Museums and Sites of Persuasion

Politics, Memory and Human Rights

Joyce Apsel, Amy Sodaro, Joyce Apsel, Amy Sodaro

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429647192
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Art
• Thema: Museum Studies

Museums and Sites of Persuasion examines the concept of museums and memory sites as locations that attempt to promote human rights, democracy and peace. Demonstrating that such sites have the potential to act as powerful spaces of persuasion or contestation, the book also shows that there are perils in the selective memory and history that they present.

Examining a range of museums, memorials and exhibits in places as varied as Burundi, Denmark, Georgia, Kosovo, Mexico, Peru, Vietnam and the US, this volume demonstrates how they represent and try to come to terms with difficult histories. As sites of persuasion, the contributors to this book argue, their public goal is to use memory and education about the past to provide moral lessons to visitors that will encourage a more democratic and peaceful future. However, the case studies also demonstrate how political, economic and social realities often undermine this lofty goal, raising questions about how these sites of persuasion actually function on a daily basis.

Straddling several interdisciplinary fields of research and study, Museums and Sites of Persuasion will be essential reading for those working in the fields of museum studies, memory studies, and genocide studies. It will also be essential reading for museum practitioners and anyone engaged in the study of history, sociology, political science, anthropology and art history.

Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

PART I
Museums, politics and persuasion

INTRODUCTION

Memory, politics and human rights

Joyce Apsel and Amy Sodaro

Museums and other memory sites are often charged today with more than simply collecting and displaying objects or symbolically representing the past. Rather, they also work to persuade visitors to change their thinking and behavior. While museums and memory sites have always played persuasive roles, like shaping national identity (Anderson 1991), many of today’s memory sites claim to work to promote liberal ideals such as human rights, democracy and reconciliation by representing past violence and conflict. This volume examines a range of museums, memorials and exhibits in places as varied as Burundi, Denmark, Georgia, Kosovo, Mexico, Peru, Vietnam and the US, analyzing how they represent and try to come to terms with difficult histories. Through the use of history and memory, they act as sites of persuasion, working to educate visitors and provide moral lessons intended to contribute to a more democratic, peaceful present and future. However, political, economic and social realities undermine this lofty goal and raise questions of how these sites of persuasion actually function. Their persuasive role is often more rhetorical than real, limiting their purportedly transformational potential.

Some of the museums and sites examined in this volume are well-funded, prominent, state-sponsored institutions that use the authority of the museum form to persuade their visitors to take a particular moral and/or political stance vis-à-vis the past and present. Thus, their narratives often reflect the political agendas and ideologies of the regimes that create them and may reinforce dominant narratives in their efforts to persuade. Others are smaller sites that emerge from community and local initiatives. While these sites are less likely to take up official, hegemonic narratives and instead attempt to be spaces where local healing and reckoning with past and ongoing violence occur, they too are influenced by local politics. All of these sites hold promise in terms of fostering dialogue and educating about human rights and democratic culture; all attempt to varying degrees to accomplish their goals by encouraging their visitors to interact with the past and its memory. Yet, despite their broad ambitions, there are also often perils in the selective memory and history that they represent.

Memory and human rights

The changing role of museums and other memory sites today is influenced by and contributes to a broader shift in how societies around the world relate to the past, moving from the triumphalist history of progress and the future—encapsulated in the achievements of the nation-state and its heroes—toward a more complicated understanding that often implicates the nation-state in violence committed against civilians. This new emphasis on the negative past is part of what has been described as a “memory boom” in academia and broader society, and reflects changes in historiography. In addition to moving away from a belief in the “objectivity” of history and toward an understanding of history as representations and interpretations of the past, replete with biases of the historian doing the writing (Jenkins 2006), historians have been working to “decenter history,” shifting from a Eurocentric, hegemonic narrative to a globalized perspective that recognizes the importance of local and cultural histories and includes the voices of those long silenced and oppressed (Davis 2011; Apsel 2016). Where the nation-state was once oriented toward the glorious future with past events as teleological prelude, today recognition of the fragmentation of experience and memory has made the past an important space for negotiating identity, recognition and legitimacy.

The memory boom and historiographical shifts of recent decades are linked to “seeing” the harm, in particular the enormous loss of life and suffering during two World Wars and, especially, the atrocities of the Holocaust. The reckoning with history that began in the second half of the 20th century has been selective and was initially driven by Western states grappling with the legacy of violence. However, this memory boom has since begun to travel the globe, picking up “memory momentum” with a series of global events, including recognition of the brutal impact of slavery and colonization and violent struggles for independence by former colonies; the demise of dictatorships in Latin America and other parts of the world; the end of communism in the Soviet Union and satellite countries; and in the aftermath of genocides and mass atrocities in Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and elsewhere. With these events, memory has become crucial in the larger project of transitional justice and democratic state building. Increasingly, confronting past violence is a normative demand for nations and groups wishing to attain international political legitimacy. Even states that previously denounced human rights violations elsewhere, like the US, have at times been pushed to acknowledge atrocities they carried out, though often it is easier to acknowledge past human rights violations with token, symbolic reparations, while ignoring present-day repercussions and current harms, as several of the case studies in this volume demonstrate.

This new “politics of regret” (Olick 2007) or “reparations politics” (Torpey 2006), focused on confronting and coming to terms with the past, has led to a global set of expectations and best practices attached to the memory of violence. With the Holocaust often referenced as a precedent, new commemorative forms—such as memorial museums, memorials and counter-monuments—and fields like memory studies and transitional justice have emerged and are often framed by the imperative of learning lessons of the past to create a better present and future. This global movement has led to the emergence of what has been theorized as a transnational (Erll 2011; Inglis 2016) or cosmopolitan (Levy and Sznaider 2006) memory discourse. Modes and methods of remembering are posited to move across and beyond national borders, shaping how groups and nations around the world work to come to terms with their complicated histories. Infused with liberal, universal ideals like human rights, democracy, peace and tolerance, this transnational memory culture purports to provide a model through which divergent violent histories can be examined and addressed.

The centrality of memory focused on violence is part of the global spread of a powerful human rights discourse. Like the memory boom, the human rights movement arose in response to select violence during the first half of the 20th century. In 1948, the newly formed United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and introduced the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide for state ratification; recognition “that human rights and human wrongs are inherently linked” (Apsel 2013). This foundation began to lay the groundwork for a global human rights enterprise (Armaline et al. 2015), creating national, regional and international laws as well as institutions, NGOs and other mechanisms for promoting and protecting human rights. However, while human rights is meant as an all-encompassing promise of rights and equality, in practice “the idea of human rights accommodated itself to the reigning political economy, which it could humanize but not overthrow” (Moyn 2018, 9). Hence, the trope of human rights as it is used in sites of persuasion largely ignores systemic and structural violence and inequity, lest they threaten the existent economic and political structures that often support—at least purportedly—mainstream human rights ideals and organizations.

As memory has figured more prominently in the writing of history, at the same time, sites of atrocity have become a crucial part of the promotion and advocacy of this narrower understanding of human rights in the aftermath of atrocity and mass violence. Testimony, material remains—including the important role of forensics—and other memory traces are essential components of prosecutions and necessary tools for reparation, reconciliation and furthering justice. As Andreas Huyssen argues, “The continuing strength of memory politics remains essential for securing human rights in the future” (2011, 621). However, as the case studies in this book suggest, memory politics are always selective, limiting the role memory can play in advancing human rights. Nevertheless, memory and human rights have become parallel discourses (which sometimes commingle and overlap, and at other times are disparate and in tension with each other) that purport to confront past violence and foster a range of liberal ideals including democratic culture and the rights and dignity of both individuals and groups.

Originally, the human rights discourse was part of Western countries’ tool-box and focused on abuses carried out by non-democratic regimes, largely ignoring their own histories of colonialism, racism, and other violence. This has begun to change in recent decades when Western democracies, often faced with pressure from groups that are or have been oppressed, and in part pressured by the “success” of the human rights regime they played a crucial role in creating, have begun acknowledging their own severe human rights violations. For example, Canada established a truth and reconciliation commission to document violence against indigenous peoples, and in the US the two newest Smithsonian Museums on the National Mall in Washington, DC—the Museum of the American Indian and the Museum of African American History and Culture—suggest that the US might be beginning to address aspects of its violent history. These museums seem to adhere to what Richard Sandell describes as a museological trend in which the hegemonic, and purportedly objective, state narrative has been increasingly “decentered,” meaning that issues of race, gender, class, disability and other factors should be taken into account in curating new exhibits and accessibility to diverse audiences (Sandell 2012).

Despite these developments, academic critiques and debates about the effectiveness of the human rights regime abound, and the “end of human rights” has been predicted by numerous scholars in recent years (e.g., Douzinas 2000; Hopgood 2013). These scholarly critiques appear to have gained a particular relevance today; as we write this Introduction, human rights protections and institutions are under attack in the US and around the globe with the growth of right-wing populism and its anti-immigration and nationalistic chauvinism. While globally states have taken up the mantle of liberal human rights norms, making these norms the rhetoric of both the status quo and hope for the future, anti-democratic and anti-rights discourse, actions and policies today remind us of the fragility of human rights as a paradigm and the difficulty of its realization. Further, the use of memory to fuel these populist movements (e.g., “Make America Great Again”) suggests that just as memory can be used to strengthen human rights, so too can it be used to weaken them. However, the ongoing resistance to these political and social trends indicates that perhaps human rights ideals and the use of memory to uphold them have so firmly embedded themselves in today’s societies and cultural landscapes that they cannot be so easily or permanently eliminated.

Museums and sites of memory

Museums and other memory sites have become important mechanisms in attempts to address past injustice and suffering within this universal human rights framework. When they emerged as public institutions in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, museums were intended to display the distinct, one-of-a-kind collections that reflected the “high culture” of their time, “legislating” taste and excellence by displaying objects and art selected by elites and meant for social uplift (Casey 2005). This positioning of museums as elite institutions gave them a role in society as spaces of authority, objectivity and legitimacy, which many retain today.¹ But as their audiences expanded, their roles have changed; as they moved from being elite institutions to more inclusive public institutions over the course of the 20th century, many museums have faced pressure to diversify and democratize both their content and visitors. Thus there has been a proliferation of museums and other sites that work not only to attract as broad an audience as possible, but also to tell previously marginalized stories and histories in innovative and interactive ways.

This shift in the role of museums at the end of the 20th century marks a significant change in museology and a move toward what Valerie Casey describes as “performing museums” (2005): museums that use theatrical tropes to create interactive and experiential exhibits to draw visitors into the stories and histories that they tell. Such museological changes mark a move from an emphasis on collections and “valuable” objects to experiential storytelling, with a focus on ideas, concepts or narratives as museums strive to serve as “spaces belonging to the citizenry at large, expounding on ideas that inform and stir the population to contemplate and occasionally to act” (Gurian 1999, 46). This new performative function of museums relies upon experiential, affective exhibition strategies that encourage interaction and empathy, with the goal of teaching the lessons of the past in a way that will create a better present and future. It is thus no coincidence that several of the museums examined in this volume, including the National Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion in Lima, Peru, have theater professionals among their key creators.

While these new museological trends are evident in different categories of museums, like art, science and natural history museums, they are especially apparent in museums about the past and its history. Most museums and memory sites in the 19th and early 20th century depicted heroes and their achievements, like victory in battle, to bolster national glory and identity—what Benedict Anderson called “official nationalism” (1991). Today, not only have many museums’ methods for telling history become more experiential and interactive but, following historiographical shifts, many museums often also work to reveal previously untold histories, bringing in diverse voices and the experiences of groups that were previously silenced and/or victimized. With this effort to tell “history from below” has come a focus on the negative past: telling the stories of slavery, colonization, genocide and other atrocities, and uncovering the resistance to and struggles against racism, imperialism, war and other forms of oppression.

A range of new museums and exhibits, as well as other types of memory sites, have been developed to tell these difficult histories in innovative ways, including cultural heritage museums, history museums, memory museums (Arnold-de Simine 2013), memorial museums (Williams 2007; Sodaro 2018), peace museums (Apsel 2016) and “sites of conscience,”² with much fluidity and overlap between and within these categories. Memorials and monuments have also changed, shifting from celebratory symbols of the nation-state and its heroes to more contemplative and interactiv...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Museums, politics and persuasion
• Part II Writing national histories
• Part III Displaying difficult pasts
• Part IV Resistance through memory
• Conclusion
• Works cited
• Index