postcolonial monumentality of curved edges and recessed buildings is complemented by a retelling of the various waves of national struggles, positioning antiapartheid resistance alongside the South African War and South African participation in World War II. Freedom Park is also a place of mourning and loss as people who perished during the battles are honored by a Wall of Remembrance that is somewhat evocative of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Movement leaders who lost their lives in the struggle are honored in a Gallery of Leaders where South Africans’ names are listed along with other high-profile figures, such as Julius Nyerere and W. E. B. Du Bois, who are presented as liberation heroes in an attempt to locate South African democratization globally. Freedom Park represents the official strategy of remembering the freedom movement as national in character, but also mourning those who perished in a manner similar to fallen soldiers in other national battles; it seeks to celebrate the individual—or some individuals—as extraordinary in the context of a broader struggle. As a state memorial project, it effectively locates social protest and dissent in the past, while also communicating a set of approved or legitimate “rules of rebellion” for future generations.

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Reflecting the tendency within social history to reorient historical portraits away from grand narratives about extraordinary figures, representations of apartheid often detail how it seeped into and infected the private lives of ordinary people. For example, failure to abide by the plethora of codes managing everyday life, from pass laws to curfews, meant that a large portion of the population possessed personal or autobiographical memories of police harassment and surveillance. Aspects of population management through racial classification and housing restrictions are presented as evidence of the inner workings of state domination or what Foucault would call “biopower.”7 The fundamental questioning of the rule of law and the social role of government in South Africa has meant that museums dedicated to representing the freedom movement are more likely to address mistreatment during apartheid as part of a deeper introspection about crime and punishment and fairness under the law. A testament to the deep reach of authoritarian rule, museum exhibitions can easily link the intimate and quotidian to larger political narratives through a plethora of personal accounts of abuse and harassment. In fact, many museums have hosted workshops and other modes of solicitation to collect and later display such firsthand accounts. The restoration of jails where activists and ordinary South Africans alike were held captive facilitates this broad interrogation into the nature of crime and punishment at sites like the Number Four Prison at Constitution Hill near downtown Johannesburg. The coupling of the museum with the Constitutional Court (the country’s highest court) signals a key motif running through the metanarrative of South African national identity, that of constitutionalism, human rights, and democratic values. This museum in par ticular plainly communicates a set of political ethos animating collective or national memory through what political theorist Jan-Werner Müller refers to as “constitutional patriotism” or the inscribing of social and human rights onto national identity.8 Beyond the placement of the museum next to the Constitutional Court, its location also serves to symbolically suture the city: it rests at the junction of one the most neglected neighborhoods and a largely commercial district downtown, Hillbrow and Braamfontein, respectively. In addition, the architecture of the museum and court communicates a story about the country’s political journey from authoritari-

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Exterior of the Constitutional Court; Johannesburg

anism to democracy.9 For example, the doors of the court contain words from various cultures; bricks from old prisons were incorporated into the court building; and the Gender Commission is housed in the Women’s Jail on the sprawling premises. Again, the specific way that civic values have been pursued and the manner in which the work of democracy has taken shape in and around museum spaces affect how revisionist social histories are legitimated. Like the Number Four Prison, museum development often borrows from preexisting knowledge about a site as a source of legitimation as much as an occasion for memorialization. From former prisons to the birth homes of freedom fighters, these spaces include buildings where apartheid policies were enacted, enforced, and contested. A Soweto township tour takes visitors to the exact spot where the 1955 Freedom Charter was adopted in the Kliptown neighborhood, to Nelson and Winnie Mandela’s family home, and to the site of the pivotal Soweto student uprising. Located less than three blocks away from the spot where the body of Hector Pieterson—the twelve-year-old student gunned down by state police during the standoff—was carried

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away, the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum opened in 2002. The museum documents the grievances leading up to the revolt against apartheid education policy: it contains oral testimony from members of the protest, video footage from news reports, historical background about the student-dominated BC movement, a reflection space, and artifacts from the violent clash, including police equipment. The museum has become a popular destination for a new generation of students on school field trips along with busloads of foreign tourists. Perhaps the most infamous site of struggle memory is the Robben Island Museum, which was established in 1997 and declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site two years later. Some officials proposed redeveloping the site as a casino resort or health spa, but a general consensus emerged that efforts should be taken to preserve the extraordinary social history of the island, which became an international icon after Nelson Mandela and some of the most high-profile leaders of the resistance movement were incarcerated there during the 1970s and 1980s.10 On September 24, 1997, at the opening ceremonies of the museums and in observation of the newly created national holiday, Heritage Day, President Nelson Mandela delivered a memorable address from the island where he had been imprisoned for eighteen years. His speech urged South Africans to celebrate their joint heritage rather than dwell on superficial differences. He highlighted the power of public culture institutions to instill national pride and democratic values: Having excluded and marginalised most of our people, is it surprising that our museums and national monuments are often seen as alien spaces? How many have gone to see one of our monuments? In other countries such places throng with citizens. . . . With democracy we have the opportunity to ensure that our institutions reflect history in a way that respects the heritage of all our citizens. Government has taken up the challenge.11

The growing chorus that efforts should be taken to preserve the notorious history of the island as a site of imprisonment, rather than redeveloping it as a high-end resort catering to an elite clientele, indicated that the history of the apartheid state’s attempt to suppress the freedom struggle by detaining its most active leaders would not

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Entrance to Robben Island; Cape Town

also be suppressed.12 Referred to as an “outdoor living museum,” Robben Island Museum includes three guided tours: a video on the ferry from the Victoria and Alfred Waterfront to the island, a walking tour through the prison buildings, including Mandela’s cell, and a bus tour across the perimeter of the island, including a stop at the quarries where prisoners invented innovative strategies to communicate with each other while futilely chipping away at stones. In fact, Robben Island Museum and other sites of the antiapartheid struggle have become highly visible symbols and examples of how the memorialization of the resistance movement has been incorporated into a revised historical consciousness located at the heart of the official postapartheid collective memory project. In other words, place— or at least certain places that activists and memory entrepreneurs mobilize around—lends urgency and seems to authenticate or at least authorize revisionist social histories. Even more, the power of place is such that the visitor is more likely to identify with the representational work of the site, as she is told she is sitting where Mandela or another prisoner sat, or seeing the same view that he saw from his jail cell. The potential for such bodily accordance or recognition increases the identification or empathetic association a visitor is likely to experience.

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Like the National Civil Rights Museum (NCRM) in the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, many regard Robben Island as a sacred place. Both museums reside on the fine line between sacred sites of memory and scarred sites of trauma, depending on who is doing the curating as much as the gazing. They are sites where iconic movement leaders were either killed or unjustly interned. However, not all museums located at historically significant sites amplify their distinctive geographies. For example, the Apartheid Museum, which opened in 2001 on the outskirts of Johannesburg next to an abandoned gold mine shaft that visitors to the nearby amusement park can explore as they are plunged 164 feet into the open pit at over 60 miles per hour on the popular ride Tower of Terror. In this case, the social historians from Wits University who created the museum did not use the power of place for branding purposes, perhaps hoping to detract attention from the museum’s close proximity to and relationship with a theme park. Irrespective of the specific events that transpired at or near the location of these sites of memory, most museums represent a rather standardized view of the past, one authorized by the rise of the social history movement of the 1970s and 1980s. While museums are not textbooks and must be responsive to unique challenges, such as directing diverse visitors through physical spaces and securing membership, in many ways they serve as public platforms that normalize historical revision by presenting it as the basis of collective memory. However, reflective of the mounting criticism lobbed at social historical production starting in the late 1980s, some museums attempt to curate revisionist history as multivocal, seeking to add complexity or texture to broad revisionist themes without necessarily upturning them. Many of these more locally oriented projects attempt to situate ongoing struggles over representation and access to resources within historical perspective. For example, the District Six Museum exhibits local iterations of apartheid as it affected the lives of people living in an urban neighborhood declared “whites only” under the Group Areas Act of 1950. Like the District Six Museum’s role in making demands about the redevelopment of the area in democratic South Africa, the Sophiatown Memory Project in Johannesburg and the Cato Manor Museum in Durban have also been vocal in advocating for land reform and the adoption of community-based development practices. These

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local museum projects reflect a desire to understand the effects of apartheid on the everyday lives of ordinary South Africans as much as they seek to mourn the loss of communal ties—and they simulta neously call for the revival of both. Despite their insistence that they present something unique, it is important to note that these local museums do not veer too far from the standard script about perseverance and success in the face of adversity, the power of collective resistance, and the inevitability of democracy. This relative uniformity speaks to the way an identity framework and a consensus-driven approach to history creates homogeneity in narratives. This approach is even evident in South Africa’s relatively recent embrace of prehistoric—from rock drawings to hominid remains— national history. For years, the South African Museum in Cape Town staged a controversial set of dioramas showcasing human casts set against the backdrop of the Kalahari Desert. Traditionally, the South African Museum focused on natural history while human history was presented nearby in the National Cultural History Museum, so the inclusion of the casts of indigenous people, the only humans on display, is a relic of the troubling division constructed between anthropology and history in the colonial imagination.13 A vocal critic of the representations, curator and University of Cape Town art professor Pippa Skotnes, has argued that the museum display contributed to the violence inflicted on San communities and their “coloured” descendants by portraying them as “living fossils.”14 As part of the museum’s efforts to distance itself from its long history of complicity with the colonial project and integrate its collections, then deputy director of the South African Museum Patricia Davison invited Skotnes to mount an exhibition that critiqued the display. “Miscast” opened in 1996 at the South African National Gallery, featuring headless casts, rifles suggestively positioned as the Eucharist, and photographs from colonial archives juxtaposed with images and objects donated from San communities.15 In 2001, the museum put the most controversial diorama into storage, just two years after Iziko Museums was created as an umbrella institution to reorient and integrate the collections at the South African Museum, the National Cultural History Museum, the National Gallery, and ten other area museums.16 The remaining dioramas are accompanied by black-and-white photocopies of “modern” Africans taped to

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the glass display case engaged in daily activities like boarding a public bus, along with a panel asking visitors whether the museum is “out of touch.” The accompanying text reads: This gallery was constructed in the 1970s and since that time approaches to exhibiting African cultures have changed. Do the exhibits create the impression that all black South Africans live in rural villages, wear traditional dress and use only handmade utensils? What about those people who live and work in towns and travel abroad or become industrialists? Do they not challenge the conventional ethnic stereotypes? African culture is not static. Why, then, are many labels in the gallery written in the present tense, as if time had stood still?

Few visitors appear to make their way to the panel, which is tucked into a dark corner near a storage room. Observing museum patrons during multiple visits in 2007 and 2011, I noticed that most lingered in front of the few remaining dioramas remarking on body shapes and laughing while striking poses meant to mimic the figures for flashing cameras. Still, the panel opens the door for more profound questions about the fraught relationship between cultural representation, power, and ideas about social difference as it gets mapped onto bodies and then inserted into highly symbolic spaces like museum exhibitions. As apparent in the incorporation of San rock art in the national coat of arms, museum displays of rock drawings and indigenous knowledge systems are part of positioning the San as a newfangled symbol of nationhood with a mystique and appeal that transcends history. San culture is a powerful symbol because it represents a distant past that precedes the national trauma of colonialism and apartheid. In fact, the San are often presented as an extinct people of an abstract timeless past, a notion reinforced by the placement of the Rock Art Museum at the Origins Centre, a cutting-edge facility devoted to telling the story of human origins. In reality, many communities survived through the 1950s and 1960s, and a small population of Khoisan descendants still inhabit regions in southern Africa, including South Africa. Perhaps the most public assertion of their presence and their ongoing struggle is the series of land claims filed by various collec-

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Display at the South African Museum; Cape Town

tives, such as the successful 1999 petition by the Khomani San in the Northern Cape for the return of land seized in 1931 to establish the popular Kalahari Gemsbok National Park.17 This prehistoric reach has even included converting evidence of human evolution into a story of national origins. For example, the Cradle of Humankind is a UNESCO World Heritage Site situated only

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Maropeng Visitor Centre at the Cradle of Humankind; Gauteng Province

thirty miles north of Johannesburg in the Sterkfontein Valley. The site stretches across 47,000 hectares, and is funded by the provincial development agency Blue IQ. It includes more than thirty limestone caves and contains an estimated one-third of the world’s hominid fossil collection, including “Mrs. Ples” (the nickname for the most complete skull of an Australopithecus africanus specimen found in South Africa).18 In 2005 President Thabo Mbeki declared the site and the state-of-the-art interpretative Maropeng Centre to be South Africa’s contribution to the historical record of human evolution and geographical change.19 Designed to resemble an ancient grassy burial ground when approaching the building and a futuristic metal and glass complex when exiting, the Maropeng Centre (translated as “the place where we come from” in Setswana) attracts researchers and fossil tourists from across the globe. The center presents an elaborate exhibition of the site’s vast fossil collection, redrawing the human family tree from the genus Australopithecus to the genus Homo and offering explanations

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for the extinction and evolution of various species within each genus. This information is presented with an air of scientific objectivism that belies the controversies and politics of human evolution, especially in a country with a long history of deficient science education under colonialism and apartheid. Although UNESCO recognized the Cradle of Humankind as a World Heritage Site in 1999, a pronouncement that increased international tourism, it has become a powerful motif in the national story, lending legitimacy to claims that extend beyond the primacy of Africa in human history. Sites like the Maropeng Centre work to detach colonialism as the anchor of national consciousness by drawing on unconventional historical material such as evolution, but they do so without dislodging the overall narrative structure of national identity formation.

UNITED STATES: RECASTING BL ACKNESS “[You] could easily re-write a textbook, but you can’t rewrite a museum.”20 Lonnie Bunch, the first director of the Smithsonian’s NMAAHC, offered this statement to explain why a new museum was underway to showcase black history rather than renovating the existing NMAH. As we have seen with museums in South Africa, museums can indeed be “rewritten,” but to do so requires tremendous political will and social pressure to recast national identity. However, it is not just the absence of more radical social transformation in the aftermath of the civil rights movement that explains this reluctance. We have seen that many Americans regard the Smithsonian and its family of museums as sacred and any attempts to alter content in ways that cast shadows over the heroism or benevolence of U.S. political leaders and their decisions can prove deeply divisive.21 But why would the creation of a separate federally appropriated museum dedicated to such content or revisions not provoke similar outrage? By the time the NMAAHC Act was passed in 2003, public recognition, if not acceptance, of black history as a part of U.S. educational and cultural life was widespread. Not to diminish the long struggle to secure congressional approval for the new museum,22 the presence of black history museums across the country had already set a precedent.

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Despite their range, the black history museums share an ideological commitment to historically situated constructions of black identity. They actively narrate black identity formation as a journey from racial subjects—first as enslaved people—to citizens.23 This metanarrative draws heavily from the black history movement of the early twentieth century, but its specific formulations reflect the ambitions of memory entrepreneurs active in the black museum movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Just as the pioneers of the black history movement saw themselves as correcting an imbalance in historical production, these museums brand themselves as similarly exceptional, offering accounts unlike those in mainstream history museums. Their directors and curators remain resolute in their commitment to historicizing blackness as a social imperative, evidence of the indomitable spirit of black Americans. This story about the origins of black collective consciousness revolves around two histories of violence: slavery and racial segregation. These moments are framed as ultimately surmountable obstacles toward black emancipation. Curating a history that was deliberately “made black” has meant that the social construction of race as a basis for human classification and identity is largely unquestioned or overlooked, while the hierarchical positioning of one race above another is rejected outright. Even though the metanarrative is explicitly racialized it is rendered intelligible only through a pluralist understanding of an imagined national community. In adopting black history as both an approach to storytelling and a type of museum during the 1960s and 1970s, black cultural nationalism inspired museum founders to imbue existing black history as they understood it with an even greater role for Africa in shaping U.S. conceptions of blackness. This role would be one of origins or ancestral homeland, anchoring black identity outside the physical borders of the United States. Indeed, nearly every black museum founded during the civil rights era opens its narrative by gesturing toward Africa, which is presented as a prelude to the troubled times on the horizon. Indeed, in the narrative construction of black identity, images of Africa operate as a clause to orient the story of racial persecution and eventual emancipation. The effect is to relocate the origins of a people, and even more profoundly an identity, someplace other than collective loss and trauma. This desire to construct a pos-

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itive origin story is evident at the DuSable Museum in Chicago where Africa is represented through a variety of masks, in order to “showcase the diverse peoples, cultures and countries in Africa, but more importantly to illustrate the link that African Americans have to their ancestral legacy beyond the institution of slavery.”24 To some degree, the abstraction of these presentations echoes the loose associations most African Americans have to Africa as an ancestral home. However, as museums with larger budgets develop genealogical research facilities on site—where African Americans can recover lost family histories in a manner popularized by the miniseries African American Lives that was hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and had two installments broadcast in 2006 and 2008—more detailed installations may be created in the future. The tentative gesture toward Africa is also evident at the handful of museums with more elaborate exhibitions, such as the replica of a village scene in precolonial Benin at Detroit’s Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History (MAAH). The area includes panels about foods traded and consumed, a soundscape of everyday life, religious traditions, and the social structure of Benin society before European contact. Yet the museum, particularly in its architectural design, also includes ambiguous motifs, such as the transformation of traditional patterns used in ceremonial kente cloths into stonework adorning the exterior and interior of the museum, as well as the large dome covering the museum called the Ford Freedom Rotunda. The lead architect insisted “the dome is an African structure; most of the structures in Africa have domes.”25 Again, the details of precolonial Africa are less significant than the country’s symbolic position as a place of origin for African Americans beyond the shores of the United States. This symbolism is further demonstrated in the visual representation of the “Point of No Return” where captives were taken and held, symbolizing black Americans’ brutal rupture with the continent. At the MAAH, visitors are taken on the “Death March” through a dark, empty space into the bowels of a ship packed with captives, whose figures were molded from the bodies of local students.26 The museum’s creators intended to evoke an emotional response from visitors, which is heightened by the darkness and tightness of the quarters and a soundtrack of sorrowful moans, coughing, and whimpering children.

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Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History; Detroit, Mich.

Visitors exit this troubling scene as they ascend to the deck where they encounter a reenactment of slave branding alongside panels describing violent uprisings, suicides, and killings along the turbulent passage. The capture and forced migration of Africans along the “Middle Passage” of European trade routes sets blacks apart from other Americans, especially from those whose ancestors came as voluntary migrants. This difference is captured in displays about the physical and psychological trauma of slave auctions. Most captives arriving to colonial Amer ica were taken to slave markets in Virginia, Maryland, Georgia, and Louisiana, where they were often separated from any remaining family or acquaintances that had survived the journey. For example, the African American Panoramic Experience Museum (APEX) in Atlanta positions artistic renderings of the Middle Passage next to preserved chains used to restrain captives and banners advertising the sale of slaves at public auctions. While I was on a tour of this site, an older white man asked our guide whether discussing these

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Ship deck replica at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History; Detroit, Mich.

events was difficult for her as an African American. The guide (and curator) responded, “No, because I’m not ashamed of anything. I’m proud of this because I just imagine how strong our ancestors had to be to withstand it.”27 Her comment highlights the importance of positionality in determining which material might cause some to cringe and others to applaud. The incorporation of this material, and increasingly the expectation from audience members that history museums simulate such material, is a complex cultural phenomenon. On one level, it reflects the entertainmentality of museums as quasi-recreational pastimes, where people expect to be entertained as much as informed. Sometimes this entertainment materializes in the form of gadgets and other interactive technologies thought to draw an aged institution into digital and virtual space, and at other times it is intended less to entertain than to emotionally engage visitors through a sensory experience that transcends text alone. As Jean Baudrillard explains, the power of such simulations lies in their interpretive weight as we

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increasingly and subconsciously rely on them to explain who we are and how we might and should relate to each other, and in this case the past.28 While the museum itself can and should be read as an instance of simulation (though not a coherent one), within it are microsimulations designed to provoke, preempt, and ultimately manage the visitors’ affective attachment to the narrative. Despite the urge to simulate past trauma, slavery is generally treated with a high degree of reverence not necessarily for the memory of those who were enslaved, but for their descendants and how they want to imagine their ancestors. Again, we must ask ourselves what we want from the dead; in this case, there is a desire to draw on them as a way to recast victimhood and sacrifice. In interviews, curators discussed how they used language selectively and amplified certain events in order to evoke a sense of pride in visitors, especially black youth. For example, curator Patrina Chatman from the MAAH emphasized that the museum’s panels use the term “enslaved people” rather than “slaves” to describe Africans in the United States because “calling them slaves takes away from their humanity. They were people first and enslaved after.”29 The exhibition designer, Ralph Applebaum, whose firm also designed the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., stated, “We were very concerned about getting the voice right. Language becomes the biggest challenge. . . . [We were] constantly vetting the subjective voice of the exhibition.”30 Indeed, efforts to present captured Africans’ lives through an active voice and imagery in order to restore their subject positions parallels concerns among curators at Holocaust museums and memorials who seek to transcend familiar victim narratives to portray the extermination of Jewish populations.31 In the case of black museums, the selective use of language to deemphasize victimhood in favor of more empowering images of group identity is evident in the amplification of instances of slave resistance, rebellion, and escape. The head curator at the African American Museum and Cultural Center of Iowa in Cedar Rapids acknowledged that she added an informational panel about slave rebellions called “Striking Back” when she learned from local schoolteachers that many black children, especially boys, expressed embarrassment when learning about black subjugation in front of their peers during field trips.32 Although slave rebellions were relatively infrequent,

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many museums devote significant space to these depictions to demonstrate that Africans resisted and even attacked slaveholders, rather than passively accepting enslavement.33 Curators at all museums dedicated to histories of violence, whether it is the Holocaust or atrocities against indigenous populations, wrestle with representing victimization without reproducing it among a wide range of visitors with varying degrees of identification with the material. Mirroring broader cultural trends, the victim status is shed for that of a fighter and then a survivor. The museums also depict the inner workings of the Underground Railroad as evidence of the ingenuity of enslaved people and their allies on the journey to freedom. These exhibits set the stage for the emergence of Harriet Tubman as one of only a handful of women who appear with regularity in black museums. Like the other figures— including Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Rosa Parks—Tubman is presented as resolute and quietly determined. This image is most explicit at the MAAH, where a mannequin styled as Tubman holds a pistol, while an automated soundtrack urges the imagined runaway slave: “Hurry. Come this way.” The emphasis on Tubman reflects a broader trend in the search for and elevation of individual heroes and heroines in the public display of U.S. history. Also, like the heavy shackles that represent the period of capture and enslavement, museums use specific material objects to represent the Underground Railroad. Besides such tools of restraint, by far the most common material objects included or referenced are so-called slave quilts with secret codes embedded in the design to indicate routes, schedules, and safe havens. Historians have dismissed the theory that the quilts contained hidden messages as a baseless fable. In fact, voicing his objection to the use of quilts in a public memorial to Frederick Douglass in New York City’s Central Park, David Blight insisted that “Douglass never saw a quilt used to free any slaves in his day. Why do we need to pin this nonsense on him now?”34 Rather than dismissing the quilt codes out of hand, it may be more useful to view them sociologically as part of the symbolic deployment of historical imagery to construct collective identities. In other words, regardless of their historical veracity it is impor tant to understand how these codes have come to figure centrally in the construction of collective memory and conform to a desire to view blacks as actively resisting

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and subverting slavery as a daily practice and a set of laws. In other words, the desire to believe and the implications of this belief are more sociologically relevant than adjudicating what really happened. A predisposition toward aspirational messages is also evident in displays about the history of racial segregation, which occupy the majority of floor space in the museums. Unlike portrayals of the slave past, which include elaborate and emotive exhibitions of historical trauma, content about racial segregation often de- emphasizes the violence of racial oppression. Instead, accounts of segregation are structured around a selective description of everyday life during de jure segregation and the strategies and victories of collective resistance. For example, the BCRI focuses on the symbolic violence of segregation with a display of signage demarcating appropriate uses of public space according to racial classification. The accompanying text reads: “The signs of segregation served as a constant reminder of the strict separation of races in the South. In many cases, no signs were needed. Through custom, Blacks and Whites knew their place.” Segregation is routinely presented as a precursor or a context to explain the rationale for various forms of collective resistance. Here the text reminds us that these practices were so deeply embedded in society and in individual psyches they hardly needed formal articulation. It begs the question of the extent to which we still operate accordingly, at least at a subconscious level, having inherited these psychic habits. Histories of racial violence in the post-Reconstruction Era, such as public lynchings and cross burnings, are sidelined and are certainly not simulated in any way. Even at the Amer ica’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—now a virtual museum that was founded by a lynching survivor—the viciousness and public spectacle of lynchings is played down after a brief topical video, after which the focus shifts toward a familiar narrative for black history museums, one that begins with the Transatlantic Slave Trade and carries through into the U.S. civil rights era. While the name of the museum is highly provocative and demands a rethinking of the history of violence and racial intolerance on U.S. soil, the retreat from this visceral imagery throughout the exhibition signals the power of the black identity narrative—explaining the triumph of an oppressed group over

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extreme odds—in representing racial histories. On the one hand, this museological preference reflects the sociohistorical moment in which these museums were first established, at a time when images of black power and agency were privileged over images of victimization. On the other hand, the attention museums give to the systematic terror of slavery distinguishes the representation of the recent past from more distant pasts. Undoubtedly, the greater availability of material objects from the recent past makes curators less reliant on simulations to animate the past. However, the greater emphasis on re-creating trauma in representations of enslavement also indicates that such material, located in the distant past, may be less likely to provoke discomfort among visitors than encountering violent images from a more recent period with living survivors and perpetrators. Indeed Laura Anderson, BCRI researcher and collections coordinator, has indicated that delving into the civil-rights-era violence in a city still divided along racial lines is complicated by the “perception from whites that they will be full of shame.”35 Instead, the exhibitionary gaze gets trained on the strategies and successes of collective resistance, with the greatest emphasis placed on forms on nonviolent activism. In this respect, we can understand the relatively scant attention to the depth of racial violence in postabolition and civil rights eras as indicative of more than a desire to establish greater distance between the visitor and unsettling graphic material; it also conforms to the narrative arc of storytelling, so that the focus has shifted away from blacks as victims—battered and beaten—to blacks as active subjects—marching on picket lines—agitating for full citizenship. While efforts to break this interpretive trend are rare, on occasion a museum garners attention for shining a light on the violence and inhumanity of racial oppression. For example, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center (NURFC) in Cincinnati opened a temporary exhibition of graphic lynching photographs—mainly postcards of bodies being hanged, castrated, and dismembered—in early 2010 in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. As visitors worked their way through the space without the presence of guides, Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” played over the intercom. Some came to pay respects to the victims, while others came to confront “the unbelievable level

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of hatred for human beings [that] a lot of white people don’t want to recognize or want to minimize,” as one visitor remarked.36 Another guest drew parallels between the brutality and disregard for human life on display with contemporary events, stating that “you are seeing this kind of hatred now expressed toward immigrants.”37 This temporary exhibition stood out because it broke the mold of what types of visual material are generally on display at museums dedicated to representing U.S. racial history, typically through the lens of black identity formation and with great care not to portray African Americans as victims. As a collective memory enterprise, black history museums work to incorporate lessons about local and national aspects of the freedom movement into black historical narratives, so that visitors ideally identify with both. These depictions of the recent past are best understood within the context of a variety of efforts to not only construct collective memories of a bygone era, but also to cement an official account of the civil rights movement itself.38 The exhibitions confirm previous arguments that this memorial landscape is characterized by a flattened vision of the freedom movement as homogenous, malecentered, and centrally organized.39 The familiar iconography of the civil rights movement, organized around the political life of Martin Luther King Jr. and the work of the SCLC, overshadows tensions within and across freedom groups, as well as the role of women and the significance of unorga nized acts of resistance. Unlike the fluctuating public images of many political and historical figures in U.S. memory,40 King’s place within the black museums has remained relatively stable over the last forty years. The programmatic priority accorded to nonviolence, tolerance, integration, and reconciliation as orientating themes further limits these selective accounts. For instance, the contours of civil rights memory are clearly visible in the transformation of the blighted Lorraine Motel into the NCRM, which attracts approximately 200,000 visitors annually. Memphis holds the regrettable distinction of being the locale where civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on a second-floor balcony at the Lorraine Motel on April 4, 1968. In a fitting tribute to the breadth of King’s teachings, the museum’s first gallery locates the movement in the context of other social protest activity during the 1960s

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and 1970s, including photographs of women’s rights, Chicano/a, and American Indian Movement rallies. Although this relational approach is not evident outside this opening space, it makes explicit what is often implied: the civil rights movement existed within a discursive and political space that exceeded racialized identity politics alone. The remainder of the museum is devoted to a photographic and textual exploration of the origins, tactics, and outcomes of the postWorld War II freedom struggle. The exhibition includes a restored public bus that visitors can walk through and see Rosa Parks’s figure seated near the front of the bus, while a sound recording repeats “Get to the back of the bus!” The subject matter is solemn, but such interactive technologies reflect museum staff ’s desire to ensure an entertaining experience for tourists. The BCRI in Alabama also includes a replica of a bus in its installation about segregation, including signage and images of blacks sitting at the rear of buses and trains. The visual language and symbolic power of segregated seating within collective memories of the civil rights era reflects the mythology surrounding Rosa Parks’s act of defiance as a lightning rod for the

FIGURE 2.10

Entrance to the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute; Birmingham, Ala.

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civil rights movement in 1955. Political scientist Jeanne Theoharis has argued persuasively that in treating Parks as a heroic symbol, her humanity and complexity have been muted as her life, including decades of activism leading up to the bus protest, is rearranged to fit into a story about social change.41 However, this type of correction—an attempt to get the story right about what happened—tends to overlook that all storytelling, whether we think of it as historical or collective remembrance, involves embellishment, selective remembering and forgetting, and denial. Unpacking why we tell the stories we tell, and to whom, and in which settings can shed light on why we need heroes in the first place and how our expectations of them fluctuate not only over time, but also according to their race and gender. Black museums juxtapose civil disobedience like Parks’s and other forms of organized protest with images depicting the extreme hostility and violence from police and angry onlookers, ranging from rock throwing to gunfire. The most elaborate illustration of this is in the NCRM’s displays about the assassination of Martin Luther King. The most popular attraction at the museum is Room 306 or the “King Room,” where, from behind a glass partition, visitors can view the room as it was at the time of his assassination, with the blankets askew, the pillows tossed from a playful pillow fight, and a cigarette perched in an ashtray, a rare attempt to humanize the larger-than-life figure. The museum also includes the Young and Morrow Building and the 420 Main Street rooming house across the street from the motel, from which the shot that killed King was probably fired. Inside, visitors can view the room where James Earl Ray stayed and see the view of King’s balcony he had from his bathroom window. This negative memorial space includes a series of panels chronicling the day of the incident, as well as the manhunt for Ray immediately following the shooting. The panels entertain several competing scenarios and theories about whether Ray was a lone shooter or whether there may have been a larger conspiracy. Although the display is somewhat evocative of a prime-time forensic television program, it echoes the growing chorus of suspicions about King’s death and possible government involvement after Dexter and Coretta Scott King acknowledged their own doubts that Ray acted alone.42 Even before its opening, the museum was embroiled in debates about the nature of King’s legacy, memorial styles, and the meaning and future

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of the civil rights movement more broadly. Museums like the NCRM draw on the power of place to strengthen and authenticate their narrative representations. They are viewed as sacred public places, but they are also scarred sites of trauma. This vacillation between sacred and scared (not profane) is not uncommon at places marked for memorialization. The tragedy surrounding King’s murder is the only sustained treatment of civil-rights-era violence and brutality at black history museums. Although other images of violence are surely present, particularly well-known photographs of protesters being terrorized by fire hoses and attack dogs, the history of the construction and maintenance of racial segregation in its various forms across the country is largely sanitized. Many museums deal with some of the more painful episodes of U.S. history while approaching histories of violence, particularly more recent histories, with extreme caution. Interestingly, the fact that exploring the deaths of great leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. has become routine suggests that audience members are more likely to be unsettled by the landscape of death and torture surrounding ostensibly ordinary people with whom they could more easily identify. Significantly, such broad treatment of everyday violence is reserved for the relatively more distant history of the Middle Passage and chattel slavery. However, a few museums do disrupt the standard museological approach to histories of racial violence and confront even more difficult material; most of these were established after the civil rights period or during the later boom in museum-building examined in the next chapter. These museums, such as the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia located on a college campus in Big Rapids, Michigan,43 tend to rely less on grants, attendance fees, and membership dues. They can afford to make people uncomfortable by locating racist ideology within contemporary popular culture and everyday social life because they cover their expenses even if they alienate audiences. Such practices highlight that constructions of collective memory and styles of curating history are pursued with more than an imagined audience in mind; they also reflect vision about how the museum might reproduce or sustain itself in the long term. The standardization of black history across the museums is also complicated by the inclusion of local and regional content. Although

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Display case at the Jim Crow Museum; Big Rapids, Mich.

most black museums present a national narrative of black identity and experience, they also showcase local struggles and homegrown heroes. In some instances, such as at the African American Library and Museum in Oakland, California, a regional focus reveals ways of thinking about collective resistance that challenge or at least complicate the SCLC-dominated accounts mentioned earlier. Head museum curator and director Rick Moss sees his museum as intervening in widely held misconceptions about U.S. racial history as concentrated in the American South and urban Northeast by exhibiting littleknown histories, such as the existence of the Underground Railroad in California. He tries to convey that despite its public image as a free-spirited and liberal space, California has a long history of hostility toward blacks and other people of color. Moss states that “California was a non-slave state, but not because folks did not believe in slavery though. It was because they did not want to taint [what they saw as] God’s gift to them by bringing blacks.”44 The museum showcases the work of local artists, the history of black settlement in Northern

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California and the Bay Area (especially Oakland), and oral histories of local civil rights and Black Power activists, who figure much more centrally here than in other similarly themed museums across the country. However, in most cases a local lens adds texture without disputing the basis or underlying logic of standard narratives by highlighting cultural phenomena, such as popular music traditions or religious life. While this local flavor can elevate new voices and perspectives, it can also provoke controversy. For example, the Anacostia Museum, one of the first black museums in the country, opened “Black Mosaic: Community, Race, and Ethnicity among Black Immigrants in Washington, D.C.” in 1994 to explore changes in the local context of black identity with the relatively recent rise in immigration from Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Some local residents criticized the exhibition, saying they resented the focus on recent immigrants in the depiction of black experience, eventually staging a boycott of the show.45 Although the exhibition highlighted the ongoing social construction of racial, ethnic, and national identities, the debate over representation revealed that many of these museums exist to preserve and celebrate specific notions of black identity and heritage associated with the history of U.S. slavery and racial segregation. In addition to the way more recent waves of immigration call into question some of the more familiar approaches to representing U.S. racial history, the election of Barack Obama as president also requires museological adjustment. The election of the first president to selfidentify as black, and the subsequent rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, necessarily draws black history museums into a dialogue with more contemporary concerns, highlighting a changing social landscape defined by ambiguity, tension, and anxiety as much as achievement, success, and resistance. These currents are not easily affixed to or reconciled with a historical narrative of black identity that presents the passage of civil rights legislation during the 1960s as an endpoint to the narrative. This chosen endpoint has always been problematic because it unwittingly situates racial violence, oppression, and resistance as historical artifacts, as social issues ameliorated with the legislative victories of the 1960s. The Charles H. Wright MAAH stands out as the only museum to carry the narrative forward, to explore how the contours of urban life in the city have been affected

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by forces such as deindustrialization and “white flight” out of the city and into the surrounding suburbs. When does history end? How will museums respond to major events in the recent past, within the last few years, or even months? Museums can add content, but the physical realities of existing buildings and installations, along with finite personnel and financial resources, present obstacles. The resounding 2008 and 2012 election victories of Obama, and the public outcry over police-related killings— Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Philando Castille, and too many more—and the sniper attack on five police officers in 2016, along with the social and news media coverage of the impassioned protests on the streets and across college campuses, will likely induce curators to at least thematically address the relentless precarity of black lives through the twenty-first century. Newer museums, such as the Smithsonian’s NMAAHC, face difficult questions about how to position themselves in relation to contemporary news headlines and scandals. For example, inaugural NMAAHC director Lonnie Bunch released a statement on March 31, 2016, declaring that in light of the multiple allegations of sexual assault against Bill Cosby, a major donor to the museum, a display called “Taking the Stage” about black entertainers would be modified so that “visitors will leave the exhibition knowing more about Mr. Cosby’s impact on American entertainment, while recognizing that his legacy has been severely damaged by recent accusations.”46 The NMAAHC has also been at the forefront of museological representation and archiving of the Black Lives Matter movement with a collecting initiative identifying and gathering artifacts from protests in Baltimore and Ferguson. During a radio interview, Bunch described their efforts: We have gone around and made sure that we were there when things happened in Baltimore. We looked at all the Black Lives Matter conversations whether it was in demonstrations in New York, or in Washington. But we also decided what was really impor tant to collect was the cell phone videos and photographs that people took at various demonstrations. One of the biggest changes is that this allows us to get multiple perspectives from people who aren’t journalists, who aren’t professionals.47

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National Museum of African American History and Culture; Washington, D.C.

Because these museums have become particularly visible modes of black storytelling, they are vulnerable to pressures to continually update content because black identity, like all collective identities, is constantly in flux. As the civil rights era—or at least its popular resonance and imagery—recedes in the public imagination, a new struggle continues to be waged over how to remember histories of racial violence and oppression. Considered too controversial or potentially divisive for mainstream U.S. history museums that celebrate heroic narratives of the country’s founding and global ascent, representations of these events are primarily concentrated in ethnically and racially themed museums. While these identity-driven accounts share a number of elements discussed above, this approach to grappling with the past is complicated by efforts to make exhibitions more global in focus. In South Africa the more global dimensions of national history have

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always been more visible given not only the imperial and colonial past, but also because of the various international contexts within which the antiapartheid movement unfolded, from exiled combatants across the African continent to global economic and cultural embargos during the 1980s. In contrast, the international focus of black history museums is present with the framing of Africa as homeland and of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. However, some museums are adding more global content by way of comparison: comparing the U.S. civil rights movement to civil and human rights struggles in other countries, including South Africa, or emphasizing its international significance. While these displays often seem added on and poorly integrated into the overall content, some newer museums, such as the National Center for Civil and Human Rights (NCCHR) in Atlanta, Georgia, seek to reconceptualize such strug gles. Doug Shipman, the chief executive officer (CEO) of the museum, which opened to the public in 2014, insists that U.S. racial conflict and systems of oppression must be viewed not as a national story per se, but rather as a national iteration of more widespread social phenomena. For example, Shipman calls for a reinterpretation of the history of racial violence in the United States. He stated, We have not ever made an argument or a presentation that says lynching happened and the civil rights movement happened and here’s the linkage between the two. What we have said is, lynching happened and it was an atrocity much like you would see in the Holocaust or in Cambodia or in Darfur and this is another example that happened on American soil. So again, a different kind of contextualization.48

He added: What I think is about to happen is that the American civil rights experience is going to survive as a cultural reference out of the twentieth century as perhaps the most impor tant movement. I think it’s going to have more cultural reference than Ghandi in India and more cultural reference than Mandela in South Africa, primarily because it’s the American example. Everyone wants to attach to the American example. But because it’s going to be used by so many in

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so many different ways, our understanding of it is going to change significantly. How that plays itself out, who knows. But what it means is, it doesn’t become exclusively African American history.49

The Atlanta museum is not the first to apply a more global lens to what is generally regarded as U.S. national history. The Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco also presents a more international interpretative framework, but again without disrupting the tropes of black identity narratives, such as the triumph over adversity and the treatment of Africa as a primordial homeland. In fact, it leaves the standard narrative about black identity intact, but places it within a diasporic frame, privileging African ancestry as a core identity linking an incredibly heterogeneous population of people worldwide.50 In both the United States and South Africa, museums established in the twenty-first century locate national narratives within a more global framework and human rights discourse to understand how state oppression and collective and everyday forms of resistance interact in the public and private realms. Such museums are more likely to be members of or actively involved with the International Coalition for Sites of Conscience, a global network of museums dedicated to commemorating historical crimes and social justice.51 In fact, this global point of view has translated into a handful of more elaborate exhibitions about apartheid at U.S. museums and, conversely, about U.S. racial segregation at South African museums. In 2005, working in collaboration with the U.S. embassy in South Africa, the Apartheid Museum opened “Separate Is Not Equal,” a mixed-media exhibition produced by the Smithsonian to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education court ruling that outlawed state segregation.52 The traveling exhibition was later installed in museums in Cape Town, Durban, Port Elizabeth, Bloemfontein, and Pretoria. Unlike the original U.S. version of the exhibition, the traveling exhibition included panels that compared U.S. racial segregation to South African apartheid—especially the role of students in resisting oppression and demanding educational equality—and drew heavily on local sources, such as the Fort Hare Liberation Archives in the Eastern Cape, to relate the two histories. Speaking at an opening for the exhibition, U.S. consul general Erica Barks-Ruggles remarked that “South Africa’s story is not the same, but

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it is not so very different. . . . The story that is told here resonates in the United States, in South Africa, but it also resonates as well in Europe and South America and Asia and everywhere that human rights are cherished.”53 In addition to this display tailored to South African audiences, U.S. and South African museums have also partnered to organize student exchanges, such as the one coordinated by the BCRI, the Mandela House Museum, and the Apartheid Museum. This crossnational dialogue has translated into several apartheid-themed events at the BCRI, including a Nelson Mandela International Day celebration and the temporary exhibition “Helen Suzman: Fighter for Human Rights” about the famous South African politician and activist in 2011. Like the “Separate Is Not Equal” exhibition, the bulk of U.S.-South African museological interaction and dialogue originates from the United States, which is indicative of the geopolitical gap or imbalance between the two countries. To a large extent and as evidenced by the popularity of films like the 2009 hit Invictus, U.S. audiences remain captivated by the history of apartheid, the resistance movement, and the election of Nelson Mandela in 1994. Exhibitions like “The Rise and Fall of Apartheid: Photography and the Bureaucracy of Everyday Life” at the International Center for Photography in New York City in 2013 and “Impressions from South Africa” at the Museum of Modern Art in 2011, which showcased apartheid-era protest posters as resistance art, suggest that South Africa—or some idea of it— remains a symbol for Americans grappling with the histories and contemporary realities of racism.54 ✴✴✴

How can we explain our attachment to keeping some memories alive and to building monuments, museums, and other memorials in an attempt to fi x their meanings? Is this attachment itself wounded? This deep-rooted anxiousness about memory loss was evident at the groundbreaking ceremony of the NMAAHC in 2012 when President Barack Obama stated, “The time will come when few people will remember drinking from a colored water fountain or boarding a segregated bus. . . . [The museum] will be a monument for all time; it will do more than simply keep those memories alive.55 Such losses of

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memory are treated as losses of identity, fear of an aimless wandering as we float about unable to make sense of ourselves, each other, and the world around us. As the freedom struggles of the twentieth century recede, a new struggle over how to remember them emerges in the context of contemporary understandings of collective identity and ongoing conflict. Despite the variety of museums engaged in this work, a general level of consensus about the content and form of the origin stories of collective identities is evident in both countries. These selective representations are based on a range of subjective interpretations and deafening silences—including the complex role of women in both struggles and violence against them at home and in detention, and fierce disagreements between factions of the freedom movements. Some of these silences reflect those of the revisionist history movements that inform museum content, while others are the product of tailoring history to the particularities of specific museums—how, when, and why they were founded and with what audiences in mind. These and other revisionist tendencies demonstrate that the veracity of historical narratives is far less socially meaningful than how they are packaged as the backbone of an ostensibly collective and consensual understanding of the past. Being a member of the collective implies identification with or at least acceptance of this packaged past. It is assembled in such a way that violence, pain, and suffering are artifacts of identity formation, detours in the evolution of social life. All productions of historical knowledge involve interpretative framing that amplify some episodes and actors at the expense of others, but in this case they are arranged or curated in such a way that they are treated as fundamentally collective in nature. This is achieved through practices such as inviting audiences to participate in recording their memories, encouraging them to place themselves within exhibits (sometimes literally, through the use of mirrors), displaying personal memories, soliciting family memorabilia, and requesting financial support as an act of observance and indeed good faith. In doing so, museological practices raise even more pressing questions about the limits of reading museum exhibitions—or any historical product—as texts rather than as enterprising cultural spectacles. Just as historical revision does not miraculously present itself, collective representations do not reproduce themselves without the efforts of specific individuals and organizations. Sociologist

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Maurice Halbwachs noted that only those memories that find their way into group identity live on—their presence is entirely dependent on the group’s reproduction.56 Even more, the museum itself, as a site of memory, only remains socially relevant to the extent that it can sustain its institutional presence as much as its ideological resonance.

3 MANAGING COLLECTIVE REPRE SEN TATIONS

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Africa has done in terms of violence to the human spirit makes it the worst country on the face of the Earth.”1 These strong words came from John Kinard, the first director of the Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, D.C. Attending the 1987 SAMA conference entitled “Museums in a Changing and Divided South Africa” with a special U.S. convoy, Kinard was party to the deliberations that culminated in SAMA releasing a statement declaring that museums “should be seen to belong to all South Africans, irrespective of colour, creed, or gender.”2 Reaching an agreement on the statement was not an easy decision; sharp barbs and accusations were exchanged, but the atmosphere became particularly volatile after John Kinard’s admonishment directed to a crowd of mostly white South African museum professionals, charging that they had been complicit and overly permissive toward the apartheid regime, accepting its stance toward representing images of nation where the majority population could only be found in the backdrop among the wildlife and vegetation. Just as his comments called attention to the role of museums in doing the work of imagining nation, they also called attention to the institutional settings or the structures within which this symbolic work takes place. When we push back the curtains to expose how collective representations are staged, the sacred is rendered profane. The production of

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collective memories must be skillfully managed to ensure more than institutional survival; the entire project of grounding personal and collective identities within historical narratives rests on the appearance of effortless uncontrived truth. This management of impressions requires creativity and ongoing coordination of goals, people, and other resources. Like any enterprising project, the poor management of collective representations threatens the robustness of historical narratives. A student of Emile Durkheim, French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs argued that collective memories stay in circulation as long as they are of use to a social group as a source of solidarity and identification with collective goals.3 But what types of material practices and sites underlie this circulation of shared knowledge about the past? Borrowing from Pierre Nora’s discussion of physical spaces of remembrance (les lieux de memoire), historian Jay Winter contends that museums, monuments, memorials, and other sites of memory represent efforts to formalize meanings and incorporate them into a social repertoire.4 These sites, as Winter observes, have their own histories that should not be taken for granted. Indeed, as we have seen, memory entrepreneurs with specific institutional locations and ideological commitments shaped the content and theming of revisionist histories. Yet no historical production, even those we are expected to personally identify with as members of a collective, can sustain itself over time without making allowances for upkeep. The challenges of maintaining or managing ideological work take us into the prosaic world of budgets, staff composition, funding streams, donors, tourism, and sponsorships. Within this “political economy of memory” the enterprising qualities of collective memory as a form of cultural production are thrown into relief.5 Museum curators and directors contend with a cluster of political, economic, and institutional factors that deeply determine their capacity to develop and actualize various styles of representation. My interviews revealed that all museums experience a related set of concerns about funding, attendance, membership development, and exhibition design. However, the interviews also revealed nuanced ways of thinking about and addressing these issues across the older (civil-rights-era) museums and the relatively new museums founded during the 1990s and 2000s. This chapter examines how some of these trends position museums not only as sites of memory, but also as sites of cultural production where representations are managed before and during

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exhibitions. It details how such representational management involves efforts to control the public image of the museum and the material and discursive objects that encourage visitors to accept and identify with the narratives on display. From funding shortfalls to staff composition, museum staff work to shield visitors from the material constraints of their work so as not to undermine the appearance of the museum as an unproblematic if not sacred site of collective memory and identity. Ultimately, a museum’s ability to control its message vis-à-vis the display of its collection rests in its ability to effectively manage its operations and physical space. Examining how staff seek to protect and reproduce their representations of histories of racial oppression, trauma, and resistance reveals the myriad ways that material considerations, such as budget cuts and building design, influence and sometimes undercut ideological investments in the past as a source of collective and personal identification. However, because of the differences in the social contexts of revision in the United States and South Africa, the temporality of these processes across museums has manifested differently in the two countries. Older museums in the United States are those created during the civil rights era with an emphasis on black history and empowerment, while older museums in South Africa were created during colonial rule and emphasized white European experiences. Notwithstanding this key difference in content and mission, older museums in both countries compete with newer museums that generally attract larger audiences, display more elaborate and interactive exhibitions, and receive more funding.

TR ANSFORMING OLDER MUSEUMS At first glance older black history museums in the United States have little in common with older colonial museums in South Africa. After all, the latter were established as part of the colonial project, showcasing the material culture of imperialism and ultimately white supremacy, while the former emerged as a response to the perceived whitewashing of history in mainstream institutions. However, in both cases we see the interlocking ideological and institutional imperatives to transform to stay relevant in changing times and a relentless effort to mask the material underpinnings of their symbolic work. This relevance has

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as much to do with being able to cover the costs of keeping their doors open as it does with keeping pace with shifting social norms to ensure there is a public interested in passing through them. CIVIL-RIGHTS- ERA MUSEUMS

The U.S. museums created during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s stand apart as pioneers of the contemporary black museum movement. Many of these museums are still operating today, though in a vastly different sociopolitical context and racial milieu than the civil rights era in which they emerged. Although the ideological mission of these museums has changed little, their capacity to reproduce black history narratives in the post-civil rights era is complicated by a variety of factors. First, the realities of sustaining a museum and the pressure to conform to professional conventions about staffing, conservation and acquisition, and display diverted resources away from public engagement activities. Second, the location of many of these museums in declining inner cities introduced new challenges around audience development and membership. Third, heightened levels of competition in the heritage industry, especially with newer state-of-the-art history museums, exacerbated staff anxieties about long-term institutional survival. Today, museum curators still view their work as a supplement and sometimes a corrective to school curricula, which has proven even more challenging to revise. Curators have insisted that despite progress, many history school texts reproduce problematic myths that sideline and distort the experiences of racial and ethnic minorities. Curators stress their role in correcting such imbalances, especially considering that many visitors are schoolchildren on field trips. As Michele Mitchell, curator at Atlanta’s APEX, explained, One of the saddest things about working here is knowing how little people know and how much misinformation there is out there. What our schools are feeding them is shameful. I feel like the schools and especially the textbooks are so bad and what I’m doing here is a corrective to that. That’s what keeps me going.6

The appeal to young audiences is not only altruistic, however. Charles Bethea, head curator at Chicago’s DuSable Museum, acknowledged

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that this is also a shrewd economic strategy to cultivate a sense of ownership among youth that will hopefully translate into their membership and donations later in life.7 Not surprisingly then, curators and directors express concern over cuts to school budgets that make it more difficult to finance field trips. In fact, some directors at the older museums, already struggling to keep their doors open, raise private funds to offset the financial burden that field trips place on school districts in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods.8 The Anacostia Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Charles H. Wright MAAH in Detroit raise money specifically to subsidize the costs of bus transportation from area public schools. The relationship of museums to local school districts is closely linked to the issue of physical location. The realities of these museums’ physical locations often limit audience access. The urban North was the epicenter of social protest during the civil rights era and became the locus for community institution-building that affected group consciousness. Accordingly, the first wave of black museum development during the 1960s and early 1970s concentrated museums in inner-city neighborhoods with large black populations, such as Detroit and Philadelphia. Black museums were also established in cities in the West, but the movement was most pronounced in Northeastern and Midwestern cities whose black populations swelled during the great migrations of the early and mid-twentieth century. In addition to their sizable black populations, these cities were also sites of urban riots that marked race relations in the mid- to late 1960s. Today, these central urban districts present unique challenges for museum staff. Due to deindustrialization and the illegalization of overt racial codes in housing markets that paved the way for concentrated inner-city poverty, many find themselves in poverty-stricken central city districts with few economic resources. For example, three of the pioneers in the black museum movement—the Charles H. Wright MAAH in Detroit, the DuSable Museum in Chicago, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia—have all suffered from declining attendance by surrounding neighborhoods and the inability to consistently draw crowds from the urban periphery and far-flung suburbs where many middle-class residents began relocating during the 1980s and 1990s. Their efforts to relate to local audiences in areas

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plagued by poverty and unemployment are complicated by the museums’ own transition away from their grassroots origins. These tensions are exacerbated by recent shifts in staff composition and organizational structure as founding directors and curators retire. As new leadership replaces the staff members who were products of the cultural movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a new set of economic realities has left many of these museums with uncertain futures as they find themselves part of a competitive tourist industry. Compared to other museums, these older institutions tend to have smaller endowments, limited marketing budgets, incomplete collections, inadequate storage facilities, and less advanced exhibitions.9 This is unsurprising given that when established, these were not typical museums; they were more focused on community outreach and filling a gap in the historical record than on being state-of-the-art facilities per se. Nonetheless, facing these new realities, a younger generation of directors and curators has sought funding for renovation from nontraditional sources outside the community of targeted visitors. Key sources of support during this period of transition starting in the late 1980s and through the 2000s have included a variety of private and public entities, ranging from the National Football League to the NEH. Some museums that include historic buildings, such as the MAAH in Boston, have also been able to secure steady funding from national preservation agencies like the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the National Park Ser vice (NPS). To some extent, museum directors prefer these forms of public support over donations from private organizations, which often include stipulations about content and programming.10 To attract new audiences as much as stay current with changing social attitudes, perceptions, and scholarship, museum content requires updating. In this respect, revisionist histories are always under construction along with representational aesthetics, trends, and preferences. Producing and renting traveling exhibitions is a common way for museums to update museum content affordably. These temporary installations consist of a mobile and abbreviated version of a permanent exhibition or area of collections that a museum compiles and rents to other institutions for a fee, ranging from $2,000 to $20,000. The African American Museums Association

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(AAAM) also organizes a clearinghouse of traveling exhibits about black history and culture. APEX’s Mitchell explained that traveling exhibitions help her bring in new content and are less expensive than a more substantive overhaul of the museum’s permanent exhibition, which has not changed for more than two decades. These temporary enhancements can help older museums keep pace with a newer generation of modern and technologically advanced black museums that have been able to attract larger audiences and greater financial support. However, their temporary nature can also complicate a museum’s ability to develop a sense of continuity and branding. Head curator at the DuSable Museum Charles Bethea acknowledged that about 70 percent of our gallery space is traveling exhibitions. We rotate between four to six shows a year and that’s a lot for an institution our size. We’re trying to get to the point where we reverse that and 70 percent is our own collection. It helps establish an identity. A museum is only as strong as its collection. Having permanent spaces in permanent galleries will allow us to promote ourselves.11

Bethea’s comments highlight the role of relative transience and permanence in our perceptions of historical narratives and how we measure their accuracy or legitimacy. Typically, conversations about the need to transform older black museums revolve around their financial stability or lack thereof. For example, as part of the NMAAHC Act of 2003 to create a national African American museum, funds were set aside to provide grants to smaller African American cultural institutions. Overseeing these grants, the Institute of Museum and Library Ser vices held a forum to discuss the state of existing black museums. Their final report concluded that historically, African Americans have not had the wealth base to rely on individual benefactors. Today, that wealth base exists, but there is not yet a collective consciousness among African Americans of “owning” African American cultural institutions. Moreover, many African American museums are not investing in developing and harvesting relationships with potential significant donors. Paradoxically, it was observed that some organizations were pursuing “celebrity”

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funding to the detriment of building a more reliable base of “regular donors.”12

Also, corporate sponsors are difficult to attract and are more likely to support specific programming and exhibitions than they are to offset the high operating costs of museums, which includes staff compensation.13 Viewing this as an issue about African American philanthropic patterns or about fundraising practices is one way to approach this puzzle. The DuSable Museum’s Bethea stated that every museum has to be a functioning business so it has an understanding of who it is [and] who it serves, to look at its collection as a consumer-based good. Then it is in a position to survive. Museums have always been seen as highbrow elitist places. . . . It has been the middle class that has been sustaining museums as a whole. When that middle class is in jeopardy financially, then you start to see large swaths of people not supporting museums and not being able to go. And then you get into the political realm with people asking, “Why should we be taxed to support the arts and humanities when they’re just the playgrounds for the rich?” This is the perception even if it is not the case. I’m going to pick on the African American community for a brief second. There has never been in the history of American museums, there has never been one ethnic group that has sustained a museum. If black history museums weren’t [elitist], then a museum such as the DuSable Museum in the middle of Chicago would make one ask: Why is our entire donor base not African American? Why is not every black resident in the whole of Chicago a member or walking through the doors of the museum? There will always be people who look at museums as something different because they just don’t know any better.14

Could there be other alternative explanations for this lack of patronage and support beyond perceptions of elitism or perceived ignorance? It could perhaps signal a more profound ambivalence toward the enterprise and institutionalization of collective memory itself. Regardless, Bethea’s belief that museums have to be “functioning busi-

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nesses” signals a shift in how contemporary curators envision their work compared to their predecessors. This perceived lack of support, especially for older museums, is also related to shifting attitudes about the past and its relation to the present. It also harkens back to the early preservationist efforts of Car ter G. Woodson and other memory entrepreneurs at the ASNLH in the early 1900s. Woodson cautioned that extreme measures had to be taken to collect documents, family heirlooms, and other materials essential to “making history black” or to historically ground his vision of blackness.15 However, one should bear in mind that the decision to preserve and then represent, along with deciding what exactly gets earmarked for preservation and which techniques to use, is a highly loaded and normative one. Woodson cautioned that valuable material objects could be trashed, forever lost. Who decides what is refuse and what is a valuable artifact? Perhaps the lack of financial support for black history museums from black communities reflects a difference of opinion over how one relates to the past and the role of museums in institutionalizing that relationship. Funding woes at older black museums are worsened by competition from newly developed museums. Competing for audiences and revenue streams directly affects collections. This is especially clear in ongoing discussions about the effect the new Smithsonian NMAAHC will have on existing black museums, particularly those established during the civil rights era. Reflecting on these concerns, inaugural NMAAHC director Lonnie Bunch stated, I think that when this museum was passed by legislation in 2003 most of the African American museums and other smaller history museums panicked, [thinking,] “Oh my God here comes the Smithsonian!” Part of that was assuaged by my hire, because most of those people in those museums knew me, they knew at some point I was at the California African American Museum, so that I came out of that culture if you will. The very first big speech I gave within thirty days of being here, was to the African American Museum Association, talking about how this was the group that nurtured me when nobody else knew my name, and really expressed how impor tant they will be to the growth of this museum. And then I came up with something called

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Save Our African American Treasures where we go around the country, to help people preserve Grandma’s shawl and old photographs. What happens as you can expect, is that hundreds of people show up, and many want to give collections, but what we do is encourage most of the collections to go to local museums, so when we were in Chicago, collections went to the DuSable Museum, or the Bronzeville Children’s Museum, or the Chicago Historical Society, my old place. But of course if it’s really cool, it’s coming back to [the NMAAHC]!

Intent aside, Bunch’s remarks reflect a hierarchy among memory projects, with the Smithsonian firmly placed at the top, acting as the ultimate authority on historical worth and allocation. It is not just that content needs to be updated or more interactive technologies installed to appeal to modern visitors; the very notion of black history is being updated or reconsidered in an effort to secure institutional sustainability. Indeed, some museum professionals have noted the need to broaden the way they represent black history. As APEX curator Michele Mitchell stated, “People today are more comfortable with a civil rights focus than black history.”16 A civil rights lens draws attention away from an explicitly black identity-based orientation toward the past. This is not just a symbolic move; it has deep material implications for museum viability. Speaking about the relationship between the new Smithsonian museum and these older museums, Lonnie Bunch viewed black museums as needing to rethink their stakeholder community: The real challenge for African American museums is that in many ways their greatest strength is that they served a community. I would almost argue that they’ve now taken that community for granted, and that they need to almost be as innovative as they once were, in terms of reaching out within their own community and then obviously . . . they ought to reach out to a broader urban community.

His reference to a “broader urban community” speaks to a widening of the imagined community of the museum to appeal to all urban residents. This requires rethinking the premises on which the museums were created in the first place as they now rest in neighborhoods dramatically different from what they were fifty years ago.

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This representational dilemma and the way it intersects with institutional identity and sustainability has been especially pronounced at the Anacostia Museum in Washington, D.C., which was founded in 1967. In 2005 Camille Akeju was hired to resolve institutional tensions and revive the museum’s mission not out of some ideological necessity to ease the contradictions of representation, but in order to secure its place as the country’s only federally funded community museum. However, the creation of the NMAAHC jeopardizes its future as Congress is unlikely to support two ostensibly black museums. Reflecting on the need to distinguish itself from the NMAAHC, Akeju stressed that there is a need to reconsider what community means, especially given the demographic shifts occurring across American cities. My sense of community is much more broad than was articulated by the Anacostia Museum in the past. There’s no reason community has to be defined by race or ethnicity. These are not black issues and in order to sustain ourselves, we have to think of ourselves in a universal context.17

This vision of community has evolved from a geographically bounded black neighborhood, to all African Americans, and now to everyone’s lived experiences in cities. This more abstract, universal understanding of community can potentially encourage visitors to see themselves in a broader context and encourage dialogue and understanding across groups, but it also presents challenges for a museum whose public image remains that of a black museum. The neighborhood surrounding the museum remains overwhelmingly black and the museum is still two trains and a bus ride away from the National Mall. In addition, the staff members are trained in black history and culture, and Akeju admits that there has been some hesitancy and even resistance from staff members who are committed to presenting information about blacks that is sidelined or ignored in conventional museums and mainstream media.18 Former head curator Portia James expressed the difficulty of this task: I’m actually intrigued by the idea of losing the ethnic specificity, to lose that focus. I mean, it’s hard to say because that’s all of our history, that’s all of our work, and that’s all of our expertise.

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But when I think of a museum of the twenty-first century and I look at the changing demographics of American cities, I can just think there would be a lot of interest in challenging some of those boundaries, instead of saying, “This is my box and I’m staying in it.” Just look at what’s going on around you in the cities—it’s incredible . . . it would be interesting to try to interpret some of that and share that discussion with the public.19

James’s remarks reflect the synergistic relationship between the more symbolic and material aspects of constructing and representing collective identity. The easier museums are able to make these adjustments, the better equipped they are to maintain their image as sites of memory and not sites of work and production. This balancing of the sacred and profane at museums is especially pronounced at older institutions that are closely associated with antiquated and imperialistic ideologies, such as those in South Africa. APARTHEID- ERA MUSEUMS

Under minority rule, Afrikaner nationalism found monumental expression in the architecture of public buildings, urban planning, and public memorials. That the older museums in South Africa are operating within a different context from the one in which they were conceived—as is the case with civil-rights-era museums in the United States—is an understatement. As the resistance movement grew and as challenges to the legitimacy of the apartheid regime gained traction, the seemingly monolithic facade of Afrikaner nationalism began to unravel along with the cultural institutions bolstering it. In this topsy-turvy social climate, museum curators and directors scrambled to rethink their work and their relationship to the state as a matter of survival. These museums faced the task amid radical restructuring of the state subsidy system and in response to public pressure to represent all South Africans, not just the white minority. This democratization of museum holdings and exhibitions had to be orchestrated with quickly diminishing resources as the apartheid state that had financed their work buckled under the weight of mass protests, sanctions, and an international boycott.20 Apartheid-era muse-

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ums responded in a number of ways, demonstrating that not all reformist projects look the same. Some have undertaken sweeping reworkings of collections and styles of presentations, while others have made more modest additions to existing displays that have been left relatively untouched. This reformist trend manifested in different ways not just because some curators were more or less enthusiastic about the call for change in their institutions. This imperative also led to varying results because of varying state incentives, expectations, and mandates across provinces and municipalities. Given that South Africa experienced a period of radical social realignment, social protest, and ongoing negotiations to usher in democracy, it is of little surprise that the management of museums and other heritage sites was somewhat uneven while state policies and department responsibilities for implementing and enforcing rules were in flux. Due to these factors—along with the fact that staff and board members had different interpretations of how to create more representative and inclusive institutions— museum reform unfolded to varying degrees and at different times. As the apartheid state was reaching a state of collapse, the 1980s and 1990s represented a period of radical change in South African museum culture. A series of conferences and workshops, some of which brought together factions as diverse as the apartheid NMC and representatives from the UDF with SAMA, set the stage for difficult and often heated discussions about the need to transform museums. Interestingly, the focus was never on whether museums— themselves colonial inventions—were needed in the new South Africa. Rather, the focus was on how to reform exhibitions and collection strategies and how to become more relevant by representing versions of the past that resonated with the majority population. All of this transpired as the end of apartheid was clear, but funding for and interest in public culture institutions—museums or other wise—was uncertain. By the twenty-first century, a number of significant renovations and revisions had taken place at older apartheid- era museums. Staff tensions have been paramount, even as most of these older museums have experienced a changing of the guard; many of the entrenched leaders were resistant to change. Drawing on Pierre

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Bourdieu’s insights, sociologist Steven Dubin suggests that this reluctance to more drastic changes stemmed from their habitus or the mind-set that went along with their particular social location.21 This argument holds that the worldview of staff was shaped by decades of colonial and apartheid rule. Museum professionals were socialized into it—to such an extent that it was difficult to imagine alternative visions of museum content, let alone alter the broader social role and mission of museums. This was true even of the more liberal factions of the museum world, including members of SAMA. As Dubin argues, these museum veterans recognized hiding or discarding their colonial collections was no more an option than preserving museological approaches to display; a reinterpretation and reordering of their collection was necessary.22 However, during the late 1980s curators and directors were still operating within the legal framework of apartheid and deliberating with government agencies, such as the NMC, about the best ways to manage transformation. One such conversation led to the 1994 MUSA report produced by the group Museums for South Africa. The report presented the conclusions and recommendations of an elite group of museum directors, SAMA officials, and representatives from government agencies. This (apartheid) government-appointed unit had been tasked with devising a new national policy for museums during the same time that the political transition to majority rule was being negotiated. Activists and ANC figures roundly criticized the report that was produced in their absence, charging that it was too incremental in its approach to including historically neglected communities and fundamentally illegitimate because of the prominence of apartheid officials and heritage professionals who had complied with apartheid policies and censorship for decades.23 The controversy surrounding these early efforts to reposition colonial museums in a democratic South Africa illustrates that the members of various political blocs recognized the importance of museums as sites where visions of the nation as a basis for social life could be legitimated. As social constructs they could serve as instruments of civil society as much as they had served as “instruments of division and mis-education in South Africa.”24 Antiquated content posed the chief challenge for older museums. Curators and directors faced the challenge of revising their approach to telling stories about the past in ways that were inclusive. For exam-

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ple, at the Africana Museum, the challenge involved pushing staff to see its mandate as moving beyond that of the apartheid state—and beyond showcasing colonial and apartheid culture and history. This had to do with the existing collection and professional conventions as much as it did with the directorship. In the end, a transfer of leadership was implemented, but this did not mean that the transition was smooth; new staff still wrestled with how to represent an inclusive history that had not been told or even imagined by most. Indeed, the new staff were concerned with reinventing the historical point of view and public image of the museum as it transitioned away from its previous life as the Africana Museum, which was far more oriented toward collectors than to the general public, especially the black general public. Former curator Ann Wanless described this transitional period as divisive because “people were forced to start acting, not just talking about change.”25 Not all staff was supportive of changing the museum to reflect the histories of the majority population—largely represented by the social history movement. The most high-profile departure in opposition was that of the longtime director and curator Blanche Nagelgast, who opted for early retirement.26 They relied heavily on the involvement of social historians at the liberal Wits University to reorient the museum and even a marketing company that administered a survey to gauge how black residents viewed the museum.27 These efforts led to more than just changing the institution’s name from the Africana Museum to MuseumAfrica.28 Curators also decided to present material thematically organized around key moments in South African history through the lens of local events, such as the discovery of gold in the Johannesburg area in 1886. Displays also include labels written in multiple languages and objects from a much wider segment of society than in the past.29 However, like the older U.S. museums discussed earlier, MuseumAfrica has been unable to attract a steady stream of visitors and donor support as it competes with a host of newer cultural attractions. Many of the key staff responsible for the museum’s transformation have left, including Hillary Bruce who had replaced Nagelgast and was a strong supporter of orienting the museum toward the general public.30 In addition to facing declining financial support from the government after the collapse of apartheid, the location of the museum also presented

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serious challenges. Again as the discussion of the older U.S. museums suggested, changing urban landscapes, including both shifting residential patterns and waning local economies, deeply affect museum sustainability. Along with its name change, MuseumAfrica was relocated to an area currently referred to as Newtown, at the heart of a formerly Indian-dominated commercial district whose occupants were forcibly removed to an Indian township called Lenasia at the outskirts of Johannesburg during the 1950s and 1960s. The area remained unused for decades before the city council offered some of the vacant space—specifically an abandoned fruit market—to the new museum hoping that it would generate new interest in the region.31 Despite ongoing efforts by municipal leaders and developers to revive the area as a cultural precinct, there is little foot traffic to draw into the museum. Clearly, even when transformation is set in motion, maintaining momentum—let alone collections—involves factors outside the control of any particular director or curator. Often the physical setting of museums and their architecture are testament to the apartheid legacy that current staff must contend with. For example, the facades of many older museums embody the very antiquated imperial or racist-nationalist ideologies that are being called into question. Unlike the older U.S. museums discussed earlier, even museums with long histories or buildings designed by famous colonial architects are not likely to find funding based on these factors; there is no pool of national funding for colonial historical preservation. Instead, staff must find ways to rethink this decorated tie to the apartheid past. While the colonial past is no longer publicly celebrated, it is still leveraged to lend authority to the representations of the past—by pointing out that a particular historical event occurred in a building at a site. Managing collective representations in the midst of museum transformation is especially daunting when a site’s public identity is associated with physical landscapes. Indeed, changing the built memorial environment can be even more costly and controversial than revising or updating the content inside the museum. Discussions around the fate of the infamous Voortrekker Monument in Pretoria offer a particularly powerful example. This monument, designed to commemorate the nineteenth-century “Great Trek” of Afrikaner pioneers into the interior of the country, was built and inaugurated just as the Na-

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tional Party came into power in 1948. AS CEO and managing director of the monument from 1999 to 2011, Gert Opperman attempted to disassociate the site from militant white supremacists without disavowing Afrikaner identity and culture more generally. Despite its imposing fascist architecture and long history of hosting political rallies in support of apartheid, Opperman insisted that today “it has nothing to do with apartheid. Period.”32 His efforts to rebrand the site were at least partially motivated by the withdrawal of public funding if content was left unchanged.33 Of course, the problem of colonial buildings and monuments scattered across the landscape as grim reminders is not unique to South Africa. The contemporary use and preservation of forts used to hold, transport, and process captured Africans during the Transatlantic Slave Trade have become focal points in discussions about diasporic identity, memory, and tourism-led development. This work points to the way competing identity narratives embedded in these highly symbolic sites across social groups intersect with the tourism industry at the global and local levels.34 In the United States, similar work has examined how plantation tours in the South celebrate antebellum life, decorative arts, and architecture as part of a romantic bygone past. Meanwhile, the history of slavery and the slave labor involved in creation is conspicuously absent.35 While plantation tours were not a central part of my research, on visits to two different sites in Georgia I observed that the vast majority of guests and staff appeared to be white Americans who expressed nostalgic longings for a time they considered romantic, charming, and simple compared to their modern hectic lives. The point here is that the very same plantation houses (or slave quarters tucked behind them) can signify radically different meanings depending on who is doing the gazing. Likewise, only a few new directors and curators have attempted to use colonial architecture as a jumping-off point to reinvent older sites in South Africa. For example, the KwaMuhle Museum in Durban is located inside the former Department of Native Affairs building. Built in 1928, it would serve as the central location where apartheid legislation was enforced, such as restrictive pass laws and labor controls restricting blacks’ movement within cities and between rural and urban areas. The symbolic power of this former site of apartheid was not always visible, nor was its preservation certain. It was only after the postapartheid

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Durban City Council failed to secure a buyer for the land underneath the building slated for demolition that it considered a proposal to convert the space into a museum.36 The museum would attract guests eager to enter a building intimately linked to atrocity and stroll along the same corridors that apartheid’s henchmen walked, as much as to learn the local histories the museum dedicates itself to representing today. In this respect, the building itself becomes a monument operating alongside, if not in concert with, the displays on its walls. One way that curators and directors have sought to sidestep potentially divisive representations of apartheid has been to reach further back into the past, into the prehistoric past. Again, this precolonial reach is not purely ideological in terms of presenting narratives that transcend the divisiveness of colonialism and apartheid. An important stream of funding has prompted one of the most significant additions to older museums in terms of renovations and devising narratives that transcend colonial and apartheid divisions and classifications. For example, the South African Museum in Cape Town, with its fraught history of displaying racist dioramas of indigenous people, has been able to secure backing to add installations about rock art. The inclusion of rock art can be seen as part of the overall national project to include and celebrate people routinely left out of the construction of South African national identity; however, some have expressed concerns about the romanticization of indigenous communities through their drawings.37 Even with these new installations, older museums must compete with newer facilities like the Origins Centre on the campus of Wits University or the Cradle of Humankind, which can devote more floor space to such installations and be more responsive to shifts in public interest and donor support. However, newer museums have not been immune to internal and external pressures about staff composition, content, and capacity-building.

DEVELOPING NEW MUSEUMS Although newer museums exhibit familiar historical narratives, they do so through more advanced technologies and more extensive public programming, punctuated by posh gift shops and cafés. These are amenities that tourists have come to expect. The timing of a muse-

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um’s development is paramount here. The older museums were not catering to tourists—they did not need cafés and gift shops because they were more oriented toward the public education of black residents and consciousness-raising and revision. In contrast, newer museums generally cater to a wider audience and experience pressure to perform competitively in the tourism industry. As Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett’s work has shown, directors at today’s museums find themselves in a constant state of crisis as they struggle to meet donors’ and tourists’ ever-rising expectations for state-of-the-art exhibitions and upscale amenities.38 This becomes especially problematic as initial public investments from municipal and state leaders diminish with changing election cycles, evolving budget priorities, and economic downturns. These museums illustrate that managing budgets, staff, and building maintenance is essential to the management of representing collective identity and experience. POST–CIVIL RIGHTS ERA MUSEUMS

A new surge of interest in building museums dedicated to presenting U.S. racial history took shape during the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s. While the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations ignited public interest in heritage sites beyond the museum-building of the civil rights era,39 it was not until the 1990s that urban planners and politicians identified African American heritage as an engine for economic development. A key turning point came in 1995 when the White House, along with the Department of Commerce and the Department of Transportation, orga nized the Conference on Travel and Tourism, which explored the possibilities of cultural tourism as a source of economic development. Ten years later, the Department of Commerce hosted the U.S. Cultural and Heritage Tourism Summit where discussions about the potential of heritage tourism to boost local economies continued. On both occasions, “African American heritage” was viewed as one of several potential sources of culture-led urban regeneration.40 Within this context, state and municipal politicians— along with regional planners—became advocates for black museum development in the post-civil rights era. These projects would expand the network of black museums beyond those created (mostly in northern cities) during the 1960s and 1970s.

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In addition to discussions about urban revitalization, these newer museums emerged at a time of growing rhetoric around multiculturalism and diversity, along with heightened talk about reconciliation. In particular, they were couched within the public discourse on what sociologist Jeffrey Olick has referred to as the “politics of regret,” which is typically associated with agitation around national apologies for state violence and various forms of reparations.41 In the case of the United States, part of the public atonement for histories of slavery and state-sanctioned segregation has been investment of public funds in black museums, which are positioned as beacons of black heritage. The greater presence of African American politicians at the local and national level helped spur on these initiatives and kept commemorative energy alive. In terms of distinguishing the politics of identity from more redistributive justice campaigns, these museum developments can be seen as bypassing calls for reparations or even revised content at schools and mainstream (historically white) museums, while also avoiding difficult questions about the structural legacies of racial discrimination. However, the synergy between the symbolic and structural elements of these projects was visible as public officials rallied support for increased investments in new museum-building projects that were seen as having the added benefit of stimulating urban economies through increased tourist traffic, job creation, and new businesses like shops and restaurants that cater to museum-goers. Although these newer museums generally reproduce the standard metanarrative of black identity formation (though they tend to be more global in scope) and grapple with comparable concerns around audience development and institutional capacity-building, they are different from their predecessors in a number of ways. Most fundamentally, their development is occurring in a dramatically different social context in which ways of envisioning collective identity have been influenced by the language and sentiments of multiculturalism, globalization, and color-blind ideologies that reject racial identification as socially meaningful. Taken together (not to mention on their own), these discourses are complicated and riddled with contradictions that muddy the terrain for museum staff as they translate their work for the public. Such considerations have weighty consequences as they affect the target or imagined audience, which has a higher

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income and education level and is more racially and ethnically diverse than in the past. The ideological dimension of this political project reinforced the economic promise of museums as heritage tourism was identified as an unexploited resource for local governments. In fact, even state and city governments without significant black political leadership and with long histories of racial discrimination joined the push for public investments in black museums.42 Following recent trends in urban renewal, newer museum projects have been characterized by public-private partnerships. As sociologists of the urban political economy have argued, many of these partnerships mask the entrepreneurial motives of the “urban growth machine” that draws people into the logic of creating a “good business climate” at all costs.43 Instead of being sites of memory, museums have been unabashedly repositioned as sites of economic growth, often championed by private developers and municipal leaders hoping to capitalize on the past. In contrast to the social agitation and grassroots impulses that ushered in black museum-building during the civil rights era, most of the latest wave of museum construction has been explicitly premised on efforts to attract new audiences, businesses, and eventually residents to inner cities. The top-down creation of these museums makes them less participatory in organizational form than their older counterparts. They are also less likely to be sited in the types of inner-city, residential neighborhoods where older museums are located. Instead, developers and city officials tend to build museums in tourist-friendly districts that are typically more commercial than residential. For example, like many new museum developments the NURFC in Cincinnati grew out of sizable public investments and agreements with private developers to donate space or commit to future construction in an area in exchange for subsidies. After its 2004 opening, the $110 million, 158,000-square-foot museum has been plagued with financial troubles and declining attendance, especially after having its request to increase its annual $500,000 subsidy rejected by the city council in 2009. Two years later, the city council cut the subsidy to $300,000, adding to the crisis; that same year the museum board turned to the Smithsonian Institution for support.44 The museum has proved exceedingly difficult to maintain and its future remains uncertain even after it was forced to merge with the corporate structure of the neighboring

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Cincinnati Museum Center, a children’s and science museum, in 2012. Despite its affiliation with the Smithsonian, its acquisition of a rare slave pen, and visits from high-profile figures like Desmond Tutu, the sprawling museum has been unable to cover its annual operating costs even after slashing its staff from 120 to 34 full-time employees.45 Such public-private initiatives have also led to the preservation of historic sites that had been abandoned. For example, the NCRM in Memphis was not immediately transformed into a museum; the museumification of the Lorraine Motel began nearly twenty-five years after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on a second-floor balcony in 1968. In a state of disarray thereafter, the motel functioned effectively as a low-income residence through the 1970s and much of the 1980s until the property was sold to the Lorraine Civil Rights Museum Foundation in 1982 after falling into foreclosure. The tenants, some of whom had lived there since the assassination, were evicted as plans took shape to develop the site into an $8.8 million museum. The most publicized eviction was that of Jacqueline Smith, who had to be forcibly removed by county deputies after refusing to vacate. While being pulled from the premises she cried, “You people are making a mistake.”46 Ms. Smith, who felt the informal memorial created at Rooms 306 and 307 were sufficient reminders of King’s brutal death, would go on to be one of the most vocal and visible critics of the museum, staging a one-person protest outside the museum since its opening in 1991. On her personal website she states, “The truth is that the museum has become a Disney-style tourist attraction, which seems preoccupied with gaining financial success, rather than focusing on the real issues.”47 Putting aside whether there is agreement over what those “real issues” might be, the material institutional realities of the social work of memorializing increasingly require financial security. Calling on others to join her boycott, Smith’s criticisms have been echoed by those unhappy with the amount of tax dollars devoted to the museum. For example, a request for $5 million to the Republicandominated State Finance Committee to offset an estimated $30 million renovation plan was initially rejected, then conditionally granted if matching funds could be secured.48 The museum was able to raise funds from the city, private donors, and even the federal government. In 2013, the Department of Commerce, an unconventional funding source, provided $2 million after floods hit the region two years ear-

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lier, although the museum was not directly affected; the rationale was that the museum was an “economic anchor” for the city and it had suffered declining attendance as tourism dropped off during the floods.49 Beverly Sakauye, the director of development, said, “We didn’t get flooded, but the flooding affected our visitorship.”50 While funds were eventually raised, the process was controversial and contested, shining a light on the difficulties of maintaining multimillion-dollar facilities that rely heavily on public-private partnerships that can be short-lived. Similarly, the BCRI opened across from the 16th Street Baptist Church where four young girls died in an infamous act of terrorism in 1963. The museum opened in 1992 through a joint city-county partnership with area business leaders and private foundations. In addition to showcasing award-winning exhibitions about black history and freedom struggles around the globe, the BCRI is a multimilliondollar economic engine for the region. It figures prominently in the city’s Convention and Visitors Bureau materials and is part of the state’s official “Alabama Civil Rights Museum Trail.” According to the Alabama Bureau of Tourism and Travel, in its first fifteen years of operation the BCRI brought in nearly $20 million annually to the state from out-of-state tourists. This included $5.7 million in direct spending by visitors and nearly $13 million in associated economic growth.51 In 2006, the bureau named Dr. Lawrence Pijeaux Jr., then director of the museum, “Alabama Tourism Executive of the Year” and the BCRI was named the “Alabama Attraction of the Year” in 2009 and 2012. However, even these recognitions have not shielded the BCRI from funding shortfalls and changing sentiments from local politicians with regard to supporting the museum. For example, in 2009 the city council voted to cut funding for the museum by 60 percent and a year later Pijeaux warned that the museum may have to close its doors.52 Afraid of losing what has been an important cultural and economic engine for the city, the council agreed to dedicate an additional $240,000 to the museum. From a political-economic perspective, developers’ interest in black museums appears to be primarily motivated by the potential contribution to the local and state economy and job creation. Indeed, the appeal of tourist-led economic growth has led to the founding of museums in unlikely settings. In San Francisco, the opening of the MoAD in 2005 came after a strong push from the city’s first

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African American mayor and a number of incentives to lure private developers. The city’s first museum dedicated to representing histories of people of African descent would not be located in one of the few historically black neighborhoods, but within the Yerba Buena district, an arts and entertainment precinct in the city. The San Francisco Development Agency (now the Office of Community Investment and Infrastructure Agency) had been working to rebrand the formerly blighted area as SoMa (South of Market Street), and the MoAD joined the redevelopment zone, which included the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Contemporary Jewish Museum. Its development was a fraught process with allegations of mismanagement and a lack of transparency after lengthy delays; bids for consultants and architectural firms were held multiple times.53 The starkest difference between this museum project and the older museums discussed earlier is that while it was initially conceived of as a black history and cultural museum, it took on a more global flavor as it focused more broadly on the African diaspora. This shift was introduced when Harlem’s Studio Museum director and curator Thelma Golden and Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. were brought on to help develop the interpretive framework and content. Together, they proposed a $5.4 million exhibition with artifacts, paintings, and a series of interactive displays fashioned after Gates and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience.54 Some feared that the proposal was too detached from the local black community-building and cultural leaders who felt that “from [our] point of view, it hasn’t been anything that the community has been asked to give its recommendations, views, or anything to. Maybe it will be an East Coast museum.”55 Dr. Raye Richardson, owner of Marcus Books in the San Francisco neighborhood of Western Addition and a community leader, remarked, “You did it backwards. There is no citizens advisory panel, yet we have a plan set in concrete.”56 Gates insisted, “We want to help the community; we have no agenda on our own.”57 To ease these conflicts, an advisory panel was finally created, though Gates and Golden remained involved, facilitating a series of community meetings about the museum content but still recommending that the mu-

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seum present a diasporic perspective of African American culture and identity. The subsequent display of different iterations of diasporic identity—including one about human evolution and continental drift—African cultures, and African American experience was ambitious but muddled, reflecting the uneven conceptual development of the museum. Within a few years, the museum would find itself struggling to maintain adequate attendance and membership levels. Its relationship with the city—being established in a redevelopment zone— buffers it from some of these pressures, with one-quarter of its annual budget guaranteed by the city. However, after rounds of board meetings, the museum temporarily closed its doors to refocus itself and its mission, under the leadership of a newly hired director, Lauren Harrison, formerly a high-end real estate agent with Sotheby’s. During this hiatus, Harrison and the board members secured an additional public grant of $303,000 for capital development and raised additional funds from private sponsors, such as Wells Fargo and AT&T, to finance a $1.3 million overhaul of its exhibitions and to develop a permanent collection, which helped secure a Smithsonian affiliation.58 In many respects, with a renewed focus on black artistic expression and efforts to engage local black cultural networks, including a series of workshops in Oakland, the museum is returning to some of the original visions of local artists and activists. This desire to assert an identity and interpretive lens related to, but ultimately distinct from, older black history museums is not uncommon among newer museum projects. The creation of the NCCHR in Atlanta is a particularly useful illustration of this trend. The $125 million facility opened in 2014 and represents one of the largest and most expensive post-civil rights museum projects. The way it relates to traditional black history museums is evident both in its content and its relationship to other area museums, particularly those in Atlanta’s historically black neighborhood along Sweet Auburn Avenue. The CEO, Doug Shipman, views the museum as a reinterpretation of U.S. civil rights history, one that places it in a more global context, and stated that it is not the exclusive domain of black history, but rather a power ful historical reference point for the world.

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I think there’s absolutely a role for places of memorial or reflection that say “this is African American history” . . . in essence a group telling its own story. [But our approach is] that everyone is invited to this history, if you’re still within the spirit of it—nonviolence, cooperation, love as an ethic, justice for all, if you’re willing to use those tenets, then it’s available for anybody. And I think it’s not exclusive.59

This is not a purely ideological preference on Shipman’s part. He acknowledged that after reviewing other civil rights museums, many of which were facing financial struggles, he and a consulting team concluded that a universal approach to this history was needed. Describing the process, he stated, We looked at thirty-five other museums and how they had developed at the end of 2005, around issues of identity or history. So we looked at their financials, we understood their strategies, we looked at how they developed themselves, to try to understand how you would build a facility like this. My background in consulting work in Boston was very helpful because it was just like looking at any industry, you just look at what makes it successful, what doesn’t, you interview people, you benchmark. A few things came out of the research. One was, a civil rightsonly museum was probably too narrow to do, it was going to be hard to sustain it long term, and those that were oriented in that fashion were having financial struggles. Two, because you couldn’t do a project like this with debt, because you would never be able to get out of the debt long term, and three that Atlanta’s opportunity, and the opportunity that existed more generally, was to link history of civil rights with contemporary human rights issues in a deliberate way.

An impor tant aspect of broadening the way U.S. civil rights history gets represented was attracting racially diverse audiences or tourists from higher income brackets. Shipman used the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., to illustrate how a history that might seem relevant to only a narrow audience—Jewish Americans—has captured a diverse national and international audi-

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ence. Shipman and others are seeking that type of mass appeal. He insisted that to me, that is success. If you have a fifteen-year-old Asian American girl from Saint Louis quoting King, it’s good for everybody. It’s good for the hardcore history folks, it’s good for African American cheerleaders, who say we need to have our history told to others, it’s good for her, it’s good for the country, it’s good for everybody.

Of course, it is also good for business. Diversifying the pool of potential visitors translates into greater potential revenue streams from members and foundations. To this effect, the Atlanta City Council, recognizing the economic potential in terms of tourist revenue, in 2006 joined forces with the Coca-Cola Company to establish the new museum in the heart of downtown, not along Sweet Auburn Avenue where the King Center and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site are located.60 The decision was based on the prediction that a more diverse and well-off population of tourists would visit the new museum in a downtown location where they could also tour the Centennial Olympic Park. The fact that the tug of history is less forceful here—no major civil rights leader was raised on site nor were any historic rallies held—frees the museum staff interpretively as it does not need to memorialize the past. Shipman stated that “we don’t have some of the obligations that others have to be that somber, downtrodden, holy experience. I’m not downplaying those, but we don’t have those same obligations. So that frees us to do what we want to do.”61 Each of the previous relatively recent museum developments discussed led us to rethink the power of place in terms of public history and museum work. Not only does it refer to the impulse to preserve historic sites of memory—a trend evident in both the United States and South Africa—it should also be viewed in relation to the politics of placement within urban landscapes. Even the NMAAHC was embroiled in protracted debates around its placement on the National Mall. What are the politics of having it on the Mall or a few blocks away like the Holocaust Memorial Museum? Should it be located near the Lincoln Memorial where King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech? Would there be enough open space remaining to

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accommodate the project in the first place? Clearly, the symbolic power of placement is involved in these decisions, but there are also equally power ful considerations about tourist routes and economic development at play. POSTAPARTHEID MUSEUMS

The same combination of material and symbolic processes is at play in the management of collective representations in South Africa. Yet the political use of museums and public presentations of national identity and culture are not confined to authoritarian regimes like the apartheid state; they are also common in democratic societies. The transformation of older colonial museums began just before a storm of new museum projects took shape across the country during the late 1990s and through the 2000s. During the 1990s, South Africa experienced the radical reworking of the national apparatus that managed museums, memorials, and other heritage sites. Many of these postapartheid museum projects have been heavily supported and even initiated by the national government. South African author and journalist Mark Gevisser described the energy put into creating new museums as part of an effort to “invent South Africa’s creation as a nation.”62 He identified the building of Freedom Park as being especially illustrative of this exercise in nation-building. Located between Pretoria and Johannesburg and less than four miles away from the infamous Voortrekker Monument, Freedom Park also serves as an example of the intersection of place-making, memory, tourism, and politics. Designed to commemorate the freedom struggle, the park was a pet project of former president Thabo Mbeki and signaled a departure from the Eurocentric styles of memorialization that characterized the colonial periods. Rather than the solemn statues and towering monoliths, the new memorial park is built into the landscape with circular structures eased into the hillside, reminiscent of Great Zimbabwe. Despite budget difficulties, construction delays, and staff turnover, the bulk of the site was open in time for the 2010 World Cup. From its inception though, the site has been embroiled in controversies about its mission, design, and political ties to the ANC. In representing a collective story of national liberation and struggle, museum

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staff had to respond to allegations that the site is not inclusive because it favors an ANC-dominated narrative about the struggle. In particular, the fact that this is a highly visible and nationally legislated project has made the act of fitting a narrative to the struggle and naming specific individuals who lost their lives especially difficult. In 2009, the Freedom Front Plus, a conservative Afrikaner political party, called for a mass boycott of the site, arguing that the heritage site “excludes Afrikaners from history.”63 Then executive chairperson Dr. Wally Serote acknowledged that presenting a national narrative that was cohesive was impossible, but insisted that “the contradiction is in the nation,” not the memorial.64 The relationship between a specific museum and the national government has been especially fraught in the case of the Robben Island Museum in Cape Town. After Nelson Mandela’s release in 1990 and the eventual closure of the institution that imprisoned some of the most high-profile leaders of the liberation movement, the site’s transformation into a museum was under way, but not without major hiccups.65 Since its opening in 1997, the museum’s performance record has been patchy. While being declared both a national and UNESCO heritage site, it also faced charges of mismanagement and corruption, with 40 percent of the annual budget coming from the national government.66 As current director and CEO Sibongiseni Mkhize acknowledges, some of the poor operating style stemmed from the initial museum leadership being swept up in the euphoria of the democratic transition and Mandela’s presidential election without fully grasping the practical realities of running a museum. He stated, I think that it took the whole country a long time to realize that okay, you need to have some sort of fundamental things in place for a democracy to happen, for an organization to be run properly, for a government to operate efficiently and effectively. I think after 1994 because of the excitement, we took some time to learn that at the end of the day if you are saying Robben Island will be a museum, okay what are the basic things that are required in a museum? Issues of collections, exhibitions, research, education programs—how are we going to get that kind of [staff ]? If we are going to get those kinds of people, let us make sure that there is an alignment between the skills that we’ve got, our programs,

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and the strategic planning of the organization and also just to make sure that we are building for the future. I don’t think that they built for the future, so that’s why there were all those problems.67

Mkhize’s hiring in 2010 came on the heels of a major staff shake-up that included the departure of the director along with the entire board. He also found himself with a staff that had just concluded a four-week strike for higher wages. Such strike activity should be expected given that many of the tour guides and building operators are union members and were themselves imprisoned on the island for their activism during apartheid. Mkhize, whose own background is with history museums, had to attend to demands for workers’ rights and fair employment practices for a uniquely positioned staff. He acknowledged that the museum suffered early on because such agitation among top leadership distracted from the mission of public history. The fact that they didn’t employ museum professionals and such [to run the place] means that we’ve had people more concerned with other issues than museum issues. Because they are not trained in museological aspects of running the institution, so for most of them it was about issues of promotion that worried them every day.68

Another way to view this would be from the perspective of the individual workers—particularly the rank-and-file employees—who may be more or less interested in or committed to public history missions or long-term institutional survival. In effect, managing collective representations entails managing workers and workers’ expectations, as much as visitors’. These more organizational strains were also evident with the mismanagement of the ferries used to transport visitors from the posh Victoria and Alfred Waterfront on the harbor to the island. For years the travel schedule was erratic and the ferries themselves were in a state of disarray with an illequipped maintenance crew that also oversaw the groundskeeping and building upkeep on the island. When he took charge, Mkhize hired an outside company to manage and maintain the ferries, remarking, “We’re not in the ferry business.” Yet ferries are an essential component of the museum, delivering visitors to the island from the shoreline and along the way regaling them with a video about the

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island’s history. They may not be in the ferry business, but they are in the business of ensuring that as many tourists as possible make that journey every day to keep their operations afloat. Despite the potential to generate cash flow, attracting tourists is not always a core goal of these newer museums. One of the clearest examples of this is the District Six Museum in Cape Town, which opened in 1994 after local academics and community leaders mobilized former residents to recollect stories about life in the District Six neighborhood before the forced removals. After the Group Areas Act was passed in 1950, the largely coloured neighborhood was reclassified as “whites only.” Today the museum stands apart from others in the postapartheid memorial landscape as one of the only communitybased museums dedicated to both commemorating local history and to redeveloping a wrecked physical neighborhood. However, even though the museum began as a project for and largely by former residents, it has become a popular destination for international tourists, with even the U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama visiting with her daughters in 2011. Visitors learn about the razing of District Six during apartheid after it was declared “whites only” and the displacement of the majority of occupants to desolate Cape Flats far outside the city center. The site initially served as a meeting place for former residents to recollect and eventually reconstruct life in District Six. It also served as the basis for exhibitions and a campaign to repopulate the abandoned space. However, the museum has also become a popular destination for tourists. Director Bonita Bennett acknowledged that tourism has changed the image of the museum and complicated its outreach efforts with local communities: There was a time when the museum was started by the community and there were a lot of local people and it wasn’t meant for tourists in that sense, but suddenly I think it got overtaken by tourism. It was fine but the local community recedes and it seemed like local people started coming less and less [. . .] I became aware of comments—and one can’t take every comment seriously because it does not always come from good and helpful places—but some say they don’t come to the museum anymore because it’s become for tourists, they see tour buses outside . . . but I think we’ve managed

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to breach that divide. So people can say these tourists are part of the story. You don’t want to just be telling the story to each other.69

Bennett and others hope that by staffing the museum and its board with former residents their voices will remain central. This representational dilemma—linking the community on display to actual populations today—is particularly challenging for local museums as the community around them shifts, disappears, or stands in opposition (or ambivalence) to their work. The Number Four Prison and the Women’s Prison in Johannesburg are also postapartheid memory projects rooted in a site-specific struggle narrative—though a somewhat less obvious one. The processes involved in transforming an abandoned prison complex into a “living” or outdoor museum and the home of the Constitutional Court were complex. As an example of colonial architecture, the site was protected from development by the apartheid NMC even after the prison closed in 1983, but no successful preservation plan was ever implemented and the site had fallen into a state of disarray by the early 1990s.70 In 1995 when a search committee became interested in the site as the location for the country’s new highest court, the Constitutional Court, the Johannesburg Development Agency recognized its potential as an urban revitalization project. This promise rested primarily in the placement of the complex between Hillbrow, a povertystricken neighborhood, and Braamfontein, the downtown location of Wits University. A partnership among city planners, heritage workers, and court officials formed to create a site that could serve multiple purposes as home to a museum, court, government offices, and eventually housing along the perimeter. These interests clashed in a way that would influence how the narrative of apartheid-style crime and punishment, forms of resistance, and the democratic transition are presented within the museum. One of the biggest challenges was the preservation of the Awaiting Trial Block; detainees in that block included Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, who was held there before the infamous Rivonia Trial that led to his conviction for treason in 1964. Despite the historic value of the structure, court officials and designers insisted that the structure— located at the center of the complex—would have to come down to

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make room for the court and offices. Eventually, bricks from the original structure were incorporated into the new court, which is positioned in the center of the prison museum, and a small portion of the Awaiting Trial Block was left standing directly adjacent to the doors of the courthouses, which have become part of the tour. The decision to leave the remaining buildings intact also posed challenges for staff, including heritage consultants—a growing industry in the country. They had to devise ways to wire the crumbling structures for audio and video installations. The vastness of the site does not lend itself to people visiting without a guided tour, though one can take in spectacular views of the city from the ramparts. Mark Gevisser, one of the leading consultants working on the site, admitted that since its opening attendance has dropped and the staff have experienced difficulty in generating publicity for ongoing programs, despite the museum sharing grounds with the country’s highest court. Linking programming and attendance to more fundamental challenges of managing the site, he noted, Unfortunately, the site has been poorly managed. We are in an era of unrealistic expectations in South Africa. We did not pay enough attention to what we really could achieve in terms of institutional capacity. We were counseled and advised by Americans who have different resources and are used to working with different capacities that are not necessarily suitable here. We had to fire staff because we just cannot afford it—this affects the type of programs we can offer.71

Reiterating Mkhize’s earlier observation about the making of Robben Island, Gevisser’s point illustrates that sites of memory require a steady stream of resources for management and maintenance; the human energy and sentiments involved in their creation cannot sustain them. However, with a scaled-down staff and programming, Constitution Hill is still open to the public and has become a public space of sorts as people use the premises as a shortcut to reach different parts of the city and others convene to stage protests and vigils in view of the Constitutional Court.72 Despite difficulties around the management of the site, like the Robben Island Museum the Number Four Prison offers a unique

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museum experience as guests travel through the cells and hear testimony about psychological and physical abuse that was an ordinary feature of the apartheid criminal system. The spaciousness of Constitution Hill lends a solemn quality to the already powerful site. The spaciousness is also used museologically, as the act of walking toward and between installations is deliberate. For example, the use of distance is cleverly deployed in the display of highly disturbing and unsettling material, such as photographs of naked prisoners doing the “Tauza dance,” a degrading ritual enforced by wardens to check whether prisoners had any contraband stored in their rectums. On the tour, guides briefly describe the ritual and indicate that images are available for viewing, but allow guests to decide whether to take the steps to view the small photographs. This tactic is reminiscent of other museums with highly disturbing content, such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which contains warnings about content and partitions so that visitors can decide whether to look (or just imagine). Such place-specific memory projects are not always welcome and raise thorny questions about ownership of the past, of memory, and of narratives rooted in those memories. For example, the Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum opened in 2002 to commemorate the 1976 Soweto student uprisings and is located only two blocks away from where the iconic photograph of Pieterson’s slain body being carried away was taken. The museum chronicles the events leading up to and following the student protests of a mandate making Afrikaans the language of instruction in schools. While many have been supportive of the $3 million museum funded by the national Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism and the Johannesburg Development Agency, which is run by the City of Johannesburg, Lulu Pieterson, one of the surviving sisters of the slain boy, has spoken out against it as a money-making machine. She told reporters, I am now the poorest [in the family] but the museum makes money and does not even give us anything. It is like I don’t exist but I am the only one who has claims to the surname being used.73

While others in her family disagree, including her mother and sister Antoinette Sithole, whose sobbing image is also captured in the photo-

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graph, Lulu Pieterson’s claims raise uncomfortable questions about control over legacy and collective memory within an institution. Such family squabbles over legacy are not uncommon and have surfaced in the use of Nelson Mandela’s name and image as a cultural symbol, not to mention bickering over his future gravesite while he was on life support in the hospital.74 In the United States, control over the Martin Luther King Jr. speeches and imagery has also been hotly contested and caused strife within the King family.75 Even when a museum is located at a historic site of memory, the staff ’s ability to harness the power of place, to control the narrative, can be undermined by survivors with a different set of interests or styles of remembrance. In a clear effort to de- emphasize place as a motivating force in the location of its project, Johannesburg’s Apartheid Museum rests on a nonetheless meaningful site. Not only is it situated near a once active gold mine, it is also part of a popular tourist and recreational complex, which includes a casino and a theme park, called Gold Reef City. The museum grew out of Solly and Abe Krok’s efforts to secure a casino license in 1995, at a time when a new national policy had been instated requiring all casino developments to include a project designed for the broader public. This social responsibility clause led to the creation of the $8 million Apartheid Museum, the country’s first large-scale postapartheid museum. The founders originally sought to create an institution like the Holocaust Memorial Museum that focused on the pain and suffering of blacks during apartheid, but they abandoned that mission after consulting with Wits University historians after failed talks between developers and museum professionals from abroad. They turned to the History Workshop at the university to tap into an existing network of social historians doing work in the community. Historian Philip Bonner became the main curator of the new museum, although he had no such past experience. He recalled, “I am a complete novice, but it has its advantages, coming to this sort of thing fresh.”76 The Apartheid Museum is uniquely positioned within a tourism industry that views history and museum-going as sources of entertainment and revenue. Nestled between a casino and theme park, it is less likely to attract domestic visitors traveling to Gold Reef City for entertainment, but it has been wildly successful in attracting international visitors and has become one of the most popular tourist attractions

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in Johannesburg.77 Museum directors and curators anticipated that guests would incorporate their visits within a larger itinerary; tourists may want to be informed—and even moved emotionally—without necessarily being so disturbed that they forgo their dinner plans or a spin on Johannesburg’s largest rollercoaster. This is an example of how being located within a recreational environment not dissimilar to the environments that urban planners seek to create can benefit a museum, despite the appearance of the Disneyfication of the past. The importance of physical space is also on display inside the museum. Bonner revealed that the architecture of the building helped shape the way histories get represented. For example, he said the museum tells an abbreviated version of the histories of the segregation era under British rule due to the physical space of the building. He recalled, The museum had already been built, so we had to face that physical reality. We had to switch the layout of the museum, so that the front is now the back. We also had to figure out what to do with the outdoor ramp, to which we added the mirrored images. We are pleased with how that turned out. We managed to make some minor structural changes, but there are some places where the story line gets squashed because of space limitations.78

He acknowledged that it was difficult to shape a narrative around and within a building that was built with a different vision in mind. Bonner also admitted that the museum is text-heavy, which is a clear reflection of his specialization and training in social history, not visual culture or museology. This point is reflective of a general trend in new museum projects; many of them are founded by unconventional staff who were not formally trained in museology or curatorship. Instead, they are progressive academics, community activists, and government actors; they are unconventional in the museum world, but at the vanguard of their par ticular spheres. Indeed, this nontraditional source of museum-building has been instrumental in reinventing the museum landscape in a way not altogether different from the role of civil society actors in shaping the black museums of the civil rights era in the United States. The difference is that in the United States these unconventional actors constituted a guild that

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shaped a subset in the museum world, whereas in South Africa museum staff members are reinventing what a mainstream museum is and does. Like the U.S. history museums discussed earlier, the curators and directors I met with in South Africa generally viewed their work through the prism of public education and outreach. This mission is evident in how they elect to represent the past to make it accessible to the widest audience possible, combining visuals with text to reduce literacy acting as a barrier to entry. Schoolchildren comprise a distinct segment of this general audience and staff members tend to view their work as intervening in the public education system, augmenting poor and unrevised school curricula. In addition to subsidizing field trips, most museums offer a plethora of lesson plans, teacher manuals, and student guides available online. In this respect, museums play the role of counterbalancing the much slower and even more contentious transformation of history and civics materials used in schools. ✴✴✴

The management of collective representations is essentially the management of expectations. Issues around representation are as much about the way specific museums operate as they are about the content of exhibitions. Treating the museum itself as an object, as a site of cultural and economic production, we see how the milieu of revision discussed in the first two chapters affects the way individual museums are then staffed and funded, which in turn shapes their capacity to mount exhibitions. In both the United States and South Africa, the growth of tourist interest in historical material fraught with pain and suffering, particularly at highly symbolic locations like Robben Island or the Lorraine Motel, has added not only resources to many of these museums, but also altered expectations. These altered expectations have led museums to be folded into tourist infrastructures, along with urban revitalization campaigns. The target audience, whether it is international tourists or local schoolchildren, affects the way the past gets staged. However, audiences do not blindly or passively consume these hyperrealities or simulated pasts. In fact, massive tensions arise when

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representations of the past—which implicate people today through identity formation narratives—fail to resonate with audiences’ own understandings of the past or with their current sense of self. In these instances, museums become sites of contestation as a cultural struggle over meanings unfolds. In other instances, people retreat from hegemonic narratives altogether and present their own articulations of memory and identity within counterpublic space to avoid the management tactics at mainstream institutions. These tendencies reflect anxieties over recognition and identification, as well as a widening gap between museums’ imagined audiences and actual people.

4 MEMORY DEVIANTS Breaking the Collective

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refuse to remember collectively. They expose memory—specifically public narratives about the past— as coercive and restrictive rather than consensual and liberating. Rejecting the underlying social agenda or the collectivist project to narrate identity, they declare independence from official representations of the past, including those of progressive revisionist historians. Instead, some offer their own individuated relationship to the past, while others remain ambivalent toward any historical imaginings. A variant of what Michel Foucault refers to as “counter-memory,”1 these voices demand the right to deviate from memory norms, to protest museum exhibitions and content, and at times challenge the project of representation—any representation—itself. The previous chapters examined the way museums foster and convert collective memories about difficult histories into public narratives about group identity. Despite the ideological overtones in constructing collective memory as consensual, this process involves a variety of political economic, institutional, and other material factors. Such constraints facing museum staff are not the only external factors at play in museum exhibitions. Museum exhibitions generate debate from everyday people, which is the focus of this chapter—how exhibitions are consumed. I pay par ticular attention to reactions from the people that museum professionals see their work as representing.

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If museums serve to standardize insurgent pasts—of formerly dissident memory—then resistance to these new public narratives should be understood as dissident as well. This chapter examines various debates about museum content and development to unpack how the collective story of collective memory itself is fractured or broken. The illusion of a consensus collective memory is shattered as various publics respond to the creation, funding, content, and programming of museums. Ultimately, this is about a struggle over the narrative, over collective memory, and over who gets to represent what happened. By examining public reaction to historical exhibitions and museum development across a range of museums in both the United States and South Africa, this chapter delves into what remains unresolved about the past and demonstrates that its relation to the present is far from certain. Unbound by the conventions of historical production and storytelling, art museums and galleries are well positioned to break or question the apparent consensus of collective memory, and often draw criticism for it. These subversive practices, such as welcoming guest curators to reinterpret existing collections and the art itself, provoke heated reactions—and are often considered shocking. Such emotional responses arise because these practices break so radically with the standard collective account of what happened and how visitors are supposed to produce, consume, and interact with historical content. I question whether an avant-garde history museum is possible—one that breaks the mold to better reflect the capriciousness of both memory and history—or whether art museums are better suited to this task. Ultimately, this chapter considers the representational dilemma implicit in all museums that draw on a stock of images, symbols, and stories that resonate with contemporary audiences to construct narratives about the past. One might guess that these histories would be more sacred and evoke stronger passions in South Africa—as they are more recent and surviving victims and perpetrators abound—but displays about the United States’ racist past also elicit vitriol and censure. In both places, passionate voices of dissidence arise from both politically liberal and conservative factions. I examine the contours of these debates— among everyday citizens, politicians, and artists—to address the question of how simulated versions of the past are created, subscribed to, and contested. Ultimately, when the past is on display time’s pas-

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sage seems to matter little; we are all implicated in the stories that museums tell, and the degree of contestation reflects a discomfort with this insinuation.

WHOSE SIMUL ATED PAST? Constructing national histories and national memory is not just about macroprocesses of museum-building and development by cultural and political elites. In order to make historical narratives collective, individuals are implicated in narratives that rely on specific ways people think of themselves in relation to groups, whether they be racial-ethnic or national in nature. Yet people’s sense of self is multidimensional and rarely internally consistent, so encounters with group representations do not always fully resonate. The imagined public that constitutes the target audience of the museum is always more varied in reality, and oftentimes resists having official accounts speak for them. Individuals sometimes offer their consent, their money, and their patronage. Other times they reject and refuse to consent or participate, and they sometimes remain ambivalent and detached from the entire project. The question of whose simulated versions of the past get treated as real shatters the illusion of any consensus memory. In the United States, the Smithsonian Institution’s NMAAHC is the most high-profile public memory project devoted to representing national history through a historically marginalized perspective. When Tom Mack, a business owner in Washington, D.C., established the National Council of Education and Economic Development to lobby for a national slavery museum, he raised the curtain on deep fissures in the U.S. public’s historical consciousness.2 Mack and his supporters viewed such an addition to the Smithsonian as an official act of contrition, a statement that the history of slavery is of national significance and a public acknowledgment that the country was built on the backs of enslaved people.3 When plans were finalized for the NMAI during the 1990s and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum opened in 1993, the campaign to establish a national slavery museum gained momentum. Each of these projects represents a shift in who can legitimately lay claim to public or collective representations of national identity, culture, and history.

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However, for some—mostly white political conservatives—it seemed wildly inappropriate to situate such a shameful aspect of the nation’s past in the heart of the capital and fund it with taxpayer dollars. This line of reasoning positions the National Mall and its panoply of museums, memorials, and gardens as a sacred public space to showcase national treasures and achievements. Accordingly, shining a bright light on one of the darkest chapters of U.S. history seemed profane. A national acknowledgment of slavery of this magnitude also raised concerns that it would bolster the movement to secure economic reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans.4 These sentiments most likely motivated the eventual transformation of calls for a national museum devoted to the history of U.S. slavery to one dedicated to representing black culture and history more broadly defined. This broader reading and tendency toward using a group identity formation framework to make painful and unsettled histories more palatable mirrors the cultural production of black history as a source of knowledge, claims-making, and identity. The eventual passage of the NMAAHC Act in 2003 did not end public debate. In early 2011, congressional representative Jim Moran (D-Virginia) vented his frustration over allocating public funds to telling history from the point of view of racial and ethnic groups. He pleaded: Every indigenous immigrant community, particularly those brought here enslaved, have a story to tell and it should be told and part of our history. The problem is that as much as we would like to think that all Americans are going to go to the African American Museum, I’m afraid that’s not going to happen. The Museum of American History is where all the white folks are going to go, and the American Indian Museum is where Indians are going to feel at home. And African Americans are going to go to their own museum. And Latinos are going to go to their own museum. And that’s not what America is all about. . . . It’s a matter of how we depict the American story and where do we stop? The next one will probably be Asian Americans. The next, God help us, will probably be Irish Americans.5

Moran’s remarks, which were made during a federal appropriations hearing on Capitol Hill, reveal more than a hierarchy of social differ-

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ence and oppression. His comments also expose a deep-seated desire to construct a univocal and bound collective memory. However, the efforts leading to the creation of the NMAAHC served to “break” official accounts, in order to rebuild them anew. Disagreements over the museum’s financing, let alone its content—whether it would be dedicated to telling the history of slavery or have a potentially less divisive focus on black culture and identity—were not only (or even primarily) about the use of federal tax dollars to expand the museums on the National Mall. More deeply, the protracted disputes were over national identity and specifically the paradox of race in defining and representing nation. Unresolved social tensions and the absence of a shared understanding of U.S. racial history exacerbate this central paradox between the apparent universalism of nation and the particularism of race. A clunky institutional apparatus and legislative relationship make deviating from conventional representational styles that might recast this conundrum formidable. However, the Smithsonian’s Asian Pacific American Center (APAC) successfully hosted “Crosslines: A Culture Lab on Intersectionality,” a pop-up art exhibition about the way “layers of identity” like race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, immigration, religion, and ableism are often misunderstood and underrepresented in museums that are “known as places that segment [rather than] crossing lines between different communities and different forms of art.”6 While the event was not without controversy,7 it marked a rare occasion when deviance, most likely because of the transience of the show, overtook the mainstream. The ambiguities and contradictions in national collective memory and identity in the United States are not exceptional. Similar tensions are evident in South African memorial projects, which have also sparked controversy about the racial overtones in official accounts of national history. Not surprisingly, these biases were abundantly clear during white minority rule, but the postapartheid state has also confronted allegations of exclusivity in its approach to national history. Leaders from white conservative groups have charged that memorials and museums sponsored by the government favor black Africans at the expense of white South Africans, particularly Afrikaners. In an unexpected turn, white conservative groups have used the rhetoric of multiculturalism and group rights to insist that their versions of the past be included in public narratives.

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Wall of Names at Freedom Park; Pretoria

This insistence took center stage during the late 2000s with the construction of Freedom Park in Pretoria, a state-legislated memorial project advocated by then-president Thabo Mbeki. The site is dedicated to representing the liberation struggle and honoring the sacrifices of freedom fighters who perished in it. These heroes were to be honored in a variety of ways, but the most visible reminder would be the Wall of Names, etched with the names of fallen fighters. The project was fraught from the beginning, with competing ideas of what constituted a freedom fighter, when the struggle started and ended, and whose deaths should be viewed as part of the struggle. However, the most vocal attacks came from the conservative political party Freedom Front Plus, whose then-leader Willie Spies accused the national government of excluding Afrikaner heroes and political figures and failing to include the names of soldiers of the South African Defense Force (SADF) who died defending apartheid. Employing the rhetorical power of reconciliation and minority rights Spies argued that “the park that aimed to promote reconciliation in South Africa transformed into a monstrosity whereby tax

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money is used to glorify the ANC and to insult others.”8 Spies further blasted the memorial as “Afrocentric,” honoring only black South Africans, in addition to Africans throughout the continent who supported the liberation movement. (Cuban soldiers also participated in battles at the border.) He stated, “The international list includes no names from Western history—not even Abraham Lincoln, who abolished slavery.”9 Surely, the elevation of Lincoln as a public icon to justify the inclusion of Afrikaners who died in the name of colonial expansion and in defense of white minority rule is a peculiar twist of logic. In this regard, Freedom Park represents an inversion of the U.S. case discussed previously. The democratic and more socially progressive factions were involved in the construction of a univocal presentation of the national past, while the conservative and historically exclusionary group attempted to break the new narrative by inserting its own. However transparent the actors’ underlying motivations and beliefs, the actions speak to the way liberal discourses around freedom, reconciliation, and multiculturalism can serve competing political visions. While Freedom Park officials insisted that the names of SADF soldiers would not be included on the wall, they have broadened the historical focus of the park, which now positions the liberation struggle as one of many national battles. This reconfiguring has prompted the inclusion of tributes to the fallen from the South African War, World Wars I and II, and several other battles. The collective memory of struggle was further fissured by the erection of an SADF memorial at the nearby Voortrekker Monument, which stands as a lasting tribute to Afrikaner myths about the origins of the country. Similar to the Orania Museum located in a small town built on private land and reserved for white Afrikaners only, such acts of defiant memory deviate from the new national ethos. The mere presence of these competing monuments, memorials, and museums powerfully demonstrates the broken nature of collective memory, which is fractured along multiple lines, but especially along racial lines in countries like the United States and South Africa where race continues to play such a strong role in organizing social life. Recently, fierce debate and student protests surrounding the fate of a statue of Cecil John Rhodes at the University of Cape Town (UCT) made international headlines, with many turning to Twitter for up-to-the-minute updates.

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Wall of Remembrance at the Voortrekker Monument; Pretoria

Dubbed the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign, student activists, many of whom were also active in parallel protests against skyrocketing student fees, targeted the tribute to the nineteenth-century British colonialist after political science student Chumani Maxwele defaced it with human excrement in March 2015, labeling the statue a symbol of racial oppression.10 After weeks of protests that triggered related actions on other campuses—most notably the unsuccessful effort to have a similar statue of Cecil Rhodes removed at Oxford University—the UCT governing council voted to remove the statue. Activists gathered as cranes removed it from its perch, with some slapping it, hurling red paint on it, and wrapping its head in paper. While the memorial stood in honor of a British industrialist, conservative Afrikaner groups, such as AfriForum, spoke out against the removal, stating: The Afrikaner is—from a historical perspective—increasingly portrayed as criminals and land thieves. But apartheid free fighters are

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certainly not the untainted heroes government is making them out to be.11

Others who were supportive of the sentiments behind the action expressed disapproval over the style of the resistance. Esteemed professor Jonathan Jansen, the first black vice chancellor at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, denounced the behav ior of protestors: Of course, there is the question of who cleans up the mess once the media cameras are turned off and the triumphal students return to their air-fresh accommodation on or off campus. It is black workers, perhaps even the parents of students. None of this humiliation matters to the students. They made their point and got their airtime. Who cares about the cleaners? What happens, though, when pouring out buckets of human waste becomes a habit of protest in a democracy—as appears to be the case in Cape Town? What does that say about us as citizens and about protest as civic action? This is where the US civil rights activist Martin Luther King [Jr.] made a sobering point to his army of non-violent protesters: “If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity, the historians will have to pause and say, ‘There lived a great people—a black people—who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.’ ”12

This criticism over the protestors as dangerously undignified and ill-informed is essentially a moral judgment about the rules of rebellion, one rooted in specific understandings of the past that others are expected to share and abide by. Incidentally, the question of who cleans up in the wake of student protests took on new meaning in the United States when Corey Menafee, a dining hall employee at Yale University, was arrested after intentionally shattering a stainedglass window depicting slaves picking cotton in a campus building named after alumnus John C. Calhoun, the prominent South Carolina politician and white supremacist. Menafee explained, “I took a broomstick, and it was kind of high, and I climbed up, and reached up and broke it. It’s 2016, I shouldn’t have to come to work and see

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things like that.”13 During the academic year preceding the incident, students, faculty, and alumni had launched a vigorous campaign to pressure the school into disavowing Calhoun and renaming the residential building, but to no avail.14 Much of the controversy in the previous examples can be traced to the role of elite institutions and national governments in producing and supporting certain versions of the past. Some projects that have evolved in the private sector may cause less of a stir because they do not involve public financing or require political approval, but that does not mean that they dodge other forms of public scrutiny, particularly from those expected to attend or whose personal histories are on display. In this sense, public consent acts as a form of authorization for the way collective memory gets constructed inside museums. As we have seen, the development of the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg evolved as part of a private casino venture that expanded to include the museum and a theme park, to comply with licensing regulations. Aside from its peculiar institutional origin story, some former freedom fighters have questioned the story on display. Perhaps most

FIGURE 4.3

Entrance to Gold Reef City; Johannesburg

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notably, the late Helen Suzman—a liberal politician who led white parliamentary opposition to apartheid—registered her disappointment with the museum, charging that it “attempt[s] to airbrush the role of white liberals out of the country’s history.”15 Her observation reiterates the complexities of navigating racial fault lines in both the production and consumption of narratives constructed in the name of identity projects. The Apartheid Museum also fractures collective memory by demystifying it, exposing the commercial aspects of its construction and display. In fact, the sorts of public-private partnerships that help sustain the “urban growth machine” that John Logan and Harvey Molotch write about elicit a range of public reactions that straddle the more ideological and material aspects of museum development.16 As discussed previously, numerous urban development initiatives across the United States and South Africa have included history, heritage, and cultural museums. Community responses—typically from residents in the surrounding areas—have focused on how the museums are financed locally, hiring practices, public programming, and the content itself. In other words, the mnemonic fissures manifest not only in the way the past is remembered; differences abound over whether, when, and why these memories get institutionalized and who foots the bill. When the discussion gets this layered, it becomes harder to predict the usual suspects with regard to support and opposition. Indeed, those most critical of content and programming are often situated among parties that were initially supportive of the museums. In these cases, support wanes as the contracts for construction are issued, directors are hired and fired, trustees are nominated, or the museums undertake any number of aspects of daily maintenance and operation. Discussions about public subsidies, property taxes, potential tourist revenue, and deferred leases shatter the illusion that history museums are primarily concerned with the past. The National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati—a $110 million project situated along the revitalized riverfront—came under criticism from local history enthusiasts who felt the museum was more about attracting tourists and redeveloping the city’s central business district than it was about local abolitionist history. For example, local historian Debra Laveck, a member of the Friends of Freedom Society, viewed the commemoration of the history of guiding fugitives into freedom

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through an elaborate system of safe houses, private homes, tunnels, and other locations as merely a “surface premise in a project whose real goal is to save Cincinnati’s waterfront.”17 In that case, the impetus and timing behind the establishment of the museum were called into question as reservations surfaced about museological decisions such as the transport and relocation of a slave pen for recaptured slaves from Kentucky, which was placed on display at the museum, where it remains today. Although many who express such reservations do so under the problematic banner of historical accuracy and authenticity, perpetuating the idea that museums must present objective historical facts, their concerns also expose entrenched uncertainties over who owns the past—or at least public representations of it. Raising a related set of dilemmas, one of the most heated and protracted protests calling for a black history museum in recent times led to the creation of the Northwest African American Museum (NAAM) in Seattle, Washington, which opened in 2008. Protesters demanded that the city invest in a museum to represent the black experience in the Northwest, which they believed was silenced in mainstream accounts of the history of the region as well as from the public image of contemporary life, especially in Seattle. The protests culminated in an eight-year occupation of an abandoned public school that protesters identified as an ideal site for such an endeavor. Finally, in 2000, the city council relented and agreed to take steps toward creating the region’s only black history museum. However, once the museum opened, former allies lambasted the museum for being directed toward tourists and middle-class audiences, rather than engaging with local black youth.18 Its construction provoked additional questions about the social role of the museum and competing notions of accountability and engagement. In effect, the reactions demonstrate that the recurrent disputes about museums as temples and shrines— as opposed to public forums and platforms—remain relevant. Anxieties around accountability, advocacy, and ownership are especially precarious when the descendants of those who lost their lives during the freedom struggles are involved. As discussed in chapter 3, the creation of the Hector Pieterson Museum just outside of Johannesburg in Soweto shined a light on family squabbles between the siblings of the 13-year-old gunned down by apartheid security

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forces. Specifically, one sister has accused another, Antoinette Sithole, who was also photographed in the image, of wrongfully benefiting from their brother’s death by creating a clothing label and acting as an official spokesperson. According to some accounts, the accusation is less about the commodification of their brother’s memory and more about her assertion that Sithole is only a half-sister.19 Theirs is not the only family dispute over the legacy of key struggle figures. Members of the family of former president Nelson Mandela have spoken out against certain memorial projects, such as the Nelson Mandela Museum, as “benefiting and profiting from [Mandela’s] name.”20 Halfway across the globe in the United States, a dispute has continued for decades involving the rights over the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Efforts to shape and control collective memories of King and his relationship to the freedom struggle have been especially fraught with anger, suspicion, and paternalism in Atlanta, Georgia. After King’s 1968 assassination, his wife, Coretta Scott King, founded the King Center on Sweet Auburn Avenue a few buildings away from King’s childhood home and Ebenezer Baptist Church where he and his father had preached. The center was established as a memorial and a think tank to discuss the promise of nonviolent social change. Initially, the King family welcomed the NPS’s involvement in preserving the five-block section of Sweet Auburn Avenue. As a nationally recognized historic site, park rangers guide an estimated 3 million tourists through the house, church, and to King’s tomb at the King Center every year. However, this relationship became strained when the NPS revealed plans to build a new museum and visitors’ center directly adjacent to the King Center, which was suffering financially amid allegations of mismanagement by King’s youngest son, Dexter King.21 Old wounds from federal harassment and mistrust resurfaced as members of the King family questioned the appropriateness of federal involvement in the project. Dexter King told reporters: We feel strongly that the heritage of the Civil Rights Movement is too impor tant to be controlled by a government agency, which has only superficial familiarity with the internal dynamics of our freedom struggle. They are poorly qualified to interpret the people’s history. The responsibility is better left to people who lived it.22

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Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King’s resting place; Atlanta, Ga.

His words signal a belief that collective memory is not self-evident and does not appear spontaneously; rather, it requires stewardship, but only from certain individuals who claim specific connections to the past. Coretta Scott King viewed memorializing her husband as the family’s “sacred responsibility and legacy borne out of tragedy. It is not something we wanted, but it is also not something we will turn away from.” Eventually, the NPS built its multimedia museum that attracts more visitors than the outdated King Center across the street, which has been besieged with financial difficulties and legal issues over the intellectual property rights of King’s speeches, writings, and image, as well as ownership of the personal writings he donated to Boston University in 1964.23 Accusations of mismanagement and greed peppered the family’s pronouncements as the rightful conveyors of King’s memory, revealing long simmering hostilities, resentment, and suspicions about the nature of King’s death.24

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This splintering of collective memory is also visible at iconic sites across South Africa, where various public players have jostled for control over historical narratives with museum staff. The preservation of Robben Island off the coast of Cape Town was not inevitable.25 Although few disagreed that the prison island was historically significant, some argued that it should be purchased from the state and redeveloped as a health spa and nature resort or a casino. More serious contenders urged the city to approve plans to renovate the island as an international peace and nonviolence center along with a museum. Rejecting proposals to establish any commercial enterprise that would profit financially from the history, peace and justice advocates also felt strongly about the mission of the museum. Terry Crawford-Brown, director of Peace Visions, said, “The question is whether Robben Island becomes a shrine to the past—just a museum with old relics—or something that has practical application for today.”26 The public dialogue around the identification and preservation of historical sites reveals that the construction of collective memory involves imagining boundaries between past, present, and future that are ultimately porous and vary across people, groups, sites, and historical events. This porosity is most evident during the walking tours at Robben Island, where guides deviate from official narratives at will. The island tours, delivered by former political prisoners who were detained on the island, play a crucial role in the effort to “create a metaphorical journey similar to the prisoners’ experience.”27 The guides are furnished with a script approved by the South African Department of Tourism, which includes suggested language as the guide leads visitors across the grounds: for example, “As we move along the corridor, let us contemplate, in silence, the ideals of freedom and human dignity of those who were imprisoned here, and the sacrifices they made to achieve those ideals.”28 While guides are armed with such stage directions beforehand, they rely heavily on personal memory, interspersing the authorized account with personal anecdotes and political views that undermine or contradict the official line. Sometimes the guide is energetic and personable, mingling personal stories about life behind bars on the island with a broader struggle narrative. However, at other times, the guide may mumble or seem uninterested in

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Outside Nelson Mandela’s former cell on Robben Island; Cape Town

fielding questions from inquisitive guests. In my personal experience, guides recognize that the vast majority of the tourists—mostly from North America and Western Europe—are waiting to see where Nelson Mandela was held captive. At this moment in the tour, the visitors almost become one, bodies crammed next to each other and arms reaching over and across one another as cameras of every sort flash. During one of my tours, I noticed that the guide disappeared around a corner, returning several minutes later to herd us to the next stop. Here, he went to great lengths to counterbalance the tourist interests as much as the official narrative, speaking passionately about lesser-known figures who stayed on the island or non-ANC politics, such as those of the PAC. Without any significant textual or visual material, visitors must heavily rely on the guides’ personal narratives and affectations to supplement the already powerful experience of simply standing on the iconic island. Many visitors express appreciation for these insider

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Ex-prisoner guided tour; Cape Town

accounts as powerful testimony and as a glimpse into a world they can scarcely fathom.29 However, these personal memories and versions of the past raise a number of questions about survivor accounts. As one private tour operator quipped, “It’s the luck of the draw. Some of the guides are good, but the day you strike one who can’t articulate himself properly or who speaks inaudibly, it’s almost like the tourists’ money is wasted.”30 This notion of waste—wasted money, wasted time, and ultimately, wasted memory—begs the question of what we expect from such encounters with the past, especially when presented with what is to be treated as its physical embodiment. Do survivors always make more authentic guides? Does it matter if initial impressions of authenticity correspond poorly with later experience? What if the guide is not particularly articulate or personable? How do visitors process idiosyncratic versions of the past that may surface? How do they make sense of personal recollections that contradict other well-established information, including that presented during other parts of the tour or in museum brochures? What exactly constitutes

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expert knowledge? As the fourth wall is inadvertently broken, the underbelly of memory work is laid bare. In fact, Robben Island Museum CEO Sibongiseni Mkhize acknowledged this social production of collective memory, noting that “just because you were a political prisoner doesn’t mean that you are trained in storytelling [and] some of them have got talents in areas other than tour-guiding.”31 He also expressed concerns over the reliance on these personal accounts as a hallmark of the tour, stating that such tours are “something that maybe in fifteen years’ time will end because the political prisoners someday will get old and we will not always have them around.” However, questioning the validity or packaging of personal reflections devalues subjective experience, while reproducing assumptions about objective truths and the role of professionals in communicating them to the public. Like these prisoners-cum-guides, the most powerful means of breaking collective construction of memory and identity arise from challenges registered by those whose lives are on display. At times, challengers follow the reasoning of Jacqueline Smith’s boycott of the NCRM in Memphis and the protesters at the NAAM in Seattle: official memorialization distracts and draws resources away from social programs that could alleviate current social inequities. These critics’ allegations stem from a fear that the status quo will persist as those in positions of power opt to support memorial projects more concerned with the poetics and aesthetics of the past, effectively placing oppression and conflict on display as historical artifacts rather than facts of contemporary life. These memorial projects offer an occasion and sometimes a public platform for members of historically marginalized groups to voice their own concerns about historical representations and the connection to identity and social life. In other words, the simulated versions of history and reality on display can spark profound discussions about self and collective identity. The implications of simulated versions of reality on display at Cape Town’s District Six Museum have had far-reaching consequences and triggered strong public pushback. Here, not only are the lines between past and present blurred, but also those between real and imagined spaces are contested. The disputed territory is that of District Six itself, a primarily coloured neighborhood destroyed during apartheid.

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Floor map of the District Six neighborhood; Cape Town

Although museum staff have deliberately chosen to represent the neighborhood as racially and culturally heterogeneous, some former residents and their descendants have had difficulty thinking of District Six as anything other than a coloured community.32 Indeed, the bulk of photographs, family mementoes, and personal histories

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exhibited are those of people who would be racially classified as coloured. As the museum’s role of producing a simulation of the neighborhood spilled over into the politics of actual redevelopment of District Six, the problem of representation has became even weightier. Museum founders, trustees, and staff helped launch the District Six Beneficiary Trust to make progress toward submitting a claim for land restitution from the government as the first step toward recreating the lost neighborhood. The first director of the trust, Nadja Anwja, was one of the original founders of the museum and became the most visible local actor representing the former residents’ interest in the future of the empty land, though this representativeness would be challenged. Some former residents resented having the institution—which had become the public image of the land claim— speak for them. In par ticular, they rejected the trust’s vision of how the process should work and how the neighborhood should be recreated, a vision rooted in the narratives constructed at the museum. In fact, some former residents were more interested in cash settlements than in receiving a newly constructed home in the neighborhood. These alternative or dissenting voices among those expected to identify with the museum project eventually found voice in a distinct organization called the Concerned Claimants of District Six. The District Six Museum example is a more pronounced illustration of what transpires with all history exhibitions. We—the imagined and real audiences—are meant to identify with collective narratives; we are all implicated in the stories on display. These cultural scripts outline not only an interpretation of past events; they also construct and often reproduce ways of thinking about social identity and categories of existence. Even opposition forces that appear to be more concerned with how the projects are financed are at their core concerned with the relationship between the past and the present, and the nature and the limits of social accountability for historical wrongs. To a large extent, public reactions to museum development and content revolve around the ambiguous territory between the self and society as the line between the visitor’s sense of self and sense of the past confronts institutionalized renderings of a collective self dressed as artifact.

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HISTORY AS AVANT- GARDE? Perhaps the most visible way standard historical accounts are disrupted or broken is through the preservation of museums, monuments, and memorials dedicated to celebrating the political regimes that the freedom movements opposed. The preservation of these politically incorrect sites is clear evidence that the collective consensus is broken, that multiple voices and interpretations exist. Their preservation also reveals that the past is not resolved, that there is in fact disagreement about what lessons were learned, if any. The victors are not always in full control of how new histories get revised and recorded. These remnants from the past represent clear opposition to the more liberal and inclusive discourse that has dominated political discourse in both post-civil rights America and postapartheid South Africa. In fact, when the impulses toward reconciliation and multicultural rights are so strong, we should expect more ideologically diverse memorial landscapes. While one set of narratives about the U.S. Civil War is depicted in national museums and mainstream school curricula, Confederate heroes and tales of “northern aggression” are on display at museums and memorials across the South. As the site where the Ku Klux Klan reestablished itself in 1915, the area surrounding Stone Mountain is a particularly thorny location for a public memorial. Yet, in 1923, the Klan donated the mountain—one of the largest exposed granite surfaces in the world—for the creation of a 200-foot carving commemorating the Confederacy. White Southerners embraced the idea of carving the silhouettes of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson onto the face of the mountain. After years of wrangling and financial woes, however, in 1956 the state of Georgia purchased the site from the Klan.33 The state government’s involvement radically transformed the site from being solely a Confederate memorial and Klan rally site because the state was concerned with securing its investment and was accountable to a much broader and diverse constituency, including an increasing black presence in Stone Mountain, located just thirty miles outside Atlanta. State ownership of the site, coupled with massive demographic and political shifts, fueled efforts to broaden the mission of the memorial

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Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial; Stone Mountain, Ga.

to justify the significant state expenditure. Those efforts coalesced into the odd commercialization of the site, which includes a theme park with a steam engine, an annual gospel celebration in honor of Juneteenth (a holiday celebrating Emancipation), and laser shows featuring music from artists as diverse as Lynyrd Syknyrd and Gladys Knight. In essence, park officials have been able to repackage the site as a family vacation destination, while the memorial remains an important tribute to Southern pride and, to some, a symbol of white supremacy. Most recently, in 2015, following public protests against the Confederate flag and President Obama’s stirring eulogy for those murdered in the mass shooting at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, the memorial’s checkered past has made international headlines. Speaking to the Guardian, Richard Rose, the director of the Atlanta branch of the NAACP, has vowed to fight to have the carving removed from the site, threatening to sue the state of Georgia and to initiate direct action or protest at the site. He stated the carvings do not commemorate lives lost during battle, but rather “its only purpose is raising the leaders of an insurrection to hero status.”34 Rose and others’ concerns are not only with the veneration of disgraced soldiers,

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but also with contemporary park-goers, including those drawn to the destination for its amenities, not the history. To be “properly” oriented toward this history entails an inability or unwillingness to experience pleasure at such a location; it is a refusal to normalize or routinize the extraordinary. These countervailing impulses toward public emotions and memory are not unique to Stone Mountain, which is only one of many Confederate monuments and memorials sprinkled across the South, from Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, to plantation houses. What all of these sites share is a failure to embrace the dominant national narrative that treats these histories as shameful, a period to atone or mourn for, but surely not to celebrate. Many monuments to bygone eras honoring largely discredited ideologies have followed a similar trajectory in South Africa. For example, the Voortrekker Monument and Memorial was built in 1949 to commemorate the “Great Trek” into the interior of the country. It stands as a political and religious shrine that tells the story of Afrikaners’ ascent into power and dominance as the chosen people, destined to bring civilization to the region and the so-called natives. These myths are clearly visible in the design and architecture of the monument and have been widely studied. This version of national history was always hotly contested by the majority population and was even debated among resistance fighters in exile. These dissenting voices did not prevent the site from becoming a focal point of political speeches and celebrations for years during apartheid, nor did they lead to the demolition of the structure with the democratic transition. Yet, opposition to the site has prompted the addition of new content more in keeping with official narratives about the past. Since the end of apartheid, directors have sought new ways to attract a diverse audience and maintain the site’s sizable state subsidies, including creating mixed-use space to hold rock concerts or wedding receptions and building hiking trails; these are improbable additions to a once state-ordained sacred space. There is also a new interpretative museum on the lower level that effectively demythologizes Afrikaner history, but does so without disturbing the iconography of the main levels and the exterior, which still unabashedly celebrate Afrikaner cultural nationalism. However controversial or insidious, the preservation of sites like the Voortrekker Monument and Stone Mountain indicate a broken

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Voortrekker Monument; Pretoria

collective memory as well as the elasticity of collective memory to contain competing narratives. However, this containment is premised on the different audiences that are drawn to these sites. Indeed, all memory spaces are not meant for everyone, regardless of how prominent they are in the public realm; people gravitate toward ones they feel an affinity toward. These examples also demonstrate that discredited sites are able to maintain themselves by repackaging themselves as vacation spots, not just sites of memory. These discredited sites are not the only sites of collective memory breakdown. Other deviations correspond to regional differences in memory, history, and culture, signaling deeper deviations in national culture and identity—sometimes, but not always, along racial lines. For example, the KwaMuhle in Durban offers a unique account of the

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liberation struggle. In this case, the Zulu-based political party and organization IFP and the role of Zulu historical figures are privileged over ANC-centric interpretations of national liberation. Also, the museum presents information about clashes within the struggle, between the IFP and the ANC. The Hector Pieterson Museum in Soweto also does this to some extent, as it highlights the role of the BC movement rather than presenting the more standard ANC-dominated narrative. This trend toward breaking collective memory by inserting regional content that disrupts national narratives has also emerged in U.S. memorial practices. Such a local lens can provide a space to counter mainstream historical myths about nation. One of the most striking recent examples of this was the “Slavery in New York” exhibition mounted at the New York Historical Society (NYHS) in 2005, which was followed by “Conscience and Commerce” and “New York Divided.” The $5 million exhibition opened to unprecedented crowds eager to learn about slave practices in the founding and expansion of New Amsterdam (now the lower tip of Manhattan). Nearly fifteen years earlier at that very location, human remains had been unearthed during the construction of the Foley Square Federal Office Buildings. Once archaeologists revealed that the remains of an estimated 10,000 enslaved people rested beneath the buildings of lower Manhattan, the local residents began asking questions about a city whose history they thought they knew.35 The “Slavery in New York” exhibition sought to show that “our history is much more complicated than a benighted racist South and a free North.”36 Lead curator and historian Richard Rabinowitz assembled a wealth of historical documents, personal narratives, and audio to uncover the practice of urban slavery in what became one of the most well-attended historical museum exhibitions in recent years.37 The exhibition drew an especially large black audience, across social classes, to the venerable Upper West Side institution. It broke with convention, not so much in curatorial practice as in the focus of the content, which was deliberately designed to dislodge entrenched beliefs about the national past. The NYHS exhibition was also transformative because it allowed people to “talk back” to the museum. Instead of relying on quantitative visitor data and cursory comment books, curators decided to install video response booths. The videos vividly captured the difference between history and memory as guests expressed their shock, horror, and

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anger about New York’s slave past. Across social groups, visitors expressed alarm that popular understandings of the past and their personal relationship to the city could be shaken to the core by an exhibition concerning events that occurred more than three centuries prior.38 While the exhibition itself did not “desegregate” the past from the present, the visitors did by commenting on how their experiences as New Yorkers was part of the same melodrama of race. This understanding of history as continuous is one that lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson of the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative is hoping to enhance with the construction of a new museum called “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration” in Montgomery, Alabama. In a video for the History Channel’s History Now series, Stevenson remarks: There is a line from slavery through racial terrorism, through segregation, that is evident in what we see in our criminal justice system today. I’m persuaded that we really won’t eliminate the problems of discrimination in the criminal justice system, in the education system, in the employment system until we change the narrative of racial difference that we have all accepted. I believe that at the end of the 1960s when we passed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act we should have committed to a process of truth and reconciliation, but we didn’t do that.39

While some question the extent to which truth commissions, such as South Africa’s much-heralded TRC, bring about collective healing and social justice,40 Stevenson’s warning that collective amnesia or numbness results from a failure to speak frankly about the nature of violence resonates with other thinkers.41 In particular, he describes the public lynchings of the first half of the twentieth century as acts of humiliation and degradation [that] created a desensitizing to victimization. We are indifferent to evidence of bias or discrimination; we are indifferent to innocent people being wrongly condemned on death row for thirty years. I think there is a historical root to that silence.42

While Stevenson’s impulse is “entrepreneurial” in terms of establishing an institution to broadcast a revised moral narrative, the aim is

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not to vindicate blackness, but to locate the present and the past within each other. The museum is scheduled to open in 2017, so it remains to be seen whether it will truly break the mold of black history museums, let alone whether it will ignite more compassionate and thoughtful deliberations about social change. Ostensibly, all black museums break with the collective because they break with historical representations at mainstream museums. However, only a handful break with the conventions of telling black history. In these instances, museum content defies the general narrative structure of black identity formation, oftentimes by deliberately focusing on some of the uglier aspects of the past that many curators shy away from, fearing they might alienate audiences with painful material or by depicting blacks as passive victims. For instance, the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia in Big Rapids, Michigan, showcases a diverse collection of racist material culture, from Mammy figurines and skin-lightening cream packages to Ku Klux Klan garb and lynching postcards. The museum, originally housed in the Sociology Department of Ferris State University, brings visitors face to face with the largest collection of racist artifacts in the country, most of which diminish the black body and mind while also glorifying racial violence.43 With little textual assistance, the objects speak for themselves through their sheer number and close proximity to each other. One of the guides (a former sociology professor on campus) acknowledged that despite receiving praise from museum critics and historians, they experienced some difficulty in finding black museums willing to display their traveling exhibition called “Hateful Things” because of the visceral imagery and fear of alienating guests. By isolating racist memorabilia as a historical and contemporary reality without fully contextualizing it within the black identity narrative, this museum offers an avant-garde approach to thinking about the past. This type of difficult content is more likely to make its way into South African museums where disrupting museum conventions tends to be viewed as an act of transgression directed at colonial and apartheid styles of remembrance. Other museums are trying to reframe some of the lessons from the freedom movements, to recast them through a global lens (a way that many black museums conclude their permanent exhibitions). The best example of this is the new NCCHR in Atlanta, which has faced

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some criticism but does not see itself as among the “black history cheerleaders.”44 In other words, the rising interest in more global perspectives should not only been seen as indicative of changing interests among target audience members; it can also be viewed as a criticism on the provincialism of black history more broadly. In South Africa, there have been intermittent efforts to draw out a more global framework for discussing the antiapartheid struggle, but this process has come across some hurdles. For example, at Freedom Park an installation on various heroes in the struggle for human rights was criticized for including non-Africans. It was also criticized for focusing overwhelmingly on the role of men in various liberation struggles. One of the most surprising—if not avant-garde—approaches to representing national histories marred by racial conflict is to do so without reference to familiar black-white racial dichotomies at all. This is a difficult task, but a few museums, typically those dedicated to representing the experiences of racial or ethnic groups that do not easily fit into the standard racialized narrative, attempt it—with varying degrees of success. The South African Jewish Museum serves as an ideal example of how uneasily a subnational group identity narrative coexists with national ones. Its opening in 2000 marked the first highly visible effort to articulate the nature of a white ethnic identity other than Afrikaner or British. The exhibition breaks with typical representations of South African identity, not only recasting it through the lens of local Jewish communities, but also by situating it as representative of a global diasporic experience. By highlighting instances of discrimination and anti-Semitism, curators have made a clear effort to align the Jewish community with other groups marginalized during colonialism and apartheid, despite their white racial classification. For example, a series of panels displayed with the heading “Facing Reality: The Voice of the Organised Community” provides information about racist immigration policy through the 1930s along with a statement titled “The Apartheid Dilemma: To Speak Out or Not to Speak Out” based on speeches from Arthur Suzman, who served as chair of the Public Relations Committee of the South African Jewish Board of Deputies from 1963 to 1965. Directly adjacent to the panels is an enlarged quote from Nelson Mandela’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom: “In my experience, I have found Jews to be more broad-minded than most whites on issues of race and politics, perhaps because they themselves

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Nelson Mandela quotation at the South African Jewish Museum; Cape Town

have historically been victims of prejudice.”45 Regardless of the ambiguities surrounding how Jewish communities operated during apartheid beyond high-profile liberal activists like Joe Slovo and Helen Suzman, the South African Jewish Museum breaks collective memories of racial oppression by showcasing the experiences of a group that does not fit neatly into familiar narratives. While some U.S. black history museums have showcased temporary exhibitions about recent waves of immigration from Africa and the Caribbean, most take “blackness” and racial thinking for granted, taking issue instead with hierarchical structuring of race. In contrast, the NMAI in Washington, D.C., is one of the few highly visible settings where racial classification is questioned. The museum displays a series of panels that highlight the invented nature and arbitrariness of racial categories across time, as well as the categories’ relationship to the eugenics movement. However, some argue that the remainder of the museum somewhat undermines this content by

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presenting profiles of eight indigenous communities as distinct units with a shared ancestry, indirectly reinforcing essentialist readings of tribal identity and membership. The American Anthropological Association and Science Museum of Minnesota’s exhibition “Race: Are We So Different?” is another interrogation of racial thinking and classification with an even larger reach, as it was installed as a temporary exhibition at museums across the country for over six years, mostly in science museums. Unlike many museum exhibitions about racial and national histories, an exhibition like “Race” can garner national attention and draw wide audiences who express shock at encountering material that breaks with their everyday understandings of themselves and social life. Just as science museums can break the mold of familiar approaches toward representing racial histories, art museums and galleries have also been at the forefront of making history avant-garde. For example, the Goodman Gallery in Johannesburg mounted artist Brett Murray’s “Hail to the Thief II” exhibition in 2011, a satirical show that challenged the status quo narratives about the freedom struggle and democracy. In particular, Murray altered the images and text of protest posters to make scathing remarks about political disillusion and rampant corruption in democratic South Africa. The show struck a nerve, not only with politicians who were especially alarmed at Murray’s depiction of President Jacob Zuma; it also garnered opposition from artists who labeled his work as a form of plagiarism disguised as art. Artist and activist Judy Seidman reacted strongly against Murray’s rewording of the text on a poster she created demanding women’s rights in 1982.46 In an open letter to the Mail and Guardian she commented, My objection is not that Murray appropriates Struggle images or even that he appropriates images that I and others created without attribution and calls them his own. My objection is that he misappropriates these images. These images became public and iconic because they told of our beliefs and our communities during that time of Struggle. Murray’s “artistic” revisions have the images saying the opposite of what we believed.47

Seidman’s comments illustrate the dangers of failing to honor and respect symbols that some consider sacred and therefore above re-

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proach, a case of misrecognition. Also, the placement of these altered images in a private gallery—rather than a museum—added to the blasphemy by inserting market forces into the conversation. For some, this uneasiness around Murray’s appropriation of freedom struggle art and imagery, including his potential personal monetary gain, was exacerbated by his white identity. Should anyone profit financially from collective trauma and liberation histories? Many believe these sacred texts and images should belong to no one in particular and to everyone in general. How are authorship and copyright understood in relation to protest art legally, as well as colloquially? The reactions to Murray’s recontextualized images, perhaps more than the images themselves, indicate disagreement over the legacy of the movement as much as the social meaning and protection of historical narratives in the public realm. Compared to history museums, art spaces such as galleries are more likely to serve as venues for memory deviance, and other forms of “breaking the collective.” At history museums, with their penchant for sequential arrangement and detailed contextualization of the visual, interpretation, not just objects, is more heavily curated, as events are named and dated and questions are posed and answered. The moral lessons are clear. The uproar over Murray’s images had as much to do with relocating subject matter typically reserved for historical institutions into the art realm, regardless of its profit-generating capabilities. African American Studies scholar Anne Rice warns that displaying difficult historical material, such as lynching photography, at art galleries can feel voyeuristic, contributing to the fetishizing of black bodies.48 Art spaces, particularly private galleries, do more than isolate the image or object; as we saw with Murray’s work, they also raise uneasy, or rather profane, questions about intellectual rights and monetary exchange in relation to the past. In 2002, Nelson Mandela himself entered into these murky waters after he agreed to sell a series of lithographs depicting his birthplace in the Eastern Cape and internment at Robben Island. His intention to raise funds for his charity, the Nelson Mandela Trust, was quickly overshadowed by the spectacle of auctioning these prized possessions, with celebrities like David Beckham and Oprah Winfrey along with dignitaries like Prince Charles placing their bids.49 The media circus only increased after Mandela accused his former lawyer of clandestinely selling

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fake prints and forging his name to them, some of which were feared to be on display (and available for purchase) at London’s Belgravia Gallery.50 Even more than the legal fracas, the auctioning and the prints themselves led some to question the aptness of this particular form of commemorative reflection, with one art critic charging, [The lithographs] do not possess the eloquence of the autobiography Long Walk to Freedom, or the famous photograph of [Mandela] talking to Walter Sisulu in the prison yard, taken secretly in 1966. Perhaps, this is what happens when you try to sell a memory, even for the best of reasons.51

This perceived inelegance stems from uneasiness with the way private art spaces expose the financial underbelly of remembrance. While one may figuratively profit from such tributes at an emotional or intellectual level, material profit is widely viewed as morally bankrupt. Conversely, when art enters into historical spaces, the potential firestorm is just as great. For example, U.S. artist James Pate drew praise and censure for his series of drawings about gun violence and gang activity in “Kin Killin’ Kin,” in which gang members are dressed in the white hoods and robes associated with Klansmen. After being shown at several black history museums, including the DuSable Museum in Chicago and the NURFC in Cincinnati, members of the Black Lives Matter movement protested its installation at the NCRM in Memphis in 2016. Its local office released a statement, maintaining that “comparing ‘black on black’ crime to the KKK, a domestic terrorist organization, is morally and intellectually dishonest and has nothing to do with the history of the Black freedom struggle that is showcased in the [museum].”52 The questions of morality and honesty in the context of historical accuracy are especially loaded at this sacred site—the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was himself gunned down. However, they also reveal the reining in of collective representations and the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable styles of remembrance, not the substance of those memories. Commenting on his work, Pate reflected, “It’s like a personal protest and as along as [the violence] keeps happening, I’m going to keep producing.”53 It is this artistic license—expressed through his personal relationship with images and history—that deviates from

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collective memory norms, even more so than the style or content. Our relationship with the past is always a cagey one, as we try to convince ourselves that we know that which is fundamentally unknowable: the subjective experiences of others. History museums mask this ner vousness with carefully arranged objects and detailed texts, with arrows and signs orienting visitors through time and space. Artwork that reimagines the visual language of pain and violence can thereby reinterpret this flow, disorient the gaze, and defamiliarize the familiar, effectively blurring past and present, fact and fantasy. From the imaginative signs and Tumblr art of protestors to the work of professional artists like Nikkalos Smith, whose jarring image of Martin Luther King Jr. donning a Trayvon Martin-style hoodie went viral in 2013, such creative practices have been instrumental in communicating emotions that often defy words.54 This effect is evident in some of the most powerful commentary on the nation’s racist past and has entailed reappropriating the visual imagery and material objects of domination, along with museums themselves. The clearest example of this is Fred Wilson’s pioneering exhibition “Mining the Museum,” installed at the Maryland Historical Society in 1992. In her review of the show in 1993, art historian and curator Judith Stein remarked that Wilson “mined” the museum in three ways: by searching through its trove of objects in storage; by displaying the objects in unexpected ways designed to provoke new thinking about America’s slave past; and by taking ownership of the museum as a personal space, which was particularly radical coming from an artist of African, Native American, and European descent.55 Thelma Golden, director and head curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, attributed the exhibition with retraining her professional gaze, stating that “[it] changed the way I understood what it meant to put objects in a public space.”56 “Mining the Museum” resonates strongly with an exhibition installed at the South African National Gallery in 1996. In “Miscast: Negotiating Khoisan History and Material Culture,” curator Pippa Skotnes repositioned objects on display in arrangements that unsettled familiar narratives of the colonial past and racial-ethnic difference. The exhibit featured headless casts, rifles suggestively positioned as the Eucharist, and photographs from colonial archives juxtaposed with images and objects donated from indigenous communities.57

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Both Wilson and Skotnes disrupted conventional wisdom about racial identity while simultaneously calling into question the role of museums in transmitting cultural narratives. By drawing on a visual language of objects, positions, and signs, they created a semiotic interrogation of violent histories as much as our habits of remembering and representing painful periods. This strategy of rendering the familiar unfamiliar to such an extent that the viewer is unmoored, shocked into reconsidering the past and its relation to the present, is clearly on display in much of U.S. artist Kara Walker’s work, which includes the show “After the Deluge,” an exhibition about Hurricane Katrina at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that also features reassembled objects and images.58 Through life-size silhouettes of scenes of antebellum life, Walker manages to weave whimsy and fantasy into depictions of the national trauma of slavery. Since her first exhibition, “Gone: A Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Negress and Her Heart,” Walker’s work has challenged more than stereotypical images of the genteel South; her work also disrupts the black identity motif by showcasing black caricatures without contextualizing them within narratives about perseverance. In fact “her blacks don’t seem to resist aggression, or at least not in obvious ways. They seem to give in to it, let themselves be abjectly used, often by one another.”59 Art critic Jerry Saltz describes encountering her work as wallowing “eternally in a world of near-mystic violence.”60 Indeed, it is the combination of beauty with violent imagery and its extraction from the usual narratives of rebellion and perseverance that is simultaneously mesmerizing and unsettling. Famously, black veteran artist Betye Saar, along with other black artists, organized a boycott of Walker’s work in 1997. Saar asked, “Are African-Americans being betrayed under the guise of art?” For Saar and others the betrayal lies in the celebration of an artist profiting from the use of racial stereotypes that ultimately diminish the black body, mind, and spirit. Walker’s work continues to generate controversy, including a row over artwork depicting a black slave having sex with a white man (“Drawing of a Slave”) displayed at the Newark Public Library in January 2013.61 After some library staff complained that the image was offensive, it was temporarily covered while a series of meetings were held to discuss the piece, after which the image was again revealed.

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About a month later, the library also hosted a discussion with Walker to discuss the work, racial imagery in art, and artistic freedom. Since then, Walker has attracted both praise and criticism for her colossal sugar sculpture on display in the decommissioned Domino Sugar refinery in Brooklyn, New York, in 2014. With syrupy-sweet detail, Walker recast the history of slave trade in the Americas with “A Subtlety,” a series of dark molasses-soaked

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Sphinx-like woman featured in Kara Walker’s sugarcoated art installation “A Subtlety”; Brooklyn, N.Y.

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Entrance to “A Subtlety” at the defunct Domino Sugar Refinery; Brooklyn, N.Y.

children weighed down by sacks of sugar surrounding the pristine figure of a woman outstretched sphinx-like, over seventy-five feet long and thirty-six feet tall, donning an unsettlingly familiar headscarf. The animalism or the positioning of the naked body in an animal pose with her genitals fully exposed generated a wide range of reactions, to which Walker responded, “Nudity is a thing, apparently, that people have a problem with; not slavery, or racism, but female bodies, or bottoms.”62 Like her artwork, her remarks toy with what lies beneath the familiar and comfortable when it comes to recalling the past in socially acceptable or consensual ways. When asked about some of the more unsettling aspects of her work, particularly those where black bodies are presented in a less than favorable light, Walker rejected the label of these as angry images.

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Instead she stated, “I think of them as giddy. I think using the silhouette is kind of a device that maybe is a little bit cagey.”63 The events Walker is concerned with are indeed cagey ones, as are the memories of them. To the extent that her work troubles notions of black identity as much as it does popular historical knowledge, the notion of sacred images and even sacred ways of knowing the past becomes relevant again. Like her floor-to-ceiling drawing “Daylights” about the cultural disorientation and violence of the Great Migration, featured alongside other destabilizing work such as Glenn Ligon’s “Narratives” in an exhibition co-curated by the MoAD and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,64 such work demonstrates a willingness, almost a compulsion, to break the illusion of consensual memory and identity through critique and deconstruction. Significantly, this reconsideration of identity is not unique to the public display of representations about slavery and U.S. racial history. In his comparative study of Holocaust memorials and museums across Germany, Poland, Israel, and the United States, James Young discusses some of the dilemmas around the visual representation of collective trauma and concerns about presenting Jewish people as passive victims, as objects of history.65 Young tracks differences in Holocaust memorialization across national cultures and proximity— physical and psychic—to the atrocity, noting the contentious politics involved in commemorative acts and the way Holocaust memory has many faces, from the bleak ruins of decaying concentration camps to more celebratory narratives about the triumph of democracy. In both these cases and the project of black public historical displays, there is a sense that modern depictions must be empowering for blacks today and must honor or celebrate ancestors, not shine a light on their torture and humiliation. This set of criteria has proven incredibly powerful in monitoring and policing how black identity and history get represented, especially in public spaces. For example, nearly twenty years after his famous “Mining the Museum” exhibition, Fred Wilson faced strident opposition to his proposal for “E Pluribus Unum,” a sculpture based on a reinterpretation of the nearby Soldiers and Sailors Monument located in downtown Indianapolis. Despite being funded through private sources, it was the proposed location of the artwork that stirred controversy, as much as Wilson’s decision to enlarge only the figure of the shirtless

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and semireclined freed slave brandishing an African flag—the flag is a composite of flags from multiple African countries—rather than clutching a broken shackle as in the original sculpture. Located directly in front of the City-County Building in the heart of the city, some were concerned that people could not make a decision to view or avoid it the way they might if it were in a museum.66 Others, including state representative Bill Crawford (D-Indiana) objected to it on the grounds that the facial features and body shape were unflattering and that it perpetuated racial stereotypes.67 Eventually, confronted with mounting opposition, the Central Indiana Community Foundation, the or ga nization financing the commission, canceled the project. Notwithstanding disagreements over how to visualize black bodies—a debate that also ensnarled the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial in Washington, D.C.—there is general agreement across racial and class lines that public representations should be uplifting, reverent, and forward-looking. These considerations reflect a sensibility that treats the past as a thing, a fragile object that should be handled with care. The fragility of this object resides in our own tenuous grasp on what we make of each other and ourselves in relation to such representations, as well as the knowledge that what binds us as a collective is just as precarious as the deceptively sublime stained-glass panel Corey Menafee shattered with the tap of a broomstick. Charges of careless handling are essentially indicators of memory deviance. These acts of recklessness can take many forms, from forged artwork and vandalism to unflattering portrayals of historical topics and figures. They also include people misbehaving at museums and memorials, or rather, people behaving in ways that deviate from the norms of commemorative observance. For example, the sight of tourists snapping photographs at sites of mass executions, assassinations, environmental disasters, and other scenes of death and suffering, draws the ire of many.68 These more socially responsible observers are particularly critical of those taking “selfie” portraits and posting them to Instagram, Facebook, and other social media outlets.69 In 2014, Twitter was aflutter after a teen posted a smiling image of herself in headphones and a pink hoodie during a visit to Poland’s Auschwitz concentration camp.70 A couple of years later, users of the popular virtual reality

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game app “Pokémon Go” were described as insensitive and careless as they flocked to landmarks like the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in lower Manhattan and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., to win points and other bonuses. The communications director at the Holocaust Museum stated, “Playing the game is not appropriate in the museum, which is a memorial to the victims of Nazism.”71 Similarly, a visitor at the 9/11 Memorial remarked, “A lot of people died here. It’s a place to reflect, not to play a game.”72 Who decides which behaviors or styles of engagement are inappropriate? Irrespective of one’s personal preferences, these reactions to perceived transgressions throw the rules, and performativity, of collective remembrance into relief. Across both countries, these projects provoked such fiery exchanges because they deviated from the identity narrative that celebrates triumph over adversity and doesn’t wallow or indulge too much in painful, embarrassing, or less-than-heroic material. While some debate what exactly Kara Walker’s and Brett Murray’s art says about the contemporary resonance of histories of violence and oppressions, they are undeniably provocative and unorthodox. As such, they are avant-garde because they break the collective patterns of remembering, forgetting, or avoiding; they are necessarily out of step with the conventions of representation. Some object to the profit that some artists have gained through showing at private galleries rather than nonprofit museums. The reality that most art dealers, gallery owners, and buyers are upperclass whites in both countries adds to the discomfort. Walker discussed this material success by noting, “To achieve success as an AfricanAmerican, one must spill out one’s guts constantly.”73 Her remarks speak to more than the market for black art and culture more broadly; they also hint at the myriad of ways that we all, regardless of our racial identification, remain ensnarled and implicated in the past, in the narratives that we produce and consume about the past. Museum content that suggests an imagined public other than the ones typically assumed also breaks the mold by rethinking history through different perspectives. The inclusion of material about queer histories and experiences, including their role in shaping and resisting forms of oppression, is still a rarity in museums focused on histories of racial conflict in the United States and South Africa. In 2012, the BCRI, however, recast popular notions of civil rights and attracted new

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audiences when it installed “Living in Limbo,” a traveling exhibition about LGBTQ communities. The photographic exhibition revolved around local members of the lesbian community, examining their lives, families, and understandings of civil rights. It repositioned the museum and black history as forums to interrogate social boundaries beyond racialized ones. In South Africa, the use of museums as a setting to discuss queer identity and rights was most visible during a recent protest at the Number Four Prison museum in Johannesburg, where attendees demanded a cultural shift and political action to ban discrimination, harassment, and violence targeted toward people who do not conform to norms of gender, sex, and sexuality. The previous examples suggest that the symbols and narratives on display—however avant-garde in terms of unsettling conventional wisdom, fracturing the self, or breaking—can be disconnected from the power and salience of the imagery in everyday life. This disconnect speaks to the degree of contemporary resonance audiences expect to find in displays about the past. Also, the above examples suggest that there are parameters within which breaking with the collective content-wise is less controversial: when the main symbols and motifs are preserved and honored, even when the text accompanying them shifts or new images are added. ✴✴✴

History museums create a simulated reality, a simulated past, and exposing it as such is a deviant act. It is a refusal to engage in socially responsible remembering. These competing voices and interpretations need not be seen as problematic or signs of a still deeply divided society—though they very well may be. At their core, history museums reveal the fractured nature of memory, both personal and collective. Whether we agree with the substance of such deviant memory acts, they highlight the multiplicity of memory and historical interpretation and the controversies they spark speak volumes about the coercive nature of collective memory or the social expectation to orient oneself to the past in very specific ways. To be socially acceptable or normal is to follow memory norms and to abide by the values they apparently endorse. Our ability to appreciate multivocality could serve as the basis of identification, so that we need not identify with the

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substance of narratives elaborating the contours of group identity; rather, we may identify with everyone’s right to remember (or forget) as she sees fit. What would such a laissez-faire attitude toward the past mean for group-making projects premised on shared memory? Memory deviants unsettle the collective of collective memory by exposing its coercive appeal to the mainstream. There are at least two broad ways the collective gets broken: through innovative content and display and through public pushback or criticism. The consensus narrative gets disrupted as members of various publics and counterpublics react against institutionalized representations, both in terms of their content and how they get staged and funded. This includes occasions when artists break from the collective understanding by offering imagery that challenges norms about the way the past should be regarded. In some ways, the more artistic, creative, and emotive environments of art museums lend themselves to the telling of avant-garde versions of the past, which are more attentive to breaks in the narrative, inconsistencies, and contradictions—or the messiness of both memory and history. Yet even these more open spaces cannot avoid the problem of representation that plagues any effort to contain—or desegregate—the past with an image, a word, or an object.

CONCLUSION Museumification of Memory I knew, not from memory, but from hope, that there were other models by which to live. — Carrie Mae Weems

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June 2013, the first African American president of the United States visited Robben Island Museum, while South Africa’s first democratically elected president lay in critical condition at a hospital in Pretoria. Before entering former president Nelson Mandela’s old prison cell, President Barack Obama reportedly instructed his two daughters, One thing you guys might not be aware of is that the idea of political nonviolence first took root here in South Africa because Mahatma Gandhi was a lawyer here in South Africa. When he went back to India the principles ultimately led to Indian independence, and what Gandhi did inspired Martin Luther King.1

This condensed history added an extra layer of meaning to the already highly symbolic and emotionally charged visit. Obama offered it during his only visit to South Africa as president, at a time when many of us awaited updates about Mandela’s ailing health. The distinction between Robben Island as a museum and Robben Island as a prison was as muddled during the visit as it is during countless other tourist encounters on the island. Standing at the limestone quarry where Mandela and other political prisoners were forced to work to the point of exhaustion, we are compelled to construct narratives linking our

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presence to the past. For Obama, this involved constructing a narrative linking Gandhi’s time in South Africa—which incidentally did not include a stay at Robben Island, though he was imprisoned elsewhere—to the independence of India brought about through nonviolent practices and ideologies that would later inspire Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, which led to the enfranchisement of African Americans whose descendants were able to vote for Sasha and Malia’s father. Presenting this information to his daughters, Obama served as a mediator along with the museum apparatus itself in the cross-generational transmission of knowledge as they were meant to orient themselves in relation to a series of historical events leading up to their visit.2 Robben Island is no longer a prison; it is a museum. The prison operated as a powerful social institution that sought to control the lives of its captives by enforcing an elaborate system of rules, norms, and practices that determined every thing from sleep schedules to eating rituals. The fact that Robben Island is no longer a prison does not escape today’s visitor; however, the fact that it is still a social institution often does. We pay a fee to be admitted, travel on a commercial ferry, and listen as paid tour guides shepherd us along a predetermined route; there are any number of practices, norms, and rituals built into a museum experience though we may experience them differently. We know that something important happened here and there is certainly one less layer of mediation at museums like Robben Island or on any of the Nazi concentration camp tours, where the ruins of atrocity serve as an eerie memorial.3 We are so riveted by our confrontation with the past along with our habitual need to link ourselves to it that we can overlook our involvement in reinventing these sites as sites of collective memory. Throughout this book I have examined what the creation and maintenance of museums reveal about the construction of collective memories about periods of conflict and division. Through museumification processes—the proliferation of museums as sites of memory— the past is seemingly contained, sectioned off as a “foreign country” that we are granted access to. Referencing British writer L. P. Hartley’s classic observation that “the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” historian and cultural geographer David Lowenthal argues that through acts of “time travel” in contemporary society we

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turn to historic pasts for a variety of reasons including nostalgia and affirmation.4 In the aftermath of intense civil strife, searching for coherent moral lessons can function as salve and suture. By displaying coherent narratives that locate social disintegration and fragmentation as artifacts of a bygone era distinct from the present, the collective as a unifying force is restored. This restoration hinges on the illusion that consensus has been reached not only about a set of lessons about the nature of past conflict, but also that conflict and trauma are both indeed objects of the past. To belong to the collective is to subscribe to a certain way of remembering that orients the individual. Along these lines, directing skepticism toward the content of memory narratives is less rewarding than understanding the underlying longings and sentiments motivating them. Every country develops unique styles of remembrance that correspond to specific events, traditions, and founding myths, and within every country we can detect semiautonomous mnemonic communities where members bond through customs somewhat distinct but typically compatible with those of the larger national community.5 Some have studied how cross-national differences in the construction of collective memories of ostensibly identical events expose how national identities, cultures, and political ideologies are reproduced and woven into understandings of the past.6 Although the United StatesSouth Africa comparison involves examining two very different histories of oppression and exclusion, it sheds light on similar tensions between universalism and particularism as much as between remembering and forgetting in representing national histories and collective identities. Despite vast differences between the two countries, this book has uncovered a common set of ideological, political economic, and institutional dilemmas involved in the public display of histories marred by violence. As public sites that we visit to gaze at the past as if it were indeed a foreign country distinct from our everyday practices, museums play an impor tant role in reproducing par ticular kinds of identities. In both the United States and South Africa, museum directors and curators seek to balance a desire to celebrate the struggles and victories of freedom movements and to document the brutality of white supremacist regimes with an impulse to present unifying historical accounts that affirm a common destiny for all citizens. Ultimately, these

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fraught histories are refracted through the lens of group identity narratives that reveal more about present-day longings for community and social cohesion than about the nature and legacies of state violence. The United States-South Africa comparison is particularly powerful given the complexity of identities forged around centuries of aggression that curators attempt to make sense of and bring into harmony by settling disputes and presenting them as artifacts. For example, the Smithsonian’s NMAAHC has attracted both praise and condemnation as some celebrate it as a long overdue acknowledgment of the centrality of black history in American life, while others see it as an uncomfortable reminder of a past better forgotten. In postapartheid South Africa, the prominence of colonial and apartheid histories in the national memorial landscape has been treated as both an element of and an obstacle to national unity two decades after the first democratic elections. Such disputes are not primarily about the actual museums nor the histories themselves; rather they are about the nature and limits of pluralism or multiculturalism as national ideologies. This essentially moral or normative project to restore the collective as sacred by reimagining its boundaries is dependent on a set of material practices that unfold in the museum’s “backstage.”7 Here, we catch a glimpse at the work of collective memory as a cultural product. Throughout the book, the political economic and institutional contexts of memory work have been rendered visible as the curtain was pulled back, exposing the material, if not profane, realities of constructing memory as collective and history as shared. The staff turnover, budget shortfalls, and infrastructure costs are hidden from view, but are essential elements of cultural production and consumption. In this material realm of museum-making the constructed nature of collective memory is especially apparent as sites of memory begin to resemble sites of employment. This does not preclude them from being places where “memory crystallizes and secretes itself,”8 but it does demonstrate that the concentration of mnemonic activity at museums and other memorials is not inevitable. In the case of most museums, it requires a physical building, staff, programming, and market (not just public) demand. Certainly, the costs of collective narratives are not just fiscal in nature. We saw throughout the book, but especially in chapter 4, that

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revised historical content is not always embraced. When people speak out against collective representations of the past they deviate from what has become the norm or standard ways to view the past and understand its contemporary significance. These memory deviants routinely challenge assertions or rather assumptions that these accounts are collective and representative. They are the lingering specters that haunt the project to construct collective memories. Even more importantly, through their agitation, which takes a variety of forms, they repossess the idea of collective life, insisting that it accommodate a greater range of thought, identity, and memory. In both the United States and South Africa, while these voices exist at the periphery, they raise questions about the role of collective memory-making projects like museums in reproducing the familiar visual and discursive language of racial and national identities that is itself rooted in histories of oppression and exclusion. The museumification of memory involves masking the symbolic and material work involved in constructing a consensual version of the past as a shared past, which marks membership in the collective. There need not be any uniform or unified version of the past nor any unified version of social identities such as race and ethnicity; these are all so subjective, uneven, and contradictory that they cannot be contained within a narrative let alone within a museum. The desire to summarize or capture human experience, identity, and memory has less to do with confronting difficult histories than it does with restoring faith in the unity of the collective. Like all social facts, these collective representations, whether revised or not, have a constraining and coercive force to them. To belong to the group is to remember like the group. The expansion of museums as places where this type of group qua memory work transpires is regularly taken for granted. Typically, discussions about the affect of mass democratic and countercultural movements on public cultural institutions like museums stress that they have become more inclusive and more embracing of lived experience as a valuable source of knowledge about the world.9 Remarking that museums are especially susceptible to shifting public mood and social climate, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, “Museums, more than archives and history departments, have travelled the distance needed to keep up with changes that mark late democracies.”10 While many of us may applaud the inclusion of

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so-called embodied experiences, vernacular memories, and subaltern voices within museum, we need not assume that these spaces are no longer biased or pedagogical in the sense that they still instruct us about social boundaries under the banner of authenticity this time rather than science. Also, this is not a condition of late democratic society alone; it is a condition of museums everywhere participating within a globalizing industry. Indeed, the representation of embodied experience and everyday people is still a representation and a cultural product that feeds into a master narrative about the transformation of social difference as a source of division and strife into one of shared purpose and commitment. How can we account for this impulse to construct coherent narratives of collective life in the face of deep fragmentation? In the United States, the way of grappling with traumatic racial histories is through a racial identity framework, while in South Africa a national identity framework is used. They are both identity formation frameworks and they both still present triumphant histories, despite positioning themselves as alternative to traditional historical conventions and approaches to representing and studying national histories. The fact that they both rely on identity narratives is telling in two key ways. First, we address pain and violence through these types of narratives because the pain is sandwiched between a prior and post period that are viewed as inspiring. There is still an impetus to represent collective identities that are redeeming because we are meant to locate our present selves in them. Second, these museums imagine and then target multiple audiences, who often have different interpretations of the same material, but as tourists, similar expectations to be educated, entertained, validated, and even absolved. South African education scholar and advocate Jonathan Jansen cautions us against this type of thinking—not to get on our high horse about revision and polarize the heroes, victims, perpetrators in ways that are not useful. In highlighting how contemporary South African narratives of nation on display at museums unwittingly exclude perceptions of the past that deviate from the new norms of collective memory, Jansen identifies public history as a source of grief for white youth, particularly those with Afrikaner heritage, who feel alienated and misrecognized.11 In pursuit of a consensus-driven memory that makes sense of the current social order and political ideologies, the

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complex emotions, memories, and identities at play are flattened or caricatured. Jansen stresses that without knowing the oppressor we never fully grasp the nature of oppression. Yet, museums exhibiting revised historical material do not permit us to know anyone, certainly not the oppressed whose memories, identities, and emotions are just as diverse and incapable of being captured for display. While these struggles may appear more volatile in relatively newly democratic and postcolonial countries like South Africa, they are neither new phenomena nor geographically dependent. They are facts of public life in the United States as much as in South Africa and well beyond. After all, the creation and reproduction of nations is inherently exclusionary and involves a variety of violent acts, at least during inception. French philosopher Ernest Renan advocated actively forgetting these violent histories: Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality. Indeed, historical enquiry brings to light deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political formations.12

Instead, violent pasts are shaped into plot lines of a storied past, into identity narratives that celebrate collective triumph over evil. The survivor groups and their descendants often challenge official state-driven attempts to shape the process of collective remembrance (erasure). A robust national narrative can expand or contract over time, and the line between remembering and forgetting is hardly distinct, but the important attribute is that it is a collective or consensual act. While professional historians and other academics exist within an institutional setting and are themselves emotional beings with personal biases and subjective stances, their work is somewhat isolated from public reactions. This distance clears a space to unsettle narratives that can upset the basic claims and premises of identity-driven narratives. For example, in South Africa the general embrace of the “rainbow nation” as a metaphor for national identity along with the corresponding ideology of nonracialism has been called into question by research indicating not only persistent racial cleavages, but also a resurgence in ethnic identification.13 In fact, in Ethnicity Inc. John and Jean Comaroff show that the growing international market for histori-

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cal tourism in South Africa has created new opportunities for the commodification of racial-ethnic differences.14 In both the United States and South Africa, scholars have called into question the way nonviolent forms of collective resistance and civil disobedience have come to typify the freedom struggles that are generally reduced to the activities of a single organization—the ANC in South Africa and the SCLC in the United States.15 Other comparative research shines a light on the little-known central role of women in challenging state oppression.16 Most of the general population is far more likely to access institutionalized historical content at museums than through academic literature.17 Some of this material works its way into museums by way of curators, researchers, and collaborations with historians and other academics. However, the range of political-economic, institutional, and ideological issues influencing content is far-reaching. Indeed, the range of issues influencing the way history is studied and presented is diverse, in academia as much as at museums. Also, we need not turn exclusively to scholarship as way to critique the way collective memory and public history get constructed at museums. Our own personal understandings of the past and self-perceptions will often conflict with the metanarratives on display. What is at stake in these conversations for collective memory and public history? The fact that these types of oversights, silences, edits, and distortions are visible in new museums says something about the collective project—it is not about getting history right, but about constructing the collective. There is no such thing as getting history right in the first place, but in the pursuit of a compelling representation of collective life and identity, historical narratives are presented as truth and revisions as correctives. They are fully invested in the project of collective identity, not in unpacking and disassembling notions of memory and identity. On many occasions our embodied knowledge or personal memories and recollections do not correspond to those on display. We realize the gaps as we visit these museums if we apply a skeptical eye and are attentive to how our sense of self and of the past intersects with that of the museum or how our own ambiguous relationship with notions of collective life and identity influences our desires to confront the past, celebrate the past, or divorce ourselves from the past. Through acts of consumption and patronage we collude in the reproduction of simulations of the past. The museum, after all, presents a simulated reality, a simulated past.18 As we travel across the

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museum floor and gaze at the displays, we are more or less aware of this collusion and of the simulated reality surrounding us. Is there space for an avant-garde history museum that could be truly multivocal, nonlinear, and disjointed? Can such a museum resist the urge to moralize and resolve what is treated as the past? Could the identity formation format or framework be dropped? Can we think about the nature of conflict, violence, and even identity outside the usual social scripts? To some extent, we have discussed this in relation to the memory deviants of all shape and stripes in chapter 4, but those were primarily related to voices at the periphery as critics of the museum from the outside or radical artists working on a temporary installation. Could an entire mainstream museum divorce itself from the collective project? What would a history museum disinvested or uninterested in displaying a socially responsible collective memory resemble? Would it still be a museum? Located in Los Angeles, the Museum of Tolerance (MOT) takes a different approach to representing histories of violence and exclusion. While Holocaust memory is a central focus, it is juxtaposed with a vast range of topics from cyberbullying to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The museum, which has expanded to two new locations in New York City and West Jerusalem, also includes a variety of permanent and temporary installations about racial segregation and discrimination toward Latinos and African Americans. On the one hand, the museum unsettles the familiar by attempting to illustrate a common thread across such diverse cases, hoping to “confront all forms of prejudice and discrimination . . . not only to remind us of the past, but remind us to act.”19 While these violent histories are not divorced from identity narratives, interweaving these histories (though concentrated in different sections of the museum) to some extent effectively interweaves identities, particularly racial, ethnic, and national. Yet, it is telling that this is a museum of tolerance and not one of violence; an uplifting message about shared humanity and compassion guides the presentation of historical trauma as a way to elevate a certain vision of (global) public life. Like the other museums discussed throughout this book, the MOT attempts to draw its audience into the collective narrative about social consensus or the consensus society, one in which we tolerate each other. Also similar to the museums discussed previously, before and ever since its opening in 1993, the MOT has been embroiled in one dispute after another. Some have called the mission and con-

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tent into question, viewing the museum itself as exclusionary in terms of which histories are represented and in what manner.20 Some local residents have lambasted the museum for being a “bad neighbor” by drawing throngs of tourists into a residential area and for proposing to expand the building.21 Others have called into question why the museum is partially funded by a state with severe budget shortfalls and its relationship to a vast international art-corporate network with political influence.22 The key point here is that even at this museum that takes a somewhat novel approach to histories of violence, we see a familiar set of dilemmas around the act of representation. This brings us back to a reconsideration of the fundamental nature and limits of museums. In Greek my thology, the Muses, the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (Memory), enshrined the stories of the gods and goddesses, transmitting them to a broader audience in the form of art, history, and literature. Similarly, contemporary historical museums legitimate, articulate, and reproduce ideas about the past and transmit them across generations. Though they possessed the ability to mold memory and knowledge, the Muses did not operate in isolation of their social context; their activities conformed to existing power structures and norms. Shortly after becoming director of the Brooklyn Museum of New York in 1971, Duncan Cameron declared that “museums are in desperate need of psychotherapy.”23 He remarked that they were neither the great temples or “cabinets of curiosities” of yesteryear nor the public forums that many people wanted them to be today. He insisted that while reform was needed, the type of social debate, interrogation, and experimentation some demanded of him and other museum professionals was fundamentally at odds with museums, which by their very institutional presence are part of the establishment or need to assimilate to the status quo in order to survive. In reality museums have always been forums or contentious sites heavily involved in validating some versions of the past and some identity claims while denying others. Not only are these museums deeply invested in making the collective—and certain notions of collective life and identity—sacred, they are also sites of employment or places of work. All of these material realities affect the sacred project in ways that call into question the museum as an institution itself. This raises deeper questions about the representational project of museums, about museums as spaces that represent people today by implicating us in narratives

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about the past. However, there is an inescapable disconnect between the personal and the collective because of their failure to fully represent any time, place, or person, especially the ordinary person (usually done by people who themselves are socially extraordinary in terms of status). With representation there is always a gap between those being represented and those doing the representing within the meaningmaking domain of museums. Representational work always risks backlash, triggering frustrations at being spoken for, because a certain degree of paternalism is unavoidable in what effectively becomes a source of silence. To consent to being spoken for is to consent to the will of another, to forgo one’s own voice. As sites of memory, museums distract from all of the ways the past surrounds us because there is no real distinction between past, present, and future. These two critiques point to the inherently reductionist quality of representing the past, let alone actual people’s lives and identities. We may ask ourselves, what is the point of visiting the past at museums, at gazing at what is essentially someone else’s pain and grief? People do not generally think of themselves as being voyeuristic during such excursions. Alternatively, why build these memorials to past pain and failure? These histories are not presented in ways that one leaves in darkness or at least they are not designed to. Instead, they offer a framework to understand today, to be grateful for today, to view today as peaceful and harmonious and acrimony as a topic of the past. By attending museums we are being appropriately social, being part of an idea of collective life made endearing and redeeming by constructing it as the outcome of a fraught past. The past is ultimately unknowable—whether there are living memories of it or not—and can certainly not be fitted to a narrative, at least not unproblematically. The desire to do so—to desegregate that which is beyond our grasp—originates in a more profound search for consensus as a form of closure and resolution, an attempt to make sense of emotions, memories, and expectations that defy logic. We seek solace and refuge in a past that is little more than a collective fantasy.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION: DESEGREGATING THE PAST 1. For a discussion about the Krok brothers’ involvement in the skinlightening consumer market and their later role in the creation of Gold Reef City see L. Thomas, “Skin Lighteners, Black Consumers, and Jewish Entrepreneurs in South Africa,” History Workshop Journal 73 (2012): 259–282. 2. For example, see J. Olick and B. Coughlin, “The Politics of Regret: Analytical Frames,” in Politics and the Past: On Repairing Historical Injustices, ed. J. Torpey (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 37. Also see L. Payne, Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007). 3. See B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). Also see A. Smith, “The Nation: Invented, Imagined, Reconstructed?,” Journal of International Studies 20, no. 3 (1991): 359; and A. Smith, “Memory and Modernity: Reflections on Ernest Gellner’s Theory of Nationalism,” Nations and Nationalism 2, no. 3 (1996): 371–383. For a discussion of the impetus to forget periods of national conflict see E. Renan, “What Is a Nation?,” in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. G. Eley and R. G. Suny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 41–55. 4. For more information on phenomenological approaches and orientations see S. Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006). 5. See G. Seidman, “Blurred Lines: Nonviolence in South Africa,” PS: Political Science and Politics 33, no. 2 (June 2000): 161–167.

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6. See S. Greenberg, Race and State in Capitalist Development (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980); G. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); and J. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 7. G. Cuthbertson, “Racial Attraction: Tracing the Historiographical Alliances between South Africa and the United States,” Journal of American History 18, no. 3 (1994): 1123–1136, 1131. 8. See A. Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Mara Loveman’s excellent review “Making ‘Race’ and Nation in the United States, South Africa, and Brazil: Taking ‘Making’ Seriously,” Theory and Society 28, no. 6 (1999): 902–927. Also see G. Seidman, Manufacturing Militance: Workers’ Movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970–1985 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 9. See I. Evans, Cultures of Violence: Racial Violence and the Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 10. For a detailed examination of these processes see H. Klug, Constituting Democracy: Law, Globalism and South Africa’s Political Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 11. For more on the limits of truth and reconciliation commissions in general and South Africa’s in par ticular see Payne, Unsettling Accounts. Also see the special issue of Radical History Review for winter 2007. 12. See E. Doxtader, “Making Rhetorical History in a Time of Transition: The Occasion, Constitution, and Representation of South African Reconciliation,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 4, no. 2 (2001): 223–260; and K. Moodley and H. Adam, “Race and Nation in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Current Sociology 48, no. 3 (2000): 51–69. 13. It was not until 1998 that President Bill Clinton issued the first national apology for slavery during his tour of Africa. For more about the anatomy, politics, and limitations of national apologies see J. Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparations Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). 14. For more analyses of public engagement with the memory of the civil rights movement see the essays in R. Romano and L. Raiford, eds., The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006). Also see O. Dwyer, “Interpreting the Civil Rights Movement: Place, Memory, and Conflict,” Professional Geographer 52, no. 4 (2000): 660–671. 15. See B. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge of American Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 16. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu defines symbolic violence as the ideological framework or underpinning of social inequality that is internalized by

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19. 20.

21.

22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

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individuals who then participate in the reproduction of inequality. See P. Bourdieu, “Social Space and Symbolic Power,” Sociolog ical Theory 7, no. 1 (1989): 14–25. Also see P. Bourdieu and L. Wacquant, “Language, Gender, and Symbolic Violence,” An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992): 339–342. See M. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. L. A. Cosner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). See R. Greenstein, “Racial Formation: Towards a Comparative Study of Collective Identities in South Africa and the United States,” Social Dynamics 19, no. 2 (1993): 1–29. S. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe (June 2008): 4 and 8. Political scientist Rogers Smith uses this phrase to capture the way stories, symbols, and emotional ties foment a sense of belonging to a political community and help define citizenship. See R. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Nancy Fraser discusses the relationship between cultural recognition and redistributive politics in “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age,” New Left Review 212 (1995): 68–93. See E. Foner, Who Owns History? Rethinking the Past in a Changing World (New York: Hill and Wang, 2002). See W. Leon and R. Rosenzweig, eds., History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). For more analysis of the exhibition and the politics surrounding it see V. Zolberg, “Contested Remembrance: The Hiroshima Exhibit Controversy,” Theory and Society 27, no. 4 (1998): 565–590. The Smithsonian would find itself ensnarled in a number of controversies that have been linked to the culture war. See I. Karp, C. Mullen Kreamer, and S. Lavine, eds., Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992). Also see I. Karp and S. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990); and T. Luke, Museum Politics: Power Plays at the Exhibition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). See M. Loveman, National Colors: Racial Classification and the State in Latin Amer ica (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). For a comprehensive overview of the changing face of South African historiography, including the rise of “radical history,” see A. Cobley, “Does Social History Have a Future? The Ending of Apartheid and Recent Trends in South African Historiography,” Journal of Southern African Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 613–625. For example, Jonathan Jansen studied the way white college students at a historically Afrikaner college related to South Africa’s recent apartheid past and how to adjust pedagogies and curricula to accommodate a new

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32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

40. 41.

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more racially diverse student body. See J. Jansen, Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009). B. Schwartz, “The Social Context of Commemoration: A Study in Collective Memory,” Social Forces 61, no. 2 (December 1982): 377. Jeffrey Olick describes the differences in approaches to the study of collective memory in “Collective Memory: The Two Cultures,” Sociolog ical Theory 17 (1999): 333–348. Also see B. Schwartz and H. Schuman, “History, Commemoration, and Belief: Abraham Lincoln in American Memory,” American Sociolog ical Review 70 (2005): 183–203. Sociologists Joachim Savelsberg and Ryan King make this point in their study of the relationship between collective memories of violence and legal frameworks across a variety of U.S. case studies in American Memories: Atrocities and the Law (New York: Russell Sage, 2011). E. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. K. Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995). See M. Halbwachs, “Social Frameworks of Memory,” On Collective Memory, 96–124. E. Zerubavel, Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). This observation would seem true even in situations where people are unwilling to use the language of race, class, and gender to talk about the past, as found in Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen’s survey presented in The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). For an overview see D. Chakrabarty, “Subaltern Studies and Postcolonial Historiography,” Nepantla: Views from the South 1, no. 1 (2000): 9–32. See G. Spivak, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. R. Guha and G. Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 3–32. See Popular Memory Group, “Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method,” in Making Histories: Studies in History-Writing and Politics, ed. R. Johnson et al. (London: Hutchinson, 1982), 205–252. See, for example, J. Bodnar, Remaking Amer ica: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992). See J. Young, Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993). See P. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7. Charles Maier is more concerned about a retreat into the past and about memory as a postmodern indulgence and distraction. See C. Maier, “A Surfeit of Memory: Reflection on History, Melancholy and Denial,” History and Memory 5, no. 2 (1993): 136–152. This conception of historians is shared by others such as Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who writes about the production of histories and about a history

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44.

45.

46. 47.

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49. 50. 51. 52.

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guild in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). See S. MacDonald and G. Frye, eds., Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Also see T. Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995). Ibid. Also see S. MacDonald, “Expanding Museum Studies: An Introduction,” in A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. S. MacDonald (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 1–13. For a broad survey of the field see B. Carbonell, ed., Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004). Also see S. MacDonald, ed., Museum Studies (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). C. Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995). D. Cameron, “The Museum, a Temple or the Forum,” in Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Con temporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift, ed. Gail Anderson, 2nd ed. (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 61–73. See C. Teeger and V. Vinitzky-Seroussi, “Controlling for Consensus: Commemorating Apartheid in South Africa,” Symbolic Interaction 30, no. 1 (2007): 57–78. J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 8. For example, see S. Keene, “All That Is Solid?—Museums and the Postmodern,” Public Archaeology 5, no. 3 (2006): 185–197. See E. Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959). This treatment builds on Howard Becker’s classic observation about the role of social agents or moral entrepreneurs in defining socially acceptable and deviant behav ior, as well as Elizabeth Jelin’s subsequent application of the concept more specifically to conflicts around historical memory and justice across Latin America. See H. Becker, “Moral Entrepreneurs,” chapter 8 in Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Free Press, 1963). Also see E. Jelin, State Repression and the Labor of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). For more information about the history of racial codes and classification in both countries see D. Posel, “Race as Common Sense: Racial Classification in Twentieth Century South Africa,” African Studies Review 44, no. 2 (2001): 87–113. Also see M. Omi and H. Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s (New York: Routledge, 1994).

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1. MEMORY ENTREPRENEURS: HISTORY IN THE MAKING 1. I draw on Howard Becker’s discussion of moral entrepreneurs as people who organize campaigns and mobilize resources in an effort to control how the public understands social problems and potential solutions, as well as Elizabeth Jelin’s use of the term “memory entrepreneurs” in her work on Latin Amer ica to speak more specifically to the way the narratives about the past are called upon to legitimate and contest political power. See H. Becker, “Moral Entrepreneurs,” Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1963), chap. 8. Also see E. Jelin, State Repression and the Labor of Memory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). 2. N. Mandela, Presidential Address on Heritage Day, September 24, 1997. Full text available at http://www.mandela.gov.za/mandela_speeches/1997/970924 _heritage.htm (last retrieved June 12, 2016). 3. P. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7. 4. See R. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001). 5. For example, see T. Skocpol, “Unraveling from Above,” American Prospect 25 (March–April 1996): 20–25. 6. B. Bozzoli, “Intellectuals, Audiences, and Histories: South African Experiences, 1978–88,” Radical History Review 46, no. 7 (1990): 239. 7. South African historian Colin Bundy’s work shed light on the relationships between so-called liberal and nationalist historical production during the twentieth century. See C. Bundy, “An Image of Its Own Past? Towards a Comparison of American and South African Historiography,” Radical History Review 46, no. 7 (1990): 117–143. 8. For a discussion of ties between South African and English social history see D. Posel, “Social History and the Wits History Workshop,” African Studies 69, no. 1 (2010): 29–40. 9. Bozzoli discusses how South African social historians depart from prevailing understandings of culture among Marxists by insisting on its centrality in understanding both oppression and the possibility of emancipation. See Bozzoli, “Intellectuals, Audiences, and Histories.” 10. Ibid., 239. 11. For a discussion of the reductionist tendencies of social history as a new form of intellectual hegemony see R. Deacon, “Hegemony, Essentialism, and Radical History in South Africa,” South African Historical Journal 24 (1991): 166–184. In that same special issue also see W. Worger, “White Radical History in South Africa” (pp. 145–153). 12. Luli Callinicos’s series “A People’s History of South Africa” is the best example of this approach toward linking subjective experiences with objective analysis of economic change. In par ticular see L. Callinicos, Gold and Workers (Johannesburg: Raven Press, 1981).

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13. For a useful comparison see Bundy, “Image of Its Own Past?” 14. See P. Bonner, “Keynote Address to the ‘Life after Thirty’ Colloquium,” African Studies 69, no. 1 (2010): 13–27. 15. See Bozzoli, “Intellectuals, Audiences, and Histories.” 16. Ibid. 17. See L. Callinicos, “Popular History in the Eighties,” Radical History Review 46, no. 7 (1990): 285–297. 18. L. Callinicos, “The People’s Past: Towards Transforming the Present,” Critical Arts 4, no. 2 (1986): 37. 19. For a description of their efforts to popularize their work see Bonner, “Keynote Address.” 20. Lesli Witz and Ciraj Rassool make this claim, noting that under apartheid access to public institutions was limited and many academic historians remained ambivalent about public engagement. See L. Witz and C. Rassool, “The Dog, the Rabbit, and the Reluctant Historians,” South African Historical Journal 27, no. 1 (1992): 238–242. 21. For a concise discussion of the problematic use of oral history among social historians see L. Witz and C. Rassool, “Making Histories,” Kronos 34 (2008): 6–15. 22. For example, see N. Nieftagodien, “The Place of ‘the Local’ in History Workshop’s Local History,” African Studies 69, no. 1 (2010): 41–61. 23. See Posel, “Social History.” 24. Ibid. 25. For a discussion of the rise of the UWC as a site of politically engaged historical revision see A. Odendaal, “Developments in Popular History in the Western Cape,” Radical History Review 46, no. 7 (1990): 369–375. 26. See C. Rassool, “Power, Knowledge, and the Politics of Public Pasts,” African Studies 69, no. 1 (2010): 79–101. 27. For a detailed analysis of the conference see the report and discussions between Cynthia Kros, Carolyn Hamilton, Leslie Weitz, and Ciraj Rassool in South African Historical Journal 27 (1992): 225–242. 28. Interview conducted August 1, 2006. 29. For a fuller account of SAMA and the fragmentation of the museum community see A. Hall and C. Kros, “New Premises for Public History in South Africa,” Public Historian 16, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 15–32. 30. The text of this declaration was previously available at http://www.samaweb .org.za / hist .htm (last accessed October 15, 2007). SAMA’s summary is available at http://sama.za.net/home-page/about-us/ (last accessed June 12, 2016). Also quoted in A. Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003), 300. 31. See I. Coetzee and G.-M. Van der Waal, eds., The Conservation of Culture: Changing Context and Challenges: Proceedings of the South African Conference on the Conservation of Culture, Cape Town, 6–10 June 1988 (Pretoria: Conference Organisers, 1988).

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32. M. Buthelezi, “Culture Conservation: The Black Perspective,” in Coetzee and Van der Waal, Conservation of Culture, 192–197. 33. Interview conducted August 1, 2006. 34. The museum hired Integrated Marketing Research to conduct a series of surveys among the general public. For more information about the museum’s transformation see S. Byala, A Place That Matters Yet: John Grubbins’s MuseumAfrica in the Postcolonial World (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Also see D. Van Tonder, “From Mausoleum to Museum: Revisiting Public History at the Inauguration of Museum Africa,” South African Historical Journal 31 (November 1994): 165–183. 35. For a detailed description of the new exhibitions see ibid. 36. Carolyn Hamilton raises these concerns in “Against the Museum as Chameleon,” South African Historical Journal 31 (November 1994): 184–190. 37. For a brief account see Patricia Davison, “Redressing the Past: Integrating the Social History Collections at Iziko,” South African Museum Association Bulletin 31 (May 2005): 101–104. 38. See L. Segal and P. Bonner, Soweto: A History (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1998). 39. See Rassool, “Power, Knowledge.” 40. Ibid., 85. 41. National Executive Committee of the African National Congress, “Position Paper on the Cultural and Academic Boycott,” Lusaka, May 1989. Available at http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/boycotts/index.html. 42. Ibid. 43. For a detailed analysis of the boycott see R. Nixon, “Sunset on Sun City: The Dilemmas of the Cultural Boycott,” in Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (New York: Routledge, 1994), 155–172. 44. K. Grundy, “Cultural Politics in South Africa: An Inconclusive Transformation,” African Studies Review 39, no. 1 (April 1996): 1–24. 45. Jeremy Cronin makes this point in his review of J. Seekings, The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983–1991 (Cape Town: David Philip, 2000). 46. Known as the “People’s Poet,” Mbuli would go on to recite a poem at Nelson Mandela’s 1994 inauguration, but would never achieve the same status and political influence that he held during the strug gle. In 1997 he was arrested and jailed for armed burglary, though he adamantly maintains his innocence. See “South Africa’s ‘People’s Poet’ Free from Jail,” BBC News, November 28, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk /2/ hi /africa /3246734.stm. 47. The ANC created its own internal Department of Arts and Culture (DAC), which focused on the role of artists and culture in the democratic transition. After gaining political power in 1994, it created the South African Department of Arts, Culture, Science, and Technology (DACST), which was

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then divided into the Department of Arts and Culture (DAC) and the Department of Science and Technology (DST) in 2002. Grundy, “Cultural Politics in South Africa.” Ibid. A. Sachs, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,” Drama Review 35, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 188. BEE is a national labor policy designed to increase the labor force participation, training, and promotion of people from groups systematically disadvantaged during apartheid. DACST, White Paper on Arts, Culture and Heritage: All Our Legacies, Our Common Future (Pretoria: DACST, 1996), available at http://www.dac.gov.za/content /white-paper-arts-culture-and-heritage-0 (last accessed June 12, 2016). Odendaal also served on a number of museum boards and became the first director of the Robben Island Museum in Cape Town. Baartman’s remains were removed from public display in 1974, though Musée de l’Homme retained possession until 2002, when they were finally returned to South Africa. For more information about Baartman’s life in South Africa and Europe, see R. Holmes, Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009). Interview conducted August 3, 2006. B. Ngubane, “Welcome Address to the Southern Flagship Museum Council,” March 25, 1999. See R. Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). My understanding of group-making projects is based on sociologist Rogers Brubaker’s notion of groupism. See R. Brubaker, “Ethnicity Without Groups,” European Journal of Sociology 43, no. 3 (2002): 163–189. W. E. B. Du Bois and Car ter G. Woodson were the first African Americans to receive doctorate degrees from Harvard University, in 1895 and 1912, respectively. For a discussion of women’s preservation activities at libraries, archives, and other collections see F. D. Ruffins, “Lifting as We Climb: Black Women and the Preservation of African American History and Culture,” Gender and History 6, no. 3 (1994): 376–396. Like the South African social historians discussed above, Du Bois recognized the limitations of official data, so he combined conventional methods and sources, such as census data, with new survey and ethnographic material. For example, see W. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996, 1899). Also see W. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in Amer ica, 1860–1880 (New York: Free Press, 1998, 1933). See C. Woodson, A Century of Negro Migration (Washington, D.C.: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1918). Full text available at

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69.

70. 71.

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73. 74. 75. 76.

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https://archive.org/details/centuryofnegromi00wood (last retrieved June 12, 2016). Also see C. Woodson, The Mis- Education of the Negro (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1990, 1933). See E. F. Frazier, Negro Family in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940). Full text available at https://archive.org/details /negrofamilyinthe031737mbp (last retrieved June 12, 2016). See J. Goggin, “Countering White Racist Scholarship: Car ter G. Woodson and the Journal of Negro History,” Journal of Negro History 68, no. 4 (1983): 355–375. A. Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Cannot Dismantle the Master’s House,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, Calif.: Crossing Press, 1984), 112. R. Ferguson, “A Special Place Within the Order of Knowledge: The Art of Kara Walker and the Conventions of African American History,” American Quarterly 61, no. 1 (2009): 186. For a discussion of how the production of black history reaffirms heterosexism see M. Richardson, “No More Secrets, No More Lies: African American History and Compulsory Heterosexuality,” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 3 (2003): 63–76. The organization and journal were later renamed the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) and the Journal of African American History, respectively. Taken from Woodson’s correspondence with J. Franklin Jameson at the Library of Congress, as quoted in J. Goggin, “Car ter G. Woodson and the Collection of Source Materials for Afro-American History,” American Archivist 48, no. 3 (1985): 61–71. C. Woodson, “Negro History Week,” Journal of Negro History 11, no. 2 (1926): 239. For a comparison of Woodson’s and Du Bois’s views on public education see M. Apple, “Can Education Change Society? Du Bois, Woodson, and the Politics of Social Transformation,” Review of Education 1, no. 1 (2013): 32–56. For example, LaGarrett King and Anthony Brown discuss how chain retailer Walmart observes Black History Month as part of its corporate branding. See L. King and A. Brown, “Black History, Inc! Investigating the Production of Black History Through Walmart’s Corporate Website,” Multicultural Perspectives 14, no. 1 (2012): 4–10. See J. H. Franklin, “Serious Truth-Telling or a Triumph in Tokenism?,” Journal for Blacks in Higher Education (January 1998): 87–92. Ibid. T. Williams, “The Problem of Black History Month,” Nieve Roja Review (1997), available at http://nieveroja.colostate.edu/issue1/blkhist.htm. For a discussion of the emergence of radical revisionist history at this time see J. Wiener, “Radical Historians and the Crisis in American History, 1959–1980,” Journal of American History 76, no. 2 (1989): 399–434.

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77. See F. D. Ruffins, “Recovering Yesterday: An Overview of the Collection and Preservation of Black History,” Black Issues in Higher Education 13, no. 5 (1997): 16–22. 78. Other organizations, especially the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Congress of Racial Equality were also involved in the early push for black museum development. 79. BAM is regularly regarded as the cultural wing of the Black Power movement. For an examination of its political, literary, and aesthetic elements see J. Smethurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005). 80. Interview conducted August 21, 2007. 81. See Ruffins, “Lifting as We Climb.” 82. For more about the founding of the museum see E. Feldman, The Birth and the Building of the DuSable Museum (Chicago: DuSable Museum Press, 1981). 83. Ibid. 84. See J. Fleming and M. Burroughs, “Dr. Margaret T. Burroughs: Artist, Teacher, Administrator, Writer, Political Activist, and Museum Funder,” Public Historian 21, no. 1 (1999): 31–55. 85. J. Kinard quoted in “Anacostia Advocate: Kinard Shaping a Neighborhood Museum into a Cultural Staple,” Washington Post, September 16, 1977. 86. See J. Fleming and M. Burroughs, “Dr. Margaret T. Burroughs: Artist, Teacher, Administrator, Writer, Political Activist, and Museum Funder,” Public Historian 21, no. 1 (1999): 35. 87. Ibid. 88. Ibid. 89. From H. D. Graham, “On Riots and Riot Commissions: Civil Disorders in the 1960s,” Public Historian 2, no. 4 (1980): 7–27. 90. Some have made similar observations about the rise of black studies programs on college campuses across the country around the same time. See M. Biondi, The Black Revolution on Campus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 91. See J. C. Stewart and F. D. Ruffins, “A Faithful Witness: Afro-American Public History in Historical Perspective, 1828–1984,” in Presenting the Past: Essays on History and the Public, ed. S. P. Benson, S. Brier, and R. Rosenzweig (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 307–336. 92. For more information on the impact of bicentennial funding see ibid. Also see F. D. Ruffins, “Mythos, Memory, and History: African American Preservation Efforts, 1820–1990,” in Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, ed. I. Karp, C. M. Kreamer, and S. D. Lavine (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 506–611. 93. Fleming and Burroughs, “Dr. Margaret T. Burroughs,” 50. The association was renamed the Association of African American Museums (AAAM) in 1997.

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94. AAMA and American Association for State and Local History, Profile of Black Museums: A Survey Commissioned by the African American Museums Association (Washington, D.C.: AAMA, 1988). 95. For a discussion of the role of museums in standardizing civil rights memory in the United States see part 1 of R. Romano and L. Raiford, eds., The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006). 96. For a detailed account of this process see F. D. Ruffins, “Culture Wars Won and Lost, Part II: The National African American Museum Project,” Radical History Review 70 (1998): 78–101. 97. L. G. Bunch, “The Fire This Time: Race, Memory, and the Museum,” Museum News 84, no. 6 (November/December): 50–53. 98. See A. Cobb, “Interview with W. Richard West, Director, National Museum of the American Indian,” American Indian Quarterly 29, nos. 3–4 (2005): 517–537.

2. THE CURATED PAST: REMEMBERING THE COLLECTIVE 1. W. Yeingst and L. Bunch, “Curating the Past: The Woolworth Lunch Counter, Greensboro, North Carolina,” in Exhibiting Dilemmas: Issues of Representation at the Smithsonian, ed. A. Henderson and A. Kaeppler (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 155. Lonnie Bunch is the first director of the Smithsonian’s NMAAHC. 2. This is especially true given that the memory box was a virtual space created on the museum’s website to facilitate sharing while the physical building was still under construction. 3. J. M. Gore, “A Lack of Nation? The Evolution of History in South African Museums, 1825–1945,” South African Historical Journal 51 (2004): 24–46. 4. For a more detailed account of this project see R. Shell, “From Diaspora to Diorama: The UNESCO Feasibility Study for the Cultural Amplification of the Memory of Slavery and the Slave Trade in Southern Africa, Part One: The Slave Lodge,” Quarterly Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa 54, no. 2 (1999): 44–56. 5. In fact, the site was declared a national heritage site in 2011 by the South African Heritage Resource Agency. 6. In September 2004 the California African American Museum hosted Magubane’s exhibition. 7. Michel Foucault describes biopower as the power to define effectively who lives and who dies and locates this power within the modern state. See M. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). 8. See J. Müller, “Constitutional Patriotism: An Introduction,” International Journal of Constitutional Law 6, no. 1 (2008): 67–71.

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9. For a discussion of how a new political ethos is built into the architecture of the site see F. Freschi, “Postapartheid Publics and the Politics of Ornament: Nationalism, Identity, and the Rhetoric of Community in the Decorative Program of the New Constitutional Court, Johannesburg,” Africa Today 54, no. 2 (2007): 26–49. Also see R. Autry, “Memory, Materiality, and the Apartheid Past,” Contexts 9, no. 3 (2010): 46–51. 10. For a discussion of the island’s history, particularly before it became renowned as prison for political prisoners, see H. Deacon, “Remembering Tragedy, Constructing Modernity: Robben Island as a National Monument,” in Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, ed. S. Nuttall and C. Coetzee (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1988), 161–179. 11. “Address by Nelson Mandela on Heritage Day,” September 24, 1997. Available at http://www.mandela.gov.za/mandela_speeches/1997/970924_heritage.htm (last retrieved June 13, 2016). For an original analysis of Mandela’s speech see R. Marback, “The Rhetorical Space of Robben Island,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 34, no. 2 (2004): 7–27. 12. See H. Deacon, “Remembering Tragedy, Constructing Modernity.” Also see C. Shearing and M. Kempa, “A Museum of Hope: A Story of Robben Island,” Annuals of the American Academy of Political Science 592 (March 2004). 13. For a discussion about the controversy surrounding the South African Museum casts see L. Witz, “Transforming Museums in Postapartheid South Africa,” in Museum Frictions: Public Culture and Global Transformations, ed. Ivan Karp et al. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press), 107–134. Also see P. Davison, “Museums and the Reshaping of Memory,” in Nuttall and Coetzee, Negotiating the Past, 143–160. 14. P. Skotnes, “Civilised Off the Face of the Earth: Museum Display and the Silencing of the /Xam,” Poetics Today 22, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 299–321. She also discusses these same issues in “The Politics of Bushman Representations,” in Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa, ed. P. Landau and D. Kaspin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 253–274. 15. Skotnes, “Civilised Off the Face of the Earth.” 16. For more information about the transformations related to Iziko see P. Davison, “Redressing the Past: Integrating the Social History Collections at Iziko,” South African Museums Association Bulletin 31 (May 2005): 101–104. For more information about the new slavery exhibitions, funded by UNESCO, at the Slave Lodge/Cultural History Museum see Shell, “From Diaspora to Diorama.” Also see G. Abrahams-Willis, “Slave Lodge to Become a Major Tourism Magnet,” Quarterly Bulletin of the National Library of South Africa 54, no. 4 (2000): 134–143. For a discussion about indigenous knowledge systems at museums see E. Neluvhalani, “Enabling Transformation in the Heritage Institutions by the Integration of Indigenous

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17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

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Knowledge Systems,” South African Museums Association Bulletin 31 (May 2005): 72–74. For a detailed analysis of the identity and cultural politics involved in this case see S. Robins, “NGOs, ‘Bushmen’ and Double Vision: The Khomani San Land Claim and the Cultural Politics of ‘Community’ and ‘Development’ in the Kalahari,” Journal of Southern African Studies 27, no. 4 (December 2001): 833–853. For more information see A. Gibson, “Great Age Suggested for South African Hominids,” Science 300, no. 5619 (April 25, 2003): 562. Also see D. Curnoe, “Early Homo from Southern Africa: A Cladistic Perspective,” South African Journal of Science 97, nos. 5–6 (2001): 186–190. See News 24 archive “Mbeki Opens Maropeng Centre,” August 12, 2005. Available at http://www.news24.com/SciTech/News/Mbeki-opens-Maropeng -centre-20051207 (last accessed June 13, 2016). Lonnie Bunch, interview conducted September 4, 2012. The most famous example of this is the public outcry following “The Crossroads: The End of World War II, the Atomic Bomb, and the Cold War” exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum in 1995, which featured the restored bomber Enola Gay on display. Critics, including war veterans, objected to the inclusion of material highlighting the mass casualties incurred by the dropping of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. For a discussion about the controversies surrounding this exhibit see V. Zolberg, “Museums as Contested Sites of Remembrance: The Enola Gay Affair,” Sociolog ical Review 43, no. 1 (1995): 69–82. For a discussion of this history see chapter 1. Also see F. D. Ruffins, “Culture Wars Won and Lost, Part III: The National African-American Museum Project,” Radical History Review 70 (1998): 78–101. This analysis is based on significantly updated material from R. Autry, “The Political Economy of Memory: The Challenges of Representing National Conflict at ‘Identity-Driven’ Museums,” Theory and Society 42, no. 1 (2013): 57–80. Quoted from description of the “Africa Speaks” exhibition at the entrance of the museum. Quoted in K. Bradsher, “Up from the Slave Ships: Museum Tells the Story,” New York Times, April 12, 1997. For a detailed description of the “And Still We Rise” exhibition see D. Apel, “Images of Black History: The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History,” Dissent 48 (Summer 2001): 90–95. This guided tour took place May 2, 2006, with the museum’s director, Michele Mitchell, serving as the tour guide. See J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). Interview conducted May 26, 2006. R. Applebaum quoted in E. Rothstein, “The Black History Exhibit: Museums That Tell You What to Think,” New York Times, April 20, 1997.

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31. See J. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993). 32. Interview conducted June 14, 2006. 33. It should be noted that these museums disseminate a version of black history remarkably similar to the narratives popularized by Car ter G. Woodson. They do not engage more recent or controversial scholarship, such as findings about the lower morality rates among enslaved people compared to white Southerners. See R. Fogel and S. Engerman, Time on the Cross (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974). 34. D. Blight quoted in N. Cohen, “In Frederick Douglass Tribute, Slave Folklore and Fact Collide,” New York Times, January 23, 2007. 35. Interview conducted May 8, 2008. 36. Louise Akers quoted in M. Curnutte, “Lynching Exhibit Stirs Visitors to Freedom Center,” Cincinnati Enquirer, January 19, 2010. 37. Rev. P. Donohue quoted in ibid. 38. For a discussion of the way the civil rights movement has been represented through public history see R. Romano and L. Raiford, eds., The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006). 39. For a useful critique of the conventional approaches to the study of the civil rights movement, see J. Fuller, “Debating the Present through the Past: Representations of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1990s,” in Romano and Raiford, Civil Rights Movement in American Memory, 167–196. For a discussion of the erasure or minimization of women’s role in the civil rights movement see P. Brooks, Boycotts, Buses and Passes: Black Women’s Resistance in the U.S. South and South Africa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). Also see F. D. Ruffins, “Lifting as We Climb: Black Women and the Preservation of African American History and Culture,” Gender and History 6, no. 3 (1994): 376–396. 40. For a discussion of the changing cultural meanings of U.S. presidents as cultural symbols see B. Schwartz, “Social Change and Collective Memory: The Democratization of George Washington,” American Sociolog ical Review 56, no. 2 (1991): 221–236. See also B. Schwartz, “Collective Memory and History: How Abraham Lincoln Became a Symbol of Racial Equality,” Sociolog ical Quarterly 38, no. 3 (1997): 469–496. 41. See J. Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Boston: Beacon Press, 2013). 42. This exhibition opened in 2002. See J. Gettleman, “Museum Gives Voice to Doubts on Dr. King’s Killer,” New York Times, October 16, 2002. Also see K. Sack, “In Memphis, Conflicting Paths on Dr. King’s Legacy,” New York Times, April 3, 1998. 43. Founded by sociology professor David Pilgrim, the museum is located at Ferris State University. 44. Interview conducted March 24, 2006.

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45. For a discussion of the exhibition see G. Candelario, “ ‘I Could Go the African American Route’: Dominicans in the Black Mosaic of Washington, D.C.,” in Black Behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 129–176. Also see R. Autry, “ ‘The Rats Are Still With Us’: Constructing Everyday Life at the Anacostia Museum,” Museum and Society 14, no 1: 160–177. 46. See “Lonnie Bunch on Bill Cosby and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.” Statement released March 31, 2016. Available at http://nmaahc.si.edu/content/pdf/Newsroom/billcosby_release_033 116.pdf. 47. L. Bunch, interview with S. Simon, “Black Lives Matter Coming to a Museum Near You,” NPR Code Switch, April 1, 2015. Available at http://www.npr .org/sections/codeswitch/2015/08/01 /428085104 / black-lives-matter-coming -to-a-museum-near-you. 48. Interview conducted June 8, 2011. 49. Ibid. 50. For more information about the content and politics of the MoAD see R. Autry, “The Politics of Race, Space, and Memory at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora,” in Remembering Africa and Its Diasporas: Memory, Public History and Representations of the Past, ed. A. Diptee and D. Trotman (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2012), 177–195. 51. See the List of Museums Visited in the front matter for which museums are members the International Coalition for Sites of Conscience. 52. The exhibition was originally produced by the Smithsonian, using materials from the Levine Museum of the New South in North Carolina, and was on display for a year at the NMAH in Washington, D.C. 53. Quoted from Embassy of the United States, “ ‘Separate Is Not Equal’ Remarks: Opening Remarks by Consul General Erica Barks-Ruggles,” University of Fort Hare, October 24, 2011. Previously available at http:// southafrica.usembassy.gov (last accessed March 14, 2013). 54. This referential and reflective deployment of South African histories of violence and resistance is not unique to the U.S. museums. For example, in 2012 the traveling exhibition “ANC—Solidaritaten uber Grenzen” (ANC— Solidarities across Borders) toured museums across Germany, showcasing the global character of the antiapartheid movement and its relations with East and West German politics specifically. For more information about the exhibition see H. Hartmann and S. Lewerenz, “Campaigning Against Apartheid in East and West Germany,” Radical History Review 119 (Spring 2014): 191–204. 55. See M. Bello, “Obama, Laura Bush Break Ground for African American Museum,” USA Today, February 2, 2012. 56. See M. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. L. A. Cosner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

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3. MANAGING COLLECTIVE REPRE SEN TATIONS 1. J. Kinard quoted in Pietermaritzburg Bureau, “Stand Up and Be Counted,” Daily News, May 11, 1987. 2. This statement became known as the 1987 Pietermaritzburg Declaration for South African Museums. Published in the South African Museums Association Bulletin 18, no. 8 (1989). 3. See M. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. L. A. Cosner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 4. See J. Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 5. R. Autry, “The Political Economy of Memory: The Challenges of Representing National Conflict at ‘Identity-Driven’ Museums,” Theory and Society 42, no. 1 (2013): 57–80. 6. Interview conducted May 2, 2006. 7. Interview conducted March 28, 2014. 8. Camille Akeju, interview conducted August 20, 2007. 9. These were among the conclusions from a daylong forum on the state of black museums held by the Institute of Museum and Library Ser vices in 2004. See “African American History and Culture in Museums: Strategic Crossroads and New Opportunities,” Institute of Museum and Library Ser vices, July 2004, https://www.imls.gov/publications/african - american - histor y - culture - museums - strategic - crossroads - and - new - opportunities. 10. Ibid. 11. Interview conducted March 28, 2014. 12. Ibid. 13. For example, Darryl Fears reported that African American museums, particularly older ones, find it difficult to cover operating costs. See D. Fears, “Black-Oriented Museums Are Lacking Black Donors,” Washington Post, December 6, 2005. 14. Interview conducted March 28, 2014. 15. See chapter 1. 16. Interview conducted May 2, 2006. 17. Interview conducted August 20, 2007. 18. Ibid. 19. Interview conducted August 21, 2007. 20. For more information about this uncertain period and the economic collapse of apartheid see G. Seidman, Manufacturing Militance: Workers’ Movements in Brazil and South Africa, 1970–1985 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 21. See S. Dubin, Transforming Museums: Mounting Queen Victoria in a Democratic South Africa (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 22. Ibid. See chapter 2, “A White Step in the Black Direction.”

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23. For more about this period and the MUSA report see S. Byala, A Place That Matters Yet: John Grubbins’s MuseumAfrica in the Postcolonial World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 24. R. Keene and A. Wanless, “Transforming: Lifting the Veil,” South African Museum Association Bulletin 28 (2002): 43. 25. Interview conducted August 9, 2006. 26. According to former curator Ann Wanless, Nagelgast strongly believed that the museum should function like a library and felt that with the changes the museum was becoming too politicized and preoccupied with recent history. Interview conducted August 9, 2006. 27. For more about this process see Byala, Place That Matters Yet. Also see A. Nettleton, “Arts and Africana: Hierarchies of Material Culture” (paper presented at University of Witwatersrand History Workshop, Johannesburg, July 1992). 28. This practice of renaming colonial and apartheid streets, buildings, and other aspects of built environments was an essential aspect of cultural transformation. For example, in Durban the provincial Natal Museum was renamed the KwaZulu-Natal Museum in 2010. 29. For more information about the interpretative physical renovation of the museum see S. Byala, “The Museum Becomes Archive: Reassessing Johannesburg’s MuseumAfrica,” Social Dynamics 36, no. 1 (March 2010): 11–23. 30. Other key departures around the same time were Ann Wanless and Rochelle Keene. Keene left to run the Johannesburg Art Gallery. 31. During the early 1990s Christopher Till, as the director of culture for the city, was instrumental in securing the location for the museum. Till would go on to serve as the director of the Apartheid Museum and the Gold Museum of Africa. 32. G. Opperman quoted in “Voortrekker Monument Changes with the Times,” IOL News, May 2, 2003, http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/voortrekker -monument-changes-with-the-times-1.105986#.UdZH-xzfFSN. 33. See chapter 4 for a more detailed discussion of this site as an example of “deviant memory.” 34. See E. Bruner, “Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora,” American Anthropologist 98, no. 2 (1996): 290–304. For a discussion of the complexities of African Americans as international tourists in Brazil see P. Pinho, “African American Roots Tourism in Brazil,” Latin American Perspectives 35, no. 3 (2008): 70–86. 35. For more on plantation museums and tours in the United States see J. Eichsteldt and S. Small, Representation of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002). 36. For a brief discussion of the museum see S. Nanda, “South African Museums and the Creation of a New National Identity,” American Anthropologist

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37.

38. 39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51.

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106, no. 2 (2004): 379–385. For a more general examination of the history of in Durban see J. Wright and A. Mazel, “Controlling the Past in the Museums of Natal and KwaZulu,” Critical Arts 5, no. 3 (1991): 59–77. For a discussion about aestheticizing artifacts to everyday life and the treatment of rock art more generally see A. Nettleton, “People, Power, Politics: Rock Art of Southern Africa Rock Art,” African Arts 29 (Spring 1996): 77–78. See B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). See J. O. Horton and S. Crew, “Afro-Americans and Museums: Towards a Policy of Inclusion,” in History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment, ed. W. Leon and R. Rosenzweig (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 215–236. Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, Preserve America Grants: Assessment of Effectiveness (Washington, D.C.: Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, 2009). Of course this is not a phenomenon unique to the United States. For a discussion focused on the politics of managing historical trauma in Germany see J. Olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New York: Routledge, 2007). For example, see G. Eskew, “From Civil War to Civil Rights: Selling Alabama as Heritage Tourism,” International Journal of Hospitality and Tourism Administration 2, no. 3 (2001): 201–214. See J. Logan and H. Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Also see S. Zukin, The Culture of Cities (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). M. Curnutte, “Freedom Center Seeks Federalization,” Cincinnati Enquirer, January 6, 2011. See A. Brown, “Freedom Center Set to Merge with Cincinnati Museum Center,” Network Journal, March 28, 2012. J. Smith quoted in “Eviction Empties Motel Where Dr. King Died,” New York Times, March 3, 1988. See J. Smith, “Why Boycott the Civil Rights Museum?,” FulfilltheDream.net, http://www.fulfillthedream.net/pages/mlk.boycott1.html. See J. Baker, “Infant Mortality, Civil Rights Museum Funds Survive in State Budget Deal,” Memphis Flyer, June 4, 2010. Available at http://www .memphisflyer.com / JacksonBaker/archives /2010 /06 /04 /infant-morality - civil-rights-museum-funds-survive-in-state-budget-deal (last accessed June 14, 2016). See B. Sullivan, “National Civil Rights Museum to Receive $2 Million in Disaster Funds,” Commercial Appeal, April 24, 2013. B. Sakauye quoted in ibid. As reported by museum director and CEO Lawrence Pijeaux Jr., in “Birmingham Civil Rights Institute: A Brief History,” BlackPast .org,

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52.

53.

54.

55.

56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

67. 68. 69.

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http://www.blackpast.org/perspectives/ birmingham-civil-rights-institute -brief-history. See A. Nix, “Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Gets Hurried Funding,” Fox6 WBRC, September 21, 2010, http://www.wbrc.com/story/13194001/2010/09/21 /birmingham-civil-rights-institute-gets-hurried-funding. See R. Autry, “The Politics of Race, Space, and Memory at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora,” in Remembering Africa and Its Diasporas: Memory, Public History and Representations of the Past, ed. A. Diptee and D. Trotman (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2012), 177–195. K. A. Appiah and H. L. Gates, Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (New York: Basic Civitas Books/Perseus Books Group, 1999). Nontsizi Cayou from the Wajumbe Cultural Institute in the Western Addition neighborhood quoted in V. Wagner, “Bay Area Blacks Absent in Museum Planning,” San Francisco Examiner, May 8, 2000. R. Richardson quoted in V. Wagner, “Local Leaders Blast Black Museum Plan,” San Francisco Examiner, June 21, 2000. Ibid. See C. Rauber, “Museum of African Diaspora to Close for Four Months for $1.3 Million Dollar Redesign,” San Francisco Business Times, June 4, 2014, http:// w w w . bizjournals . com /sanfrancisco / blog /2014 /06 /museum - of -african-diaspora-redesign1-3-million.html. Interview conducted June 8, 2011. Coca-Cola donated 2.5 acres near its world headquarters for $1 per year. See “Coke to Donate Land for Civil Rights Museum,” Atlanta Business Chronicle, October 23, 2006. Interview conducted June 8, 2011. Interview conducted August 1, 2006. Willie Spies quoted in “FF Plus Calls for Freedom Park Boycott,” Mail and Guardian, March 20, 2009. W. Serote quoted in Z. Ntuli, “Freedom Fighters Return Home Finally,” Government Communication and Information System, February 19, 2004. For a detailed discussion of the process leading up to the creation of the museum along with other proposals see A. Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham, N.C. Duke University Press, 2003), chap. 2. According to its annual report, in 2015 the museum’s total expenditures and revenue were R185 million (about $12.7 million) and R190 million (about $13 million), respectively. Annual reports dating back to 2007 are available at http://www.robben-island.org.za/news#publications (last accessed June 13, 2016). Interview conducted July 13, 2011. Ibid. Interview conducted July 15, 2011.

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70. For more on the politics of preserving the site see R. Autry, “Memory, Materiality, and the Apartheid Past,” Contexts, Summer 2010: 46–51. Also see Constitution Hill Foundation, Number Four: The Making of Constitution Hill (London: Penguin Group, 2006). 71. Interview conducted July 20, 2007. 72. For example, in November 2006 two hundred women gathered at Constitution Hill and marched through Hillbrow for a “Take Back the Night” campaign. In August 2007, the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation orga nized a candlelight vigil at the site in honor of the families who still know nothing about loved ones who went missing during apartheid. 73. L. Pieterson quoted in M. Nxumalo, “Keep It in the Family Begs Hector Pieterson’s Sister,” Mail and Guardian, March 22, 2013. 74. Mandla Mandela has been ensnarled in legal battles with other family members over the burial of a number of relatives, including his father, Nelson Mandela. See S. Evans, “Makaziwe: Mandla Trying to Cash in on Mandela’s Burial,” Mail and Guardian, July 3, 2013. 75. See R. Bragg, “Family of Dr. King, Feuding with U.S., May Curb Tours at Shrine,” New York Times, December 14, 1994. 76. Interview conducted August 3, 2006. 77. This is according to City of Johannesburg materials. For example, see “Soweto Grows as a Tourist Attraction,” Official Website of the City of Johannesburg, December 19, 2003, http://www.joburg.org.za/index.php?opt ion= com_content&id= 981&Itemid=168. 78. Interview conducted August 3, 2006.

4. MEMORY DEVIANTS: BREAKING THE COLLECTIVE 1. See M. Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, trans. D. Bouchard and S. Simon (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977). 2. Mack was not involved in the black museum community, so his strong push for the museum was surprising and opposed by some prominent black museum leaders, such as John Kinard, but over time the project was championed by most of the community, though it raised new dilemmas of competition for funding, artifacts, and visitors. For a detailed review of these early efforts to establish a national museum see F. D. Ruffins, “Culture Wars Won and Lost, Part III: The National African American Museum Project,” Radical History Review 70 (1998): 78–101. Also see R. Dennis, “Who Axed the African American Museum on the Mall?,” New Crisis (February– March 1998): 8–13. 3. See I. Molotsky, “Washington Talk: The Mall; An Empty Space Inspires Battle of the Museums,” New York Times, April 19, 1988.

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4. James Oliver Horton and Johanna Kardux also make this point in their comparison of public responses to slave commemoration in the United States and the Netherlands. See their “Slavery and Public Memory in the United States and the Netherlands,” New York Journal of American History 66 (Fall–Winter 2005): 35–52. 5. J. Moran quoted in N. Hopkinson, “The Root: Segregated Museums Mirror History,” NPR.org, May 24, 2011, http://www.npr.org/2011/05/24/136605926 /the-root-segregated-museums-mirror-history. 6. APAC curator Adriel Luis quoted in P. McGlone, “Arts Groups to Host Identity-Themed Pop-Up at Smithsonian Arts and Industries Building,” Washington Post, May 27, 2016. Available at https://www.washingtonpost .com /entertainment /museums/arts-groups-to -host-identity-themed-pop -up-at-smithsonian-arts-and-industries-building/2016/05/27/ b1ed13fa-243c -11e6-8690-f14ca9de2972_ story.html (last accessed July 15, 2016). 7. The major issue involved Smithsonian officials’ heavy scrutiny of two invited artists, Gregg Deal and Anida Yoeu Ali, whose artwork on indigenous and Muslim identity, respectively, was considered potentially offensive. See R. Waters, “The Smithsonian’s Most Recent Censorship of Artists Hurts Us All,” Huffington Post, June 22, 2016. Available at http://www.huffingtonpost .com/rachel-waters/crossing-the-line-the-smi _b_10607330.html (last accessed July 15, 2016). 8. W. Spies quoted in “FF Plus Calls for Freedom Park Boycott,” Mail and Guardian, March 20, 2009. 9. Ibid. 10. For an overview of this protest and the students’ demands, see C. Pather, “#RhodesMustFall: No Room for Ignorance or Arrogance,” South African Journal of Science 111, nos. 5–6 (2015): 7–8. Available at http://sajs.co.za/sites /default /fi les /publications /pdf /SAJS%20111 _ 5- 6 _ Pather _ News%26Views .pdf (last accessed July 16, 2016). 11. AfriForum representative quoted in Agence France Presse report “Cheers and Protests as University of Cape Town Removes Cecil Rhodes Statue,” Guardian, April 9, 2015. Available at https://www.theguardian.com/world / 2015 / apr / 09 / universit y - cape - tow n - removes - st at ue - cecil - rhodes -celebration-afrikaner-protest (last accessed July 16, 2016). 12. See J. Jansen, “Rhodes: The Unresolved Question of Symbolic Justice,” Rand Daily Mail, March 19, 2015. Available at http://www.rdm.co.za/politics/2015 /03/19/rhodes-the-unresolved-question- of-symbolic-justice (last accessed July 14, 2016). 13. Quoted in D. Brighenti, Q. Xu, and D. Yaffe-Bellany, “Worker Smashed ‘Racist’ Panel, Loses Job,” New Haven Independent, July 11, 2016. Available at http:// www.newhavenindependent .org /index .php /archives /entry/corey _menafee/ (last accessed July 16, 2016). 14. See N. Remnick, “Yale Grapples with Ties to Slavery in Debate over a College’s Name,” New York Times, September 11, 2015. Available at http://www

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.nytimes .com /2015 /09 /12 /nyregion / yale -in - debate - over- calhoun - college -grapples-with-ties-to-slavery.html (last accessed July 16, 2016). The Yale University media statement announcing President Peter Salovey’s decision to retain the name is available at http://communications.yale.edu/media /media-kits/naming-announcements (last accessed July 16, 2016). H. Suzman quoted in D. Yutar, “Suzman: Where’s the ‘Better Life for All’?” IOL News, March 22, 2005. Available at http://www.iol.co.za /news/politics /suzman-wheres-the-better-life-for-all-236977 (last retrieved July 13, 2016). See J. Logan and H. Molotch, “The City as a Growth Machine,” in Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 50–98. D. Laveck quoted in F. Clines, “Slave ‘Railroad’ Buffs Question Museum Site,” New York Times, June 24, 2002. See J. Broom, “Dreams of Museum Wouldn’t Die,” Seattle Times, January 20, 2008. See A. Mphaki, “Pietersons in Bitter Feud,” IOL News, September 30, 2011, http://www.iol.co.za /news/south-africa /gauteng /pietersons-in-bitter-feud -1147993. Nelson Mandela’s grandson Mandla Mandela quoted in F. Chothia, “The Battle for Nelson Mandela’s Legacy,” BBC News, July 17, 2010, http://www.bbc .com/news/world-africa-10351550. See R. Bragg, “Family of Dr. King, Feuding with U.S., May Curb Tours at Shrine,” New York Times, December 14, 1994. D. King quoted in ibid. See P. Applebome, “Debate over Course of the King Center Surfaces after Son Resigns as Chief,” New York Times, August 4, 1989. Also see “Dr. King’s Widow Loses a Plea to Regain Control over Papers,” New York Times, April 14, 1995. During the 1990s the King family, particularly Dexter and Coretta Scott King, issued public statements denouncing the ruling that James Earl Ray had acted alone, suspecting government culpability. See K. Sack, “Son of Dr. King Asserts L.B.J. Role in Plot,” New York Times, June 20, 1997. See H. Deacon, “Remembering Tragedy, Constructing Modernity: Robben Island as a National Monument,” in Negotiating the Past: The Making of Memory in South Africa, ed. S. Nuttall and C. Coetzee (Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1988), 161–179. T. Crawford-Brown quoted in S. Holmes, “South Africa Ponders Fate of Apartheid’s Bastille,” New York Times, June 22, 1994. Juanita Pastor-Makhurane, former heritage resource manager at Robben Island Museum, quoted from “Robben Island—Developing an Integrated Environmental and Heritage Management System,” Conference paper presented at “Place, Memory, Meaning: Preserving Intangible Values at Monuments and Sites, Proceedings of the International Scientific Symposium, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, October 27, 2003. Available at

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41.

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http://www.icomos.org /victoriafalls2003 /papers/C2-1%20 -%20Pastor.pdf (last accessed July 13, 2016). Quoted from Section 10 of Robben Island Museum, Tourism Ser vices Department, “Narrative for Prison Guiding,” unpublished document. For an example, see D. Knoetze, “Robben Island Tours Luck of the Draw,” Cape Argus, September 12, 2012. Lionel Pead, general manager of Cape Town-based Wilderness Touring, quoted in ibid. Interview conducted July 13, 2011. Mandy Sanger, District Six Museum public outreach and programming coordinator, interview conducted July 14, 2011. See G. E. Hale, “Granite Stopped Time: The Stone Mountain Memorial and the Repression of White Southern Identity,” Georgia Historical Society (Spring 1998): 22–44. R. Rose quoted in “Stone Mountain Monument at Center of Racial Tensions over Confederate Tributes,” Guardian, November, 28, 2015. For more information about the excavation of the African Burial Ground and local responses see I. Berlin and L. Harris, “Uncovering, Discovering, and Recovering: Digging in New York’s Slave Past Beyond the African Burial Ground,” in Slavery in New York, ed. I. Berlin and L. Harris (New York: New Press, 2005), 1–27; and S. Wilson, “African Burial Ground,” in Berlin and Harris, Slavery in New York, 7. Leslie Harris quoted in “Old North: Recalling the Real Slaves of New York,” Washington Post, October 9, 2005. For an overview of the exhibition, including the thinking behind a variety of curatorial decisions, see R. Rabinowitz, “Eavesdropping at the Well: Interpretive Media in the Slavery in New York Exhibition,” Public Historian 35, no. 3 (2013): 8–45. For an excellent review of the exhibition, see B. Carbonell, “The Syntax of Objects and the Representation of History: Speaking of ‘Slavery in New York,’ ” History and Theory 48, no. 2 (2009): 122–137. This interpretation is based on my informal review of seventy-seven videos at the Brooklyn, New York, office of the American History Workshop on February 28, 2007. Quoted in video “Bryan Stevenson Wants Us to Talk More About Slavery,” available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLiRuBL _i3RtLwcggdO63nN_ jGEwF2knN6&v= 8iodxZqGfVQ&app = desktop (last accessed July 16, 2016). For example, see M. Mamdani, “Amnesty or Impunity? A Preliminary Critique of the Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC),” Diacritics 32, nos. 3–4 (2002): 32–59. Also see D. Posel, “History as Confession: The Case of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Public Culture 20, no. 1 (2008): 119–141. For example, Dora Apel argues that violence runs deep in the American psyche and helps explain similarities in the way social others are con-

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42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53.

54.

55. 56. 57.

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structed and tortured. See D. Apel, “Torture Culture: Lynching Photographs and the Images of Abu Ghraib,” Art Journal 64, no. 2 (2005): 88–100. Quoted in video “Bryan Stevenson Wants Us to Talk.” See M. Householder, “New Michigan Museum Showcases Racist Artifacts,” Associated Press, April 19, 2012. Doug Shipman, interview conducted June 8, 2011. This displayed quote is from N. Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (Boston: Little Brown, 1994), 71. For more information about the history of art and the liberation struggle, including discussions about Judy Seidman’s participation, see J. Peffer, Art and the End of Apartheid (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). J. Seidman, “Between Satire and Slogan,” Mail and Guardian, June 10, 2011. See A. Rice, “How We Remember Lynching,” Journal of Contemporary Art 20 (Fall 2006): 32–43. See Karen Smith’s column “Of Many Things,” Amer ica: National Catholic Review 199, no. 2 (2008): 2. Available at http://americamagazine.org/issue/662 /many-things/many-things (last accessed July 15, 2016). Also see J. Jones, “Nelson Mandela: The Strange Case of the Artworks His Lawyer Claims as Forged,” Guardian, July 13, 2009. Available at https://www.theguardian.com /theguardian/2009/jul/14/nelson-mandela-artworks (last accessed July 15, 2016). Ibid. J. Jones, “Nelson Mandela: The Strange Case of the Artworks His Lawyer Claims as Forged,” Guardian, July 13, 2009. Available at https://www.the guardian.com/theguardian/2009/jul/14/nelson-mandela-artworks (last accessed July 15, 2016). Quoted in B. Phillips, “Black Lives Matter to Protest Civil Rights Museum Exhibit,” Memphis Flyer, March 24, 2016. See “Interview with Kin Killin Kin artist James Pate,” YouTube video, posted by the Urban Media Source, October 14, 2013, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=FOgEAQdvv5o. Digital designer Angelica Rogers discusses her work in relation to many of these pieces in “Does This Flag Make You Flinch?” New York Times, July 14, 2016. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/15/us/artist-flag-protests -lynching-by-police.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource = story -heading & module = photo -spot-region & region = top -news &WT.nav =top-news& _r = 0 (last accessed July 2016). See J. Stein, “Sins of Omission: Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum,” Art in Amer ica (October 1993): 110–115. T. Golden quoted in P. Hoban, “The Shock of the Familiar,” New York Magazine, July 28, 2003, http://nymag.com/nymetro/arts/features/n_9014/. See P. Skotnes, “Civilised Off the Face of the Earth: Museum Display and the Silencing of the /Xam,” Poetics Today 22, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 299–321.

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58. For a review, see M. Stevens, “Race and Gender on Fifth Avenue,” New York Magazine, April 24, 2006. Available at http://nymag.com/arts/art /reviews /16704/ (last accessed July 16, 2016). 59. H. Cotter, “A Nightmare View of Antebellum Life That Sets Off Sparks,” New York Times, May 9, 2003. 60. J. Saltz, “An Explosion of Color, in Black and White,” New York Magazine, February 1, 2007. 61. See V. Cavaliere, “Large Drawing in Newark Library Depicting Troubling Images of Racism Revealed Again to the Public after Critics Back Down,” New York Daily News, January 23, 2013. 62. K. Walker quoted in B. Sutton, “Kara Walker on Her Bittersweet Colossus,” ArtNet, May 8, 2014, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/kara-walker-on -her-bittersweet-colossus-11952. 63. K. Walker, interview with F. Chideya, “Kara Walker Rattles the Art World Again,” NPR News and Notes, March 7, 2008. Available at http://www.npr.org /templates/story/story.php?storyId= 87985217. 64. This 2016 exhibition, called “Portraits and Other Likenesses,” represents the first major collaboration between MoAD and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and signals the more arts-centered focus of the redesigned MoAD under the leadership of Lauren Harrison. 65. J. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993). 66. These complaints were voiced at community meetings, on blogs, and in op-ed pieces. For example, see the op-ed by L. Robinson, “Sculpture Is Appalling,” Indianapolis Recorder, September 16, 2010. 67. See B. Boucher, “Kara Walker Artwork Censored at Newark Library,” Art in Amer ica, December 11, 2012, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news -features/news/kara-walker-newark-library/. 68. For a brief discussion of the tourist appeal of these destinations, see J. Teicher, “Explore the World’s Most Morbid Tourist Attractions,” Wired Magazine, January 23, 2015. Available at http://www.wired.com /2015 /01 /ambroise -tezenas-i-was-here/ (last accessed July 16, 2016). For a more thorough treatment of the topic see B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 259–281. 69. For an analysis of “selfie” portraits as a cultural phenomenon see G. Goldberg, “Through the Looking Glass: The Queer Narcissism of Selfies,” unpublished paper. Also see J. Oullette, Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self (New York: Penguin Books, 2014). 70. For discussion of this incident see C. Dewey, “The Other Side of the Infamous ‘Auschwitz Selfie,’ ” Washington Post, July 22, 2014. Available at https:// www.washingtonpost .com /news /the -intersect / wp/2014 /07/22 /the - other -side- of-the-infamous-auschwitz-selfie/ (last accessed July 16, 2016). Also see R. Margalit, “Should Auschwitz Be a Site for Selfies,” New Yorker, June 26,

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2014. Available at http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/should -auschwitz-be-a-site-for-selfies (last accessed July 16, 2016). 71. Andrew Hollinger quoted in A. Peterson, “Holocaust Museum to Visitors: Please Stop Catching Pokémon Here,” Washington Post, July 12, 2016. Available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/07/12 /holocaust-museum-to-visitors-please-stop-catching-pokemon-here/ (last accessed July 16, 2016). 72. Quoted in M. Chan, “Pokémon Go Players Anger 9/11 Memorial Visitors: ‘It’s a Hallowed Place,’ ” Time Magazine, July 12, 2016. Available at http://time .com/4403516/pokemon-go-911-memorial-holocaust-museum/ (last accessed July 16, 2016). 73. K. Walker quoted in J. Szabo, “Kara Walker’s Shock Art,” New York Times, March 23, 1997.

CONCLUSION: MUSEUMIFICATION OF MEMORY 1. M. Shear, “Obama Visits Prison Cell That Helped Shape Modern South Africa,” New York Times, June 30, 2013. 2. Generational effects on collective memory is an impor tant area of investigation for sociologists. Their work has shown age cohorts remember the past in distinctive ways and that generational effects are mediated by other social identities such as race and places of origin. See H. Schuman and J. Scott, “Generations and Collective Memory,” American Sociolog ical Review 54, no. 3 (1989): 354–381. Also see L. Griffin, “ ‘Generations and Collective Memory’ Revisited: Race, Region, and Memory of Civil Rights,” American Sociolog ical Review 69, no. 4 (2004): 544–557. 3. For example, Herbert Marcuse traces the history of Dachau from its infamy as one of the first concentration camps in Germany to its present state as a public memorial and tourist attraction. See H. Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933–2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 4. See D. Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 14–22. 5. Sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel makes this point in Social Mindscapes: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). 6. Some of the most power ful examples of this cross-national variation are evident in Holocaust memorializations across Europe and the United States. See B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Destination Culture: Tourism, Museums, and Heritage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 79–128. Also see J. Young, Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993). Also see J. Salvesberg and R. King, “Institutionalizing Collective Memories of Hate: Law and Law

224

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

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Enforcement in Germany and the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 11, no. 2 (2005): 579–616. Also see D. Levy, “The Future of the Past: Historiographical Disputes and Competing Memories in Germany and Israel,” History and Theory 38, no. 1 (1998): 51–66. This reference to the backstage is in the spirit of sociologist Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to the study of self-impression management. See E. Goffman, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959). P. Nora, “Between History and Memory: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7–24. D. Chakrabarty, “Museums in Late Democracies,” Humanities Research 9, no. 1 (2002): 5–12. Ibid., 11. See J. Jansen, Knowledge in the Blood: Confronting Race and the Apartheid Past (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009). E. Renan, “What Is a Nation?,” in Becoming National: A Reader, ed. G. Eley and R. R. G. Suny (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 45. For example, see J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). J. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Historian Lance Hill’s work challenges conventional depictions of the civil rights movement as nonviolent and exposes a variety of gender and class divisions in the diverse movement. See L. Hill, Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). For a discussion about the challenges of using a nonviolence frame to describe the liberation strug gle in South Africa see G. Seidman, “Blurred Lines: Nonviolence in South Africa,” Political Science and Politics 33, no. 2 (2000): 161–167. See P. Brooks, Boycotts, Buses, and Passes: Black Women’s Resistance in the U.S. South and South Africa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). See Chakrabarty, “Museums in Late Democracies.” Also see D. Lowenthal, “Fabricating Heritage,” History and Memory 10, no. 1 (1998): 5–24. See J. Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). “Our History and Vision,” Museum of Tolerance, http://www.museumof tolerance.com /site/c.tmL6KfNVLtH / b.4866027/k .88E8/Our_ History_ and _Vision.htm. For example, protesters form the Armenian Youth Federation camped out in front of the museum for several days to draw attention to what they viewed as the misrepresentation of the Armenian genocide in Turkey. See C. Reynolds, “Armenians Protest at Museum,” Los Angeles Times,

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April 22, 2003. The MOT in West Jerusalem has also experienced a storm of controversy, with some claiming that it is situated atop an ancient Muslim gravesite. See D. Yanai, “Museum of Intolerance?” Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2007. For an opposing opinion about the site see M. Hier, “A Proper Site for a Museum of Tolerance,” Los Angeles Times, February 12, 2010. 21. Eventually, the museum board agreed to pay a $150,000 settlement to a neighborhood group threatening a lawsuit to stop the expansion, despite city approval. See M. Groves, “Center to Pay $150,000 to Settle Lawsuit,” Los Angeles Times, March 8, 2010. 22. See D. Morain, “Lean Times Don’t Imperil Wiesenthal Grant,” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 1995. 23. D. Campbell, “The Museum: A Temple or the Forum,” Curator: The Museum Journal 14, no. 1 (1971): 11.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate figures. AAMA (African American Museums Association), 61–62 Africa, as ancestral home, 86–87, 102 African American Association of Museums, 112–113 African American Library and Museum, Oakland, 98–99 African American Lives miniseries, 87 African American Museum, Philadelphia, 111 African American Museum and Cultural Center of Iowa, Cedar Rapids, 90–91 African American Panoramic Experience Museum, Atlanta, 88–89 Africana Museum, Johannesburg, 41, 121 African National Congress (ANC): arts, culture, collective memory, and, 46–48; cultural boycott and, 43; Culture Desk and, 44; Freedom

Park and, 134–135; role of, in social construction of collective memory, 74–75; Sachs address to, 45; social history movement and, 35, 38 AfriForum, 152–153 “After the Deluge” exhibition, 178 Akeju, Camille, 117 American Anthropological Association and Science Museum of Minnesota, 174 American Association of Museums, 61 America’s Black Holocaust Museum, Milwaukee, 92 Anacostia Community Museum, Washington, D.C., 58, 59, 99, 111, 117–118 ANC. See African National Congress Anderson, Laura, 93 Anwja, Nadja, 164 apartheid-era museums, transformation of, 118–124

240

Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg: development of, 154; entrance to, 1; funding for, 155; location of, 80; mining industry and, 73–74; narrative of, 154–155; overview of, 41–42; “Separate Is Not Equal” exhibition, 103; student exchanges, 104; total sensory experience of, 1–2; tourism industry and, 141–142 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 130 Applebaum, Ralph, 90 architecture, colonial, 122–124 art museums and galleries, 174–177 arts and culture, state-supported, 45–48 Asian Pacific American Center, “Crosslines” exhibition, 149 Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH), 52–53, 54, 115 Association of African Museums Association (AAMA), 61–62 Baartman, Sarah (Saartjie), 47 Barks-Ruggles, Erica, 103–104 Baudrillard, Jean, 20, 89–90 BC (Black Consciousness) movement, 35, 37, 44 Becker, Howard, 202n1 Bennett, Bonita, 137–138 Bethea, Charles, 110–111, 113, 114 Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI), 14, 92, 95, 95, 104, 129, 183–184 Black Arts Movement, 57 black bodies, visualization of, 179–182 Black Consciousness (BC) movement, 35, 37, 44 Black History Month, 54–55, 61 black history movement: as collective memory project, 28, 53–54; desire for validation and, 50; fathers of, 50, 52–54; identity

INDE X

formation and, 48–49, 56; methods of, 51; NMAAHC and, 85; overview of, 28–29; racial divisions and, 7; radical history movement compared to, 55–56; in school curricula, 54–55; social history movement compared to, 34–35, 36; vindicationist agenda of, 50–52. See also black museum movement black history museums in U.S.: as breaking with collective, 171; narratives of, 86–87 black identity formation, narrative of, 4, 178–181. See also identity formation Black Lives Matter, 99, 100, 176 black museum movement: as collective memory project, 61–62; economic capital for, 61; founders of museums, 57–61; overview of, 49, 56; political leadership and, 62; vindicationist model of representation and, 62–63 Blight, David, 91 Bonner, Philip, 35, 42, 141, 142 Bowling Alone (Putnam), 31 Bozzoli, Belinda, 32–33, 35 Bruce, Hillary, 121 Bunch, Lonnie, 63, 66, 85, 100, 115–116 Bundy, Colin, 35 Burroughs, Margaret Taylor, 58–59, 60–61 Buthelezi, Mangosutho, 40 Calhoun, John C., 153–154 Callinicos, Luli, 36, 42, 47 Cameron, Duncan, 19, 195 Cato Manor Museum, Durban, 80–81 Central Indiana Community Foundation, 182 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 190 Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History

INDE X

(MAAH), Detroit, 87–88, 88, 89, 99–100, 111 Chatman, Patrina, 90 civil-rights-era museums, transformation of, 110–118 civil rights movement: comparison with human rights struggles, 102–103; historicization of, 62; history of, 94–97, 99–100; as nonviolent, 224n15; outcomes of, 7 Civil War in U.S., monuments and memorials related to, 165–167 collective: sacredness of, 16, 175, 181; social construction and affirmation of, 66–68 collective memory: broken nature of, 151, 158–159, 165, 168–169, 185; consensus about, 187–188; construction of, 36–37, 145, 149, 154, 159, 188; as cultural product, 189–191; generational effects on, 223n2; making of, as contentious project, 10; representation and construction of, in South Africa, 46; revision of history and, 27; role of, 9; social production of, 162 collective memory narratives: construction of, 8; history museums and, 3–4; role of, 9 collective representations: management of, 107–109, 143–144; in society, 15–16. See also apartheid-era museums, transformation of; civil-rights-era museums, transformation of; postapartheid museums; postcivil rights era museums colonial past, representations of, 69–73, 70, 71, 72 Comaroff, John and Jean, 192–193 commercialization of trauma and liberation histories, 175–176, 183 Commission for the Reconstruction and Transformation of the Arts, 47

2 41

comparative perspective on South Africa and U.S., 5–9, 193 Concerned Claimants of District Six, 164 Conference on Travel and Tourism, 125 Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), 35, 38 consensus-driven history, 11–12, 13–14 consensus-driven memory, 14–17, 21 “Conservation of Culture” conference, 40 Constitutional Court, Johannesburg, 76, 77, 138–139 Constitution Hill, 139–140 content: influences on, 193–194; of older museums, 112–113, 120–121 COSATU (Congress of South African Trade Unions), 35, 38 Cosby, Bill, 100 Cradle of Humankind, Gauteng Province, 83–85, 84, 124 Crawford, Bill, 182 Crawford-Brown, Terry, 159 Crisis magazine, 52 “Crosslines” exhibition, 149 cultural boycott of South Africa, 43–44 cultural capital, 43–44 Culture Desk, 44 culture wars in U.S., 10, 19 Cuthbertson, Greg, 6 Davison, Patricia, 81 “Daylights” (Walker), 181 “Deconstructing Apartheid” exhibition, 74 details, glossing over of, 16 development of new museums: overview of, 124–125; postapartheid, 134–143; post-civil rights era, 125–134 discredited sites, 165–168 District Six Beneficiary Trust, 164

242

District Six Museum, Cape Town, 14, 18, 42, 80, 137–138, 162–164, 163 “Drawing of a Slave” (Walker), 178 Dubin, Steven, 120 Du Bois, W. E. B., 50, 51, 52, 75 Duncan, Carol, 19 Durkheim, Emile, 15, 16 DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago, 58, 60, 87, 111, 176 Ebony Museum of Negro History, Chicago, 58 economic growth, museums as sites of, 127, 129–130 educational institutions, museums as, 19–20, 143 elite institutions, as supporting versions of past, 153–154 Enola Gay exhibition, 11, 210n21 entertainment at museums, 89–90 “E Pluribus Unum” (Wilson), 181–182 Evans, Ivan, 6 exhibitions: debate over, 145–147; traveling, 112–113; updating material and, 100–101. See also specific exhibitions Eyerman, Ron, 49 family disputes about legacy, 140–141, 156–158 Feldman, Eugene, 58–59 Ferguson, Roderick, 51 Foner, Eric, 11 forts of Transatlantic Slave Trade, 123 Foucault, Michel, 76, 145 Franklin, John Hope, 54 Frazier, E. Franklin, 50 Freedom Front Plus, 135, 150 Freedom Park, Pretoria, 75, 134–135, 150, 150–151, 172 From Slavery to Mass Incarceration Museum, Montgomery, 170–171

INDE X

funding sources: for black museums, 61; government, 61, 74, 75, 128–129, 147–149, 150–151; heritage tourism, 127; for newer museums, 127–129; for older museums, 112–115; public-private, 127–128, 154, 155 Gandhi, Mahatma, 138, 186–187 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 87, 130 Gevisser, Mark, 134, 139 global perspectives of museums, 101–103, 172 Goffman, Erving, 20 Golden, Thelma, 130, 177 Gold Reef City recreation complex, Johannesburg, 2, 80, 141–142, 154. See also Apartheid Museum Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, “Hail to the Thief II” exhibition, 174–175 government: Black History Month and, 54; funding from, 61, 74, 75, 128–129, 147–149, 150–151; heritage tourism as resource for, 127; historical revision and, 46–47, 48; postapartheid museum projects and, 134, 135, 149, 150; relationship between museums and, 134–135; as supporting versions of past, 154. See also African National Congress Greenstein, Ran, 9 Grundy, Kenneth, 44, 45 habitus, 120 “Hail to the Thief II” exhibition, 174–175 Halbwachs, Maurice, 15, 106, 108 Harrison, Lauren, 131 Hartley, L. P., 187 Hartman, Saidiya, 9 “Hateful Things” exhibition, 171 Hector Pieterson Memorial and Museum, Soweto, 78, 140–141, 156–157, 169

INDE X

heritage consultants, 139 Heritage Day public holiday, 29, 78 heritage tourism, 125, 127, 192–193 historical capital, 30–32, 59 historical thinking, shifts in, 16–17 history: as continuous, 170; line between memory and, 18; progressive, in U.S., 35; revisions to, 27–29. See also black history movement; slavery, history of; social history movement history as avant-garde: in art museums and galleries, 174–177; breaking collective patterns and, 183–184; discredited sites and, 165–168; Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia and, 171; NCCHR and, 171–172; questioning of racial classification and, 173–174; regional differences in memory and, 168–169; rendering familiar as unfamiliar and, 177–178; representations without reference to racial dichotomies, 172–173; visualization of black bodies and, 179–182 history museums: apartheid law and, 43; attendance at, 10–11; avantgarde, possibility of, 146, 194; collective memory narratives and, 3–4; as colonial enterprises, 42–43, 68; cross-disciplinary interactions at, 41; History Workshop and, 39; Mandela on, 29; nations and, 3; nature and limits of, 195–196; need for validation and vindication and, 61, 62; new, in South Africa, 42; ordering of time and, 22; popular discourse around, 18–19; in South Africa and U.S., parallels between, 64–65; study of, 4–5; as supplement to school curricula, 110–111, 143; tourist industry and, 2. See also development of new

243

museums; transformation of museums; specific museums history wars in U.S., 10 History Workshop, University of the Witwatersrand, 36–37, 39, 41–42 Holocaust memorialization, 181, 223n6 Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood (Nixon), 43–44 Huddleston, Trevor, 43 human rights struggles, comparison with civil rights movement, 102–103 identity: national, 3, 9, 12, 17–18; past and, 8–14, 21 identity formation: black, narrative of, 4, 178–181; black history movement and, 48–49, 56; black museum movement and, 62; as discursive framing for museums, 65; framework of, 148; global focus of exhibitions and narrative of, 101–103; immigration and, 99; narratives of, 4, 67–69, 86–87, 126, 188–189; pain, violence, and, 191 immigration and black identity, 99 indigenous populations, 13 Institute of Museum and Library Services, 113–114 institution-building in South Africa, 42–44 International Afro-American Museum, Detroit, 58 International Center for Photography, New York City, 104 International Coalition for Sites of Conscience, 103 Invictus (film), 104 Iziko Museums, 81 jails, restoration of, 76–77 James, Portia, 117–118 Jansen, Jonathan, 153, 191–192, 199n28

244

Jelin, Elizabeth, 202n1 Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, Big Rapids, 97, 98, 171 Journal of Negro History, 52, 54 Kinard, John, 40, 58, 59–60, 107, 217n2 King, Coretta Scott, 157, 158, 158 King, Dexter, 157 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 18, 62, 94, 96–97, 157, 158, 187 King Center, Atlanta, 157, 158 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 125 Krok, Abe and Solly, 2, 141 Ku Klux Klan, 165 KwaMuhle Museum, Durban, 123, 168–169 Laveck, Debra, 155–156 Ligon, Glenn, 181 “Living in Limbo” exhibition, 183–184 “living memories,” 14 local museum projects, 80–81, 97–99, 137–138 Logan, John, 155 Lorde, Audre, 51 Lorraine Motel, 128. See also National Civil Rights Museum Lowenthal, David, 187–188 Luthuli, Albert, 47 lynchings, 170 MAAH (Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History), Detroit, 87–88, 88, 89, 99–100, 111 Mack, Tom, 147 Magubane, Peter, 74 Mandela, Mandla, 217n74 Mandela, Nelson: Awaiting Trial Block and, 138; history museums and, 29, 48; homes of, 47, 77; incarceration of, 78; on Jews, 172–173, 173; Robben Island and, 135; role of, 74–75; sale of lithographs by, 175–176

INDE X

Mandela House Museum, 104 Marks, Shula, 33, 35 Maropeng Visitor Centre, Cradle of Humankind, Gauteng Province, 84, 84–85 Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial: Atlanta, 157, 158; Washington, D.C., 182 Maryland Historical Society, “Mining the Museum” exhibition, 177 Maxwele, Chumani, 152 Mbeki, Thabo, 84, 134, 150 Mbuli, Mzwakhe, 44 memory: attachment to and fear of loss of, 104–105; consensus-driven, 14–17, 21; museums as between history and, 17–21; personal narratives, 14, 76; regional differences in, 168–169; sites of, 18, 77–80, 140–141, 187, 196. See also collective memory; collective memory narratives; memory deviants; memory entrepreneurs “memory boxes” at NMAAHC, 14, 67 memory deviants, 22, 145–146, 182, 184–185, 189–190. See also history as avant-garde; simulated past memory entrepreneurs: in black museum movement, 57–61; historical capital and, 29–32; popularizing efforts of, 64; processes of, 41; as protesters, 43; as revising history, 27–29; states as, 45–48; work of, 36, 53 Menafee, Corey, 153 Metropolitan Museum of Art, “After the Deluge” exhibition, 178 Mills, C. W., 60 mining industry, history of, 73 “Mining the Museum” exhibition, 177 “Miscast” exhibition, 81, 177–178 misrecognition and misrepresentation, 174–175 Mitchell, Michele, 110, 113, 116

INDE X

Mkhize, Sibongiseni, 135–136, 162 MoAD. See Museum of the African Diaspora Molotch, Harvey, 155 Moorland, Jesse, 52 Moran, Jim, 148 Moss, Rock, 98 Müller, Jan-Werner, 76 multicultural approaches and consensus-driven memory, 14–15, 189 Murray, Brett, 174–175, 183 MuseumAfrica, Johannesburg, 41, 121–122 museumification processes, 187–188, 190 Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 104 Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), San Francisco, 103, 129–131, 181 Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, 194–195 museums: under ANC, 46–47; behavior at, 182–183; as between history and memory, 17–21; social history movement and, 39–42, 80; as supplement to school curricula, 110–111, 143; as temples and shrines, 156; tourist industry and, 2, 124–125, 127, 137–138, 141–142, 143; urban locations of, 111, 155–156. See also black museum movement; history museums; specific museums Museums for South Africa, 120 museum studies, field of, 19 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 52 Nagelgast, Blanche, 121 narratives: of black history museums in U.S., 86–87; of black identity

245

formation, 4, 178–181; homogeneity in, 81, 105; identification with, 164; of identity formation, 4, 67–69, 86–87, 126, 188–189; personal, 14, 76, 159–162; postapartheid metanarrative, 73, 75, 76; regional, 168–170; resistance to, 145–147; site-specific struggle, 138. See also collective memory narratives nation: paradox of race in defining, 149; race and, 29; reorganization and rearticulation of, 64. See also national history; national identity National Air and Space Museum, Enola Gay exhibition, 11, 210n21 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 52 National Center for Civil and Human Rights (NCCHR), Atlanta, 102, 131–133, 171–172 National Civil Rights Museum (NCRM), Memphis, 80, 94–95, 96–97, 128–129, 176 National Cultural History Museum, 81 National Heritage Council, 47 national history: prehistoric, 81–84, 83, 124; in South Africa, 101–102. See also revisions of national histories national identity: role of museums in communication of, 3, 17–18; in South Africa, 191–193; tension between diversity and, 9, 12 National Mall, Washington, D.C., 148 National Monuments Council (NMC), 46, 47, 119, 120, 138 National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), Washington, D.C.: Anacostia Neighborhood Museum and, 117; Bunch on, 85; contemporary news and, 100; debate over, 147–149, 189; effect of,

246

National Museum (cont.) on existing black museums, 115–116; exterior of, 101; location for, 133–134; virtual “memory box” of, 14, 67. See also NMAAHC Act of 2003 National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), Washington, D.C., 63, 147, 173–174 National Park Service Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, Atlanta, 157, 158, 182 National Underground Railroad Freedom Center (NURFC), Cincinnati, 93, 127–128, 155–156, 176 NCCHR (National Center for Civil and Human Rights), Atlanta, 102, 131–133, 171–172 NCRM (National Civil Rights Museum), Memphis, 80, 94–95, 96–97, 128–129, 176 Negro History Week, 54 Nelson Mandela Museum, 157 new social history movement, 12–13, 17. See also social history movement New York Historical Society, “Slavery in New York” exhibition, 169–170 Ngubane, Ben, 48 9/11 Memorial & Museum, New York City, 183 Nixon, Rob, Homelands, Harlem, and Hollywood, 43–44 NMAAHC Act of 2003, 63, 85, 113, 148 NMAI (National Museum of the American Indian), Washington, D.C., 63, 147, 173–174 NMC (National Monuments Council), 46, 47, 119, 120, 138 Nora, Pierre, 18, 30, 108 Northwest African American Museum, Seattle, 156 Number Four Prison, Johannesburg, 76–77, 138–140, 184

INDE X

NURFC. See National Underground Railroad Freedom Center Nyerere, Julius, 75 Obama, Barack, 99, 100, 104, 186–187 Obama, Michelle, 137 Odendaal, Andre, 47 Old Fort Prison complex, Johannesburg, 42 Olick, Jeffrey, 126, 200n30 Opperman, Gert, 123 Orania Museum, 151 Origins Centre, Johannesburg, 124 Ovington, Mary White, 52 Parks, Rosa, 95–96 past: as cultural phenomenon, 5; as curated, 66–68, 104–106; as foreign country, 187–188; as fragile, 182; identifying with, 8–14, 21; revisiting, 3, 8; shifts in orientations to, 11. See also colonial past, representations of; simulated past Pate, James, 176 people’s history movement, 32 People’s History Project, University of the Western Cape, 37–38 personal narratives, 14, 76, 159–162 Philadelphia Negro, The (Du Bois), 50, 51 physical locations of older museums, 111, 121–124 Pietermaritzburg Declaration, 40 Pieterson, Hector, 74, 77–78, 140 Pieterson, Lulu, 140–141, 156–157 Pijeaux, Lawrence, Jr., 129 place, power of, 78–79, 97 plantation tours, 123 police-related killings, 100 politics in presentation of historical material, 11 “politics of regret,” 126 Popular Memory Group, 17

INDE X

Posel, Deborah, 37 postapartheid museums, 134–143 post-civil rights era museums, 125–134 prehistoric national history, 81–84, 83, 124 progressive historians, 30, 37, 58 progressive history in U.S., 35 public-private partnerships for museum projects, 127–128, 154, 155 Putnam, Robert, Bowling Alone, 31 queer histories and experiences, 183–184 Rabinowitz, Richard, 169 race: classification by, 173–174; comparative research on, 7–8; nation and, 29; paradox of, in defining nation, 149; as principle for organization of society, 6; social history movement and, 35 “Race: Are We So Different?” exhibition, 174 racial segregation, history of, in U.S., 92–94 racial subjectivities, 4 radical history movement, 55–56 Rassool, Ciraj, 47 Ray, James Earl, 96 rebellion, moral judgment about rules of, 153 regional narratives, 168–170 Renan, Ernest, 192 representation: of apartheid, 76; collective, 15–16, 107–109, 143–144; of collective trauma, 181; of colonial past, 69–73, 70, 71, 72; limits of history museums and, 195–196; memory deviants and, 145–147; need to broaden, 116–117; of racial oppression, 74; vindicationist model of, 61, 62–63; of violent histories, 66, 68–69,

2 47

90–91, 92–94, 96, 97, 101–102; without reference to racial dichotomies, 172–173 resistance to public narratives, 145–147 revisions of national histories: historical capital and, 30–32; memory entrepreneurs and, 64–65; as originating from above, 30; overview of, 27–29. See also black history movement; social history movement Rhodes, Cecil John, statue of, 151–153 Rice, Anne, 175 Richardson, Raye, 130 riots in U.S., 61 Ripley, S. Dillon, 59 Robben Island Museum, Cape Town: antiapartheid struggle and, 78–80; debates over, 159; entrance to, 79; government and, 135–137; Mandela cell, 160; Obama visit to, 186–187; tours at, 14, 159–162, 161; UWC and, 42 rock art, 124 Rock Art Museum, 82 Rose, Richard, 166 Ruffins, Fath Davis, 57 Saar, Betye, 178 Sachs, Albie, 45 sacredness of collective, 16, 175, 181 SADF (South African Defense Force), 150, 151 Sakauye, Beverly, 129 Saltz, Jerry, 178 SAMA (South African Museums Association), 39, 40, 41, 107, 120 San people, 81–83 school curricula, museums as supplement to, 110–111, 143 Schwartz, Barry, 8 science museums, 174

248

SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference), 57, 62, 75, 94 Segal, Lauren, 42 Seidman, Judy, 174 Serote, Wally, 135 Shipman, Doug, 102–103, 131–133 simulated past: Apartheid Museum and, 154–155; District Six Museum and, 162–164; at elite institutions, 153–154; family disputes about legacy and, 156–158; NMAAHC and, 147–149; NURFC and, 155–156; overview of, 147, 184; patronage of, 193–194; in South Africa, 150–153; survivor accounts and, 159–162 simulations at museums, 89–90 sites of memory, 18, 77–80, 140–141, 187, 196 Sithole, Antoinette, 140–141, 157 Skotnes, Pippa, 81, 177–178 Slave Lodge Museum, Cape Town, 69–71, 70, 71 slavery, history of: forts and plantations, 123; national apology for, 198n13; NMAAHC and, 147–148; in South Africa, 69–71; in U.S., 87–92, 89; Walker and, 179–180 “Slavery in New York” exhibition, 169–170 Slovo, Joe, 173 Smith, Jacqueline, 128, 162 Smith, Nikkalos, 177 Smithsonian Institution: Anacostia Community Museum, 58, 59, 99, 111, 117–118; Asian Pacific American Center, 149; integration of black history into, 63; Museum of the African Diaspora and, 131; National Air and Space Museum, Enola Gay exhibition, 11, 210n21; National Museum of the American Indian, 63, 147, 173–174; National Underground Railroad Freedom

INDE X

Center and, 127–128; “Separate Is Not Equal” exhibition, 103; Woolworth Lunch Counter and, 66. See also National Museum of African American History and Culture social history movement: ANC and, 48; ascent of, 33; black history movement compared to, 52, 55; Bozzoli and, 32–33; collective memory and, 21, 28, 36–37; critics of, 37, 41; as enterprising, 34–35; identity crisis in, 38; museums and, 39–42, 80; overview of, 12–13; People’s History Project and, 37–38; Popular Memory Group and, 17; race and, 35; system of exclusion and censorship and, 36; techniques of, 33–34; urban focus of, 34; in U.S., 32 social transformation, 13 Sophiatown Memory Project, Johannesburg, 80–81 South Africa: consensus-driven history in, 13–14; cultural boycott of, 43–44; global dimensions of national history in, 101–102; identity formation narratives in, 68–69; institution-building in, 42–44; national identity framework in, 191–193; “negotiated revolution” in, 6–7; new social history movement in, 12–13; parallels with U.S., 5–8, 22, 64–65, 103–104, 188–189, 191; postapartheid metanarrative of, 73, 75, 76. See also social history movement; specific museums South African Cultural History Museum, Cape Town, 41, 71 South African Defense Force (SADF), 150, 151 South African Jewish Museum, Cape Town, 172–173

INDE X

South African Museum, Cape Town, 41, 68, 81–82, 83, 124 South African Museums Association (SAMA), 39, 40, 41, 107, 120 South African National Gallery, “Miscast” exhibition, 81, 177–178 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), 57, 62, 75, 94 Soweto uprising, 74, 77–78, 140 Spies, Willie, 150–151 Spivak, Gayatri, 16 staff composition of older museums, 112, 119–120 stakeholder community, 116 Stein, Judith, 177 Stevenson, Bryan, 170 Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial, Georgia, 165–167, 166 storytelling, 96 strategic essentialism, 16 “Subtlety, A” (Walker), 179, 179–180, 180 survivor accounts, 159–162 Suzman, Arthur, 172 Suzman, Helen, 155, 173 symbolic violence, 198n16 terminology, 25 Theoharis, Jeanne, 96 Thompson, E. P., 33 tourist industry and museums, 2, 124–125, 127, 137–138, 141–142, 143 Trace Group, 42 transformation, cultural, by renaming, 214n28 transformation of museums: apartheid-era, 118–124; civilrights-era, 110–118; difficulty of, 71, 73, 85; overview of, 109–110 traveling exhibitions, 112–113 truth, desire to believe as more relevant than, 91–92 Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 7 Tubman, Harriet, 91

2 49

Underground Railroad, 91–92, 98. See also National Underground Railroad Freedom Center United Democratic Front (UDF), 44, 74–75 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO): Slave Trade Project, 69; World Heritage Sites, 78, 83, 85 United States (U.S.): civil rights movement in, 7, 62, 94–97, 99–100, 102–103, 224n15; consensusdriven history in, 11–12, 13–14; culture wars in, 10; identity formation narratives in, 67–68; interest in history of apartheid in, 104; museum attendance in, 10–11; parallels with South Africa, 5–8, 22, 64–65, 103–104, 188–189, 191; progressive history in, 35; racial identity framework in, 191; riots in, 61. See also black history movement; specific museums United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., 140, 147, 183 University of Cape Town, 151–152 University of the Western Cape (UWC), 36, 37–38, 42 University of the Witwatersrand (Wits University): Apartheid Museum and, 73, 80, 141; History Workshop, 36–37, 39, 41–42; liberal historians and, 33; Origins Centre, 124 updating material and exhibitions, 100–101, 112–113 urban development, use of museums in, 155–156 urban locations of older museums, 111 U.S. Cultural and Heritage Tourism Summit, 125

250

UWC (University of the Western Cape), 36, 37–38, 42 victimhood, recasting, 90–92 video response booths, 169–170 vindicationist model of representation, 61, 62–63 violence: of civil rights era, 97; history of, forgetting, 192; identity formation, pain, and, 191; Museum of Tolerance and, 194–195; of racial oppression, 92–94; representation of, 66, 68–69, 74, 90–91, 96, 97, 101–102; symbolic, 198n16 visual representation of collective trauma, 181 Voortrekker Monument and Memorial, Pretoria: colonial past in, 72–73; exhibition at, 72; front of, 168; narrative of, 167; South African Defense Force memorial in, 151; transformation

INDE X

of, 122–123; Wall of Remembrance, 152 Walker, Kara, 178–181, 183 Wanless, Ann, 39, 41, 121, 214n30 Wells, Ida B., 52 West, Richard, 63 Williams, Tyrone, 55 Wilson, Fred, 177, 178, 181–182 Winter, Jay, 108 Wits University. See University of the Witwatersrand Women’s Prison, Johannesburg, 138 Woodson, Carter G., 50, 51, 52–54, 115 Workers’ Museum, Johannesburg, 41, 42 Wright, Charles H., 58, 59 Yale University, 153–154 Yeingst, William, 66 Young, James, 18, 181 Zerubavel, Eviatar, 15, 223n5