Contested Histories in Public Space

Contested Histories in Public Space

Memory, Race, and Nation

  • Author: Walkowitz, Daniel J.; Knauer, Lisa Maya
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • Serie: Radical Perspectives
  • ISBN: 9780822342175
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822391425
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2009
  • Month: January
  • Pages: 376
  • DDC: 909
  • Language: English
Contested Histories in Public Space brings multiple perspectives to bear on historical narratives presented to the public in museums, monuments, texts, and festivals around the world, from Paris to Kathmandu, from the Mexican state of Oaxaca to the waterfront of Wellington, New Zealand. Paying particular attention to how race and empire are implicated in the creation and display of national narratives, the contributing historians, anthropologists, and other scholars delve into representations of contested histories at such “sites” as a British Library exhibition on the East India Company, a Rio de Janeiro shantytown known as “the cradle of samba,” the Ellis Island immigration museum, and high-school history textbooks in Ecuador.

Several contributors examine how the experiences of indigenous groups and the imperial past are incorporated into public histories in British Commonwealth nations: in Te Papa, New Zealand’s national museum; in the First Peoples’ Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization; and, more broadly, in late-twentieth-century Australian culture. Still others focus on the role of governments in mediating contested racialized histories: for example, the post-apartheid history of South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument, originally designed as a tribute to the Voortrekkers who colonized the country’s interior. Among several essays describing how national narratives have been challenged are pieces on a dispute over how to represent Nepali history and identity, on representations of Afrocuban religions in contemporary Cuba, and on the installation in the French Pantheon in Paris of a plaque honoring Louis Delgrès, a leader of Guadeloupean resistance to French colonialism.


Contributors. Paul Amar, Paul Ashton, O. Hugo Benavides, Laurent Dubois, Richard Flores, Durba Ghosh, Albert Grundlingh, Paula Hamilton, Lisa Maya Knauer, Charlotte Macdonald, Mark Salber Phillips, Ruth B. Phillips, Deborah Poole, Anne M. Rademacher, Daniel J. Walkowitz

  • Contents
  • About the Series
  • Introduction: Memory, Race, and the Nation in Public Spaces
  • First Things First
    • Two Peoples, One Museum: Biculturalism and Visitor “Experience” at Te Papa–“Our Place,” New Zealand’s New National Museum
    • Contesting Time, Place, and Nation in the First Peoples’ Hall of the Canadian Museum of Civilization
    • “Unfinished Business”: Public History in a Postcolonial Nation
  • Colonial Legacies and Winners’ Tales
    • Exhibiting Asia in Britain: Commerce, Consumption, and Globalization
    • The Alamo: Myth, Public History, and the Politics of Inclusion
    • Ellis Island Redux: The Imperial Turn and the Race of Ethnicity
  • State Stories
    • A Cultural Conundrum? Old Monuments and New Regimes: The Voortrekker Monument as Symbol of Afrikaner Power in a Postapartheid South Africa
    • Narratives of Power, the Power of Narratives: The Failing Foundational Narrative of the Ecuadorian Nation
    • Affective Distinctions: Race and Place in Oaxaca
  • Under-Stated Stories
    • Marking Remembrance: Nation and Ecology in Two Riverbank Monuments in Kathmandu
    • Saving Rio’s “Cradle of Samba”: Outlaw Uprisings, Racial Tourism, and the Progressive State in Brazil
    • Afrocuban Religion, Museums, and the Cuban Nation
    • Haunting Delgrès
  • Bibliography
  • Contributors
  • Index

Subjects

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