The Museum's Borders

On the Challenge of Knowing and Remembering Well

Simon Knell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000198041
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

The Museum's Borders demonstrates that museum practices are deeply entangled in border making, patrol, mitigation and erasure, and that the border lens offers a new tool for deconstructing and reconfiguring such practices.

Arguing that the museum is a critical institution for the operation of knowledge-based democracies, Knell investigates how they have been used by scientists, art historians and historians to construct our bordered world. Examining the role of museums in the Windrush scandal in Britain, the exclusion of Black artists in America, ideological and propaganda discourses in Europe and China, and the remembering of contested pasts in the Balkans, Knell argues for the importance of museums in countering unethical, nationalistic, post-fact political discourse.

Using the principles of Knell's 'Contemporary Museology', The Museum' s Borders considers the significance of the museum for societies that wish to know and remember in ways that empower citizens and build cohesive societies. The book will be of great interest to students and academics engaged in the study of museums and heritage, art history, science studies, cultural studies, anthropology, memory studies and history. It is required reading for museum professionals seeking to adopt non-discriminatory practices.

PART I
Prelude

1
BORDER VIOLENCE, DEMOCRACY
AND THE MUSEUM

In 2018, the Higgins – a large, modern, multidisciplinary, town museum and art gallery in Bedford in the English Midlands – was one of a number of institutions in Britain to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the first arrival of Caribbean migrants known as ‘the Windrush generation’ who had been drawn to the ‘mother country’ by new equalities provided by the British Nationality Act (1948).¹ While a number of British public sector industries would later recruit directly from the Caribbean, this migration was born in Jamaica in the aspirations of those who saw, in Britain and the new Act, opportunities for a better life.² It was, however, the alternative narrative of Britain reaching out to her colonies for labour for her reconstruction after the Second World War that was used to frame the 2018 commemorations.³ While this act of meritorious re-narration was meant as a gift of recognition, it had the advantage for some of its authors of permitting a border to be erected between this and more recent migrations from the low wage economies of Central and Eastern Europe, which were then being used in nativist anti-immigration discourses to disrupt mainstream British politics. In fact, there was no difference between these Caribbean migrants arriving in the 1940s and 1950s and those arriving from Romania, Bulgaria and Poland 60 years later. Both communities took advantage of a legal right of entry and both saw similar opportunities. Both were met with a negative response from some in the political establishment and press. Both made similar contributions and both endured violence and abuse. Both were seen, in their day, as transgressing national and cultural borders; of being ‘visibly different’.

The hostile environment and Windrush scandal

It might be thought that after 70 years, the Windrush generation would be fully inducted into a modern sense of Britishness that was partly Black and of Caribbean heritage. Those who had arrived as children were now British pensioners, having worked their entire lives in the country. The culture they had introduced into Britain was now deeply embedded in towns and cities across the country. Surely no one could doubt that these people were British? In government circles, however, there was far less certainty and at that very moment when Windrush anniversary exhibitions were meant to introduce a period of recognition, reflection and celebration, they were instead given unexpected poignancy as the result of an emerging national scandal. For it was only then that the wider British public first became fully aware of the devastating consequences for this historic generation of migrants, of former Home Secretary, and now Prime Minister, Theresa May’s, ‘hostile environment’ which sought to apply brutal and inhumane measures to stem the tide of immigration.⁴ Pursuing a policy of zero tolerance, May sought to drive compassion out of the immigration system:

The ludicrous former position was that UKBA [UK Border Agency] had to examine proactively every case for compassionate factors before they could remove someone.⁵

As part of this policy, the government had ‘Go Home’ vans patrol neighbourhoods where there were migrant populations. Seeking to intimidate an already vulnerable group, these displayed fictitious statistics: ‘In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest. 106 arrests last week in your area.’⁶

This crackdown on migration was not simply an assault on recent migrants, it questioned the status of anyone who had arrived in Britain as a migrant, no matter how long ago and regardless of their settled status.⁷ In 2014 and 2016, the government had introduced Immigration Acts that turned hospitals, universities, workplaces, rented accommodation, and so on, into border posts.⁸ This happened despite the government being fully cognisant that 0.5 million settled migrants in Britain would have difficulty proving their status. British citizens, who had arrived as Windrush children perhaps 50 years before, now found themselves trapped in May’s hostile environment, where they were denied the right to work, healthcare, shelter and social security.⁹ Experiencing the full effects of Home Office performance targets for deportation, these legal British citizens were detained and deported, and driven into ill health, poverty and suicide.¹⁰ The ‘Windrush scandal’, as it became known, revealed how pervasively, subtly and easily borders can be erected within a society and yet remain invisible to a wider population (Figure 1.1).¹¹

Figure 1.1 Whitehall, London, 5 May 2018: hundreds of people join the ‘March for Windrush’ to protest against the ‘Hostile Environment’.

Photo: David Mbiya/shutterstock.com

In 2016, in the chaotic aftermath of the Brexit vote, Mrs May had launched her premiership with a rhetoric of compassionate one-nation Conservatism which came as a relief after the Cameron government’s austerity-led assault on the most disadvantaged in society. In 2018, however, when the Windrush scandal broke and with the hostile environment still in place, her message of empathy took on the appearance of a form of doublespeak behind which the bureaucratic machinery of the state was actively threading borders through British society in ways never before seen. In 2019, now behind a hollow rhetoric of compensation and change, the government began placing immigration officers in public institutions. Satbir Singh, chief executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, saw this as ‘Spreading the tentacles of this hostility ever deeper’.¹²

What was being enacted here exploited the twin characteristics of the border: a form of defence that can be moralised, and a violent act of ‘Othering’ that deploys the dehumanising and depersonalising language of objectification and threat, in such words as ‘migrant’ and ‘swarm’,¹³ to render certain individuals beyond the compassion of the state. Willem Schinkel, in his analysis of state violence, observes an identical illusion: the state presents itself as enacting justice but it does so by simultaneously delegitimising the citizen:

The state primarily directs the explicit use of its monopoly of violence towards its own subjects, more specifically towards those subjects not satisfyingly subjectified . . . those subjects not properly ‘socialized’, ‘adapted’ or ‘integrated’ . . . . But this view offers a one-sided sketch of the violence of the state. For since the state defines the borders of the legitimate, it is imprecise to conclude that internal state violence is merely reactive. The view of the violence of the state as being only reactive in fact legitimates the active forms of violence by the state by taking them to be induced by illegitimate forms of private violence.¹⁴

Note that this use of objectifying categories has political efficacy that would be lost if these arguments were conducted using the specific examples of those vulnerable British citizens who were really the subject of the government’s policies. This effect is at the heart of this book’s discussion of the museum as an institution engaged in constructing, guarding and mitigating borders and possessing a love of categorisation. The government’s use of categories and concepts, and its avoidance of the discussion of real lives, permitted it to argue that the fault was not with the policy but with the Windrush people for not having appropriate documentation. In television interviews, issuing apologies and feigning action, Mrs May remained resolute in her policy of exclusion, apparently believing that collateral damage was inevitable if the country was to be protected from the ‘scourge of immigration’.¹⁵

Democracy and the autonomous museum

In the context of border construction, Othering and state violence, and regardless of curatorial intent, exhibitions like that shown in Bedford were more than simply celebratory or acknowledging, or a means to fill a ‘compassion gap’. As part of the distributed institutional fabric of the nation-state, the Higgins, and these other organisations, were countering a state’s violence against its own citizens and dismantling a border at the very moment when the state sought to erect it. It was doing this not as a partisan political actor or as a political adversary but in its role as an institution that records and presents those empirical truths that form the ethical basis for the operation of a knowledge-based democracy.¹⁶ In a democracy and in this overlooked role, the museum should be considered a constitutional requirement akin to an autonomous judiciary and free press.¹⁷

If this claim for an English provincial museum and a small temporary exhibition seems overstated, it can be proven if we apply the sharper lens of a museum in a democracy that has had a more troubled recent history. Such a museum can be found in Tirana, Albania: the National History Museum. Here, under the heading, ‘Border Killings’, displays show large photographs of the bodies of those young men, some in their teens, who had tried to escape the country in 1990 and were killed by forces of the collapsing communist dictatorship.¹⁸ This museum is here acting as a critical memory institution, keeping alive objective truths in a country that has often been subjected to unbending ideology. As a form of incontestable evidence, these photographs and associated objects counter the legacy of the dictatorship’s elaborate political propaganda and misinformation, used at the time to control society but which also sought to shape future histories. Here the museum records actions at a territorial, political and historical border but it is also, as an institution, patrolling and guarding a border between a free, truth-based, democracy and violent, ideological, propaganda-based, authoritarianism. In this role, this fairly traditional, pragmatic, museum seems fundamentally important. With the communist regime overthrown, it was possible for the museum to compartmentalise, historicise and pass judgement on the past but it did so not by adopting a partisan political counterargument or position. It used instead that most powerful of museological resources: transparent material documentation. People died as a result of the Windrush scandal, too, just as they did at the Albanian border.

In 2019, a year after news of the Windrush scandal broke, the UK parliament’s Home Affairs Select Committee conducted an unrelated, but very pertinent, twenty-year review of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• PART I Prelude
• PART II Introduction
• PART III The borders of truth
• PART IV The borders of memory
• PART V The borders of contemporary living
• Index