Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel J. Walkowitz is Professor of History, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, and Director of Experiential Education at New York University. Lisa Maya Knauer is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African and African American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. They are editors of Memory and the Impact of Political Transformation in Public Space, also published by Duke University Press.

Lisa Maya Knauer is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and African/African-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth.

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"This is an exceptionally strong and interesting collection about public history in the context of evolving sensibilities about nation, race, culture, 'identity, ' and public representation itself. It features great essays instructively organized, as well as a thoughtful, focused introduction that sets them all in a broader context."--Michael Frisch, University at Buffalo, SUNY

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Contested Histories in Public Space

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

About the Series..................................................................................................................................................................1FIRST THINGS FIRST................................................................................................................................................................31Two Peoples, One Museum: Biculturalism and Visitor "Experience" at Te Papa-"Our Place," New Zealand's New National Museum Charlotte J. Macdonald.................................49Contesting Time, Place, and Nation in the First Peoples' Hall of the Canadian Museum of Civilization Ruth B. Phillips and Mark Salber Phillips...................................71COLONIAL LEGACIES AND WINNERS' TALES..............................................................................................................................................101Exhibiting Asia in Britain: Commerce, Consumption, and Globalization Durba Ghosh.................................................................................................122The Alamo: Myth, Public History, and the Politics of Inclusion Richard R. Flores.................................................................................................136STATE STORIES.....................................................................................................................................................................157A Cultural Conundrum? Old Monuments and New Regimes: The Voortrekker Monument as Symbol of Afrikaner Power in a Postapartheid South Africa Albert Grundlingh.....................178Narratives of Power, the Power of Narratives: The Failing Foundational Narrative of the Ecuadorian Nation O. Hugo Benavides......................................................197UNDER-STATED STORIES..............................................................................................................................................................229Marking Remembrance: Nation and Ecology in Two Riverbank Monuments in Kathmandu Anne M. Rademacher...............................................................................249Saving Rio's "Cradle of Samba": Outlaw Uprisings, Racial Tourism, and the Progressive State in Brazil Paul Amar..................................................................280Afrocuban Religion, Museums, and the Cuban Nation Lisa Maya Knauer...............................................................................................................311Haunting Delgrs Laurent Dubois..................................................................................................................................................329Bibliography......................................................................................................................................................................353Contributors......................................................................................................................................................................357

Chapter One

THE THREE ESSAYS in this section analyze public sites in three nations that were colonized by Great Britain and remain today part of the British Commonwealth: New Zealand, Australia, and Canada. All three cases examine how and in what ways public historians incorporate the experience and history of indigenous groups and the imperial past into stories of the "nation." In the cases of New Zealand and Canada, the focus is on a national museum, while the Australia example gives an account of public history efforts in that country to tell the national story.

Charlotte Macdonald's analysis of Te Papa ("Our Place" in Maori) is an appropriate place to begin, as the New Zealand historian Claudia Orange's classic 1987 history of imperial conquest and exploitation of the indigenous Maoris, The Treaty of Waitangi, is a landmark in postcolonial history. Macdonald's essay examines the museum's "national story" at its opening in February 1998 and then, in an afterword, brings the story forward five years. Her essay raises many of the issues that run throughout the volume: the commodification of the past and the ways in which public history sites negotiate competing claims of subalterns, emerging nationalisms, and commercial and professional interest groups.

Ruth Phillips and Mark Phillips offer a contrasting study of the use of visual display in several rooms of the new Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa. Their essay highlights the contrasting roles of an earlier generation of public historians in the more traditional rooms of the exhibit with those of native and nonnative museum professionals in the First Peoples' Hall. The essay provides a perspective on debates over modernist practices of museology as informed by postcolonial thinking and raises important issues of narrative strategy in museums, the use of oral history, and claims of "authenticity."

The last essay in this section takes us to Australia. Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton distinguish three eras in the representation of Aborigines in Australian public history. Pioneering efforts, they note, can be traced back to nineteenth-century statuary depictions. These are followed by the better-known blossoming of the modern public history movement in the 1970s. Ashton and Hamilton's focus, however, is on the politics of the more recent present in which Aborigine voices have struggled to make themselves heard in contemporary public sites against the pressures from a conservative national government committed to consensual multiculturalism and a pleasing narrative that it imagines would appeal to tourists.

Two Peoples, One Museum

Biculturalism and Visitor "Experience" at Te Papa-"Our Place," New Zealand's New National Museum Charlotte J. Macdonald

THE CREATION of national memory takes place in the contested present. For New Zealanders the opening of a new national museum in February 1998 came after just over a decade of tumultuous upheaval in which radical neoliberalism transformed the economy, the structure of communities, the role of government, and, ultimately, the political system. The mechanics and values of the market were extolled while the public sector shrank drastically. By the 1980s and 1990s the longer-term unraveling of legacies of a colonial history dating back formally to 1840 had produced both a boosterish cultural nationalism (expressed through a pride in a newly found "national identity") and a vociferous challenge from the indigenous Maori population demanding redress for the dispossession suffered through colonialism. The politics of "race" in New Zealand-or Aotearoa as many Maori know it-takes the shape of biculturalism. Maori have sought, and won, recognition for a relationship of partnership agreed to in the Treaty of Waitangi, first signed in 1840 between representatives of Queen Victoria (for the British government) and a large number of Maori tribal leaders. The recognition is not simply of a historical agreement but, much more significantly, for the treaty's operating as the framework for relations between Maori and the Crown (the state authority) and between Maori and Pakeha (literally, non-Maori; largely white New Zealanders, the majority of whom are descendants of English, Welsh, Scots, and Irish settlers) in the present. Those politics remain a flashpoint for dissent in New Zealand life.

The new museum positioned itself boldly in this cultural-historical terrain. Indeed, its survival depended on its doing so. But survival also required it not to be a museum-commercially, it had to cultivate a significant income from ancillary activities to support 365-days-a-year free entry. Promised an "experience" rather than a visit, "guests" were presented with a range of opportunities to park vehicles, eat and drink, take rides on virtual activities, buy goods, host their own event in hired space in the building, and more, and to do so, if they were among the approximately 40 percent of visitors who were locals, often rather than occasionally. Culturally, the museum had to distance itself very firmly from its own origins as a descendant of imperial institutions in which indigenous peoples such as Maori, and the places they inhabited, constituted prime collecting grounds for the exotic object. In wholeheartedly adopting a bicultural approach in governance, operations, management, and exhibitions, the museum became an exemplar of how a Treaty partnership might work while placing its own colonial past in the past. As opening day approached, the institution, the building, and the space were given a new name and symbol: the name "Te Papa," with a loose English equivalent of "Our Place," and the symbol a thumbprint. Both quickly passed into universal usage. Identity as a museum disappeared as the organization's life as a novel institution, an experience, a destination, and a familiar space began. Binding the contrary imperatives together was an overarching theme of celebration-emphasizing the uniqueness of New Zealand/Aotearoa's natural and human histories and the success of its peoples, narratives bearing clear messages of resolution and pride. Conflict was sublimated beneath a celebratory populism. Empire has little space in such a narrative of nationhood while the central statement of bicultural partnership suggests a postcolonial state of resolution has been reached.

The recipe has been a success, though it has also drawn its critics. Decried as too popular, too bicultural, too little concerned with showing "art," Te Papa's first decade has proved the vitality of national, cultural space. Most significant among Te Papa's critics has been the Labour Party and in particular its leader and known cultural devotee, Helen Clark. Charging that it represented an undue devotion to populist commercialism, an emphasis on form rather than substance, and insufficient reverence for artistic achievement, Clark's attacks on Te Papa during 1999 were part of Labour's broader center-left challenge to the corporatism pervading the public sector and in particular, the erosion of a substantive rather than a decorative role for national cultural institutions. In so doing, the party of the center-left became the defenders of aesthetic standards against the philistinism of the center-right. The volume of both national discourses-that of biculturalism and of independent nationalism-was amplified after Labour's election to government in late 1999 (in which Clark took responsibility as minister of culture in addition to prime minister). Among the incoming adminstration's stated goals was "to strengthen national identity and uphold the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi." Changes in exhibition space and style followed. Art and research functions gained a higher priority at Te Papa. Biculturalism has remained central in the institution and become more established as the primary narrative for contemporary nationhood, though giving effect to it in terms of redistribution of resources remains highly contested. History, in its messy complexity and its entanglement in the present, remains problematic. Imperial relations are unspoken, apart from those which exist in the imaginary world, and there they reign supreme. Nothing in Te Papa's ten-year existence has surpassed the popularity of The Lord of the Rings Motion Picture Trilogy: The Exhibition, which drew more than 219,000 visitors over 124 days between December 2002 and April 2003. The Tolkien classic, an epic struggle between empires of good and evil, as interpreted by director Peter Jackson in Wellington studios and in New Zealand's wilderness, but with the backing of the Hollywood movie empire, proved a huge hit. The exhibition toured other centers, beginning at the Museum of Science and Industry in London. Imagination is safer, and infinitely more popular, than the awkward and argumentative present.

The much awaited opening of New Zealand's premier public history venue, the new national museum, occurred in the midst of the extreme El Nio summer weather of February 1998. While city dwellers basked in long, hot days, farmers in east coast regions faced severe drought, financial stress, and the prospect of running out of feed for the few sheep, cattle, and deer remaining on their properties. For a week or two the farmers' plight and the museum's opening extravaganza on February 14th became entwined. Crowds of people waiting their turn in the museum's forecourt for a first viewing were marshaled into orderly queues within curving paths marked out by hay bales. Providing comfortable and folksy seating, the hay stacks made the waiting something to be enjoyed rather than endured, enhancing the mood of anticipation and excitement. Entertainers moved through the crowd, along with food, drink, and hat vendors. The museum's opening publicity was careful to point out that the hay bales were only temporarily in the museum's forecourt; within a week or so, they would be continuing their journey from the more fortunate and generous northern farms from which they had come, over Cook Strait to the Marlborough farmers most hard hit by the drought. In this way the image of New Zealand as a farming nation, a society in which the heart of the country is identified with its rural core and the mutuality to be found there, was embraced by the new museum.

Popular reinscription of national icons is what the directors would regard as the museum's core business. (Icon, by no coincidence, is the name of the museum's quality restaurant and bar.) The museum is unashamedly a monument to national pride. Since it is funded substantially by public monies, statutorily obliged to provide free entry to visitors, and architecturally prominent in the capital city, this comes as no surprise. What is surprising, however, is the form which national celebration takes in this society in the 1990s. Empire has little place here because "New Zealand" is what is on display; it is a flourishing national culture that has been achieved, a triumph of cultural independence. Yet relations between the indigenous Maori and Pakeha peoples-the central issue of race in the society-are fundamental to the museum's physical and cultural space. That a national institution can simultaneously so thoroughly marginalize empire and embrace race when the two are intrinsically bound together in New Zealand's history since the late eighteenth century signifies the complex, often contradictory, unraveling of interwoven threads of colonialism in a former settler colony at the end of the twentieth century.

The museum's depictions of race and empire are evident in the tripartite structure of the exhibitions dealing with people, cultures, and societies. This human level of the museum is on the upper floor, above nature's domain where displays called Awesome Forces and Mountains to Sea bristle with glaciers, earthquakes, and densely birded forest. To get to the upper level, there is either a stately seaward ascent up a galleried ramp to Te Marae, the entry point to the Maori galleries, or a staircase-and-elevator journey to the upper central concourse, poised between all the main exhibitions. In the center, immediately opposite the arrival points on the upper concourse, is the Treaty of Waitangi exhibition. To the left, the seaward side, are Te Marae, Mana Whenua, and the various iwi (tribal) exhibitions of Maori art, culture, and life. On the landward side, to the right, are the History exhibitions in the area designated as Tangata Tiriti, literally, the people of the Treaty, non-Maori who live in Aotearoa / New Zealand by virtue of the Treaty of Waitangi.

Strangely perhaps, given the central place of the Treaty, the separation of Maori and Pakeha serves to deemphasise the interaction between the two peoples by separately exploring the experience of each. The Treaty exhibition, Signs of a Nation-Nga Tohu Kotahitanga, is intended to be viewed in the context of the Maori and Pakeha exhibitions on either side: approached spatially and conceptually from the two perspectives of the Treaty partners.

The central Treaty exhibition is large in scale, deliberately spare, and reverential in tone. The design is drawn from religious models. Two very large panels hang high above the heads of visitors with the Maori and English texts simply depicted on each. The atmosphere is one of tribute. In the foreground of the exhibition area there is a small forest of listening posts reminiscent of the poles outside the Museum of Sydney, totemlike in appearance. These are literally listening posts where, up close, voices of a range of New Zealanders debating the treaty can be heard. The level of these voices from anything but a close distance is a whisper; again, like the barely audible human voice in a church. The exhibition's gloss invites visitors to "engage directly with our founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi," along with the statement: "The floor is open to discussion."

Mana Whenua, the principal Maori exhibition, is centered around an expansive exhibition area in which carved marae (meeting houses) and waka (canoes) command visitors' attention. Around these are arrayed smaller displays on Pacific voyaging, the people and places significant to particular iwi, or tribes, and the arts of weaving and taniko (decorative, usually woven, border panels). Te Marae is a contemporary interpretation of the central institution of Maori culture: a meeting house and a place where culture, in language, ritual, oratory and song, relationships, and arts, is most highly preserved and practiced. Unlike traditional marae, Te Papa's Te Marae is adorned in highly colored modern designs, is not bound by traditional protocol, and is explicitly described as "a place for all New Zealanders."

The exhibitions on the Tangata Tiriti side of the Treaty area, popularly referred to as the History exhibitions, are comparatively intimate exploratory spaces made up of broad irregular corridors containing smaller exhibits and strongly driven by linking narratives. They invite viewers into a space in which a series of smaller artifacts are revealed and a story, or stories, can be followed. Three exhibits are presented here: Passports follows the question "Who are non-Maori New Zealanders and how did they come to be here?"; Exhibiting Ourselves follows the changing ways in which "New Zealand" has been defined and shown to the world in international exhibitions from 1851 to 1992. On the Sheep's Back takes the economically important sheep industry as a place in which to display the science and art of wool growing and use, along with the work and social relations which were formed around it.

(Continues...)

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