also deserve immense thanks too, of course, for joining the convoy and staying the journey. We hope that it feels well worth it for all concerned. Without you – editors and contributors – it couldn’t have happened.
There is also somebody else without whom it couldn’t have happened. This is Gill Whitley. Gill joined the project in 2012 as Project Editor. In short, she transformed our lives through her impeccable organization and skillful diplomacy, directly contacting contributors to extract chapters from them, setting up systems to keep us all on track with where things were up to, and securing many of the picture permissions. She has been a pleasure to work with and we are immensely grateful to her.
The idea for a series of International Handbooks of Museum Studies came from Jayne Fargnoli at Wiley Blackwell and we are grateful to her for this and being such a great cheerleader for the project. She read a good deal of the work as it came in and knowing that this only increased her enthusiasm for the project boosted everyone’s energy as we chased deadlines. We also thank other staff at Wiley Blackwell for their role in the production processes, including, most recently, Jake Opie, for helping to at last allow us to bring out the individual volumes in paperback format.
Because of its extended nature and because things don’t always happen according to initial timetables, editorial work like this often has to be fitted into what might otherwise be leisure time or time allocated for other things. Luckily, both of our Mikes (Mike Beaney and Mike Leahy) were sympathetic, not least as both have deeply occupying work of their own; and we thank them for being there for us when we needed them.
Lastly, we would like to thank each other. We have each benefited from the other’s complementary expertise and networks, from the confidence of having that insightful second opinion, and from the sharing of the load. Having somebody else with whom to experience the frustrations and joys, the tribulations and amusements, has made it so much more fun. Not only has this helped to keep us relatively sane, but it has also made The International Handbooks of Museum Studies so much better than they would otherwise have been.
Sharon Macdonald and Helen Rees Leahy, August 2014 and July 2019
INTRODUCTION: MUSEUMS IN TRANSFORMATION: Dynamics of Democratization and Decolonization
Annie E. Coombes and Ruth B. Phillips
The transformation masks of the Northwest Coast are among the most famous artistic genres created by North American Indigenous artists. When first seen in ceremonial dances they appear as clearly identifiable beings – a human, a thunderbird, a wolf. In performance the dancer pulls on hidden strings and reconfigures the mask’s moving parts to reveal an entirely new being – the animal becomes a human, the human a radiant sun. The onlookers realize that appearances are deceptive and that they had not understood the true nature of the ancestral beings they had first seen. Yet, because the ability to transform is the essential nature of the primordial beings who are represented in these dances, we might just as easily say that their fundamental identity has not changed but been revealed.
Something of the same conundrum faces us when we consider the transformational potentials of museums. As institutions, museums are quintessential inventions of the modern era. The literature of critical museology has persuasively analyzed the modern Western museum as a primary public site of authoritative articulation, inscribing in its visitors the Eurocentric hierarchies of race, class, and gender and the ideological formations required for the social and political reproduction of imperial nations. Museums expose our regimes of knowledge, tell us our histories of progress, and form us as citizens through spectatorial experiences that position us as knowing subjects in command of the objects and truths set out before our gaze (see Bennett 1995; Duncan 1995;). But do they still function this way today in an era that proclaims itself as postcolonial and global rather than imperial and Eurocentric? When we survey the museums of the early twenty-first century we see a confusing array of installations, practices, and institutions, some of which continue to exhibit the modernist features just summarized, while others appear to have reconfigured familiar conventions and practices to produce new, less hierarchical, and more socially interactive kinds of exhibits, programs, and relationships. How thoroughgoing are these transformations? Were the potentials they now exploit always already present and available to projects of reconfiguration? And, if so, do those in control of the strings and levers have the ability to pull these changed guises back into the old patterns?
During the last decades of the twentieth century, museums, as primary sites for the public visualization of Western narratives of history, culture, and knowledge, presented themselves as natural targets for deconstructive critique. Many became sites of contestation and the working out of a “politics of recognition” which, as Charles Taylor (1992) has argued, emerged from the identity politics of the second half of the twentieth century. In this process, the subjects of museum representation assert their right to “recognize” themselves in the public images that museums create according to their own formulations of their histories and cultures. In numerous institutions around the world, professional museologists and members of marginalized communities have come together to affirm the museum’s potential to rectify past silences and to set the record straight. Pressures toward decolonization and greater democratization have led to the development of collaborative processes of exhibition and program development and to a greater multivocality – processes and models we have sought to instantiate in this volume through the close collaborations that inform many chapters and the voice boxes used by many of the authors.
No one volume can, of course, address such a large issue comprehensively. We focus here on museums of art, history, and ethnography because these sectors of the museum establishment were the first to be subjected to rigorous critical analysis by community activists and poststructuralist and postcolonial theorists. In many ways, we would argue, the innovative responses these kinds of museums developed have provided models for change in other types of museums and heritage sites. Our framing of the large topic of museum transformation through democratization and decolonization and the revisionist narratives they demand inevitably reflects our own research in Africa, North America, and Europe. We draw on these experiences for many of the specific examples discussed in this introduction, but we also urge that they closely parallel patterns of museological change found in other parts of the world. Museum creation, as many case studies show, has proved particularly adapted to the desires of decolonizing communities and minorities to memorialize past oppression and advocate for social justice. The contributions we have assembled reveal the cross-influ-ences between museum transformations that have involved the representation of racial and political oppression within Europe and those impelled by the dynamics of decolonization. Kavita Singh, in Chapter 2, for example, recounts the close study of Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust made by Sikh founders of the Khalsa Heritage Museum, while Paul Chaat Smith, in Chapter 22, notes the generative importance of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to the founding of the National Museum of the American Indian. In Chapter 5, Gabriel Koureas explores the conflictual representation of nationhood in Cyprus in the National Museum of Struggle in Nicosia.
The three parts of this book trace a movement from representation to action, to innovation. We begin with a set of essays that discuss the role of the museum in the narration of difficult histories that have previously lacked sites of articulation. Public recognition of past histories of political and racial oppression and colonization in the museum emerges as a necessary first step in changing the social attitudes and political structures that enable oppression. It also invites social action in the present, and the second set of essays thus addresses the linked issue of the museum’s affirmation of its social agency. Activism, in its turn, takes the museum into the arena of experimentation – new roles require new strategies.
