Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Von der hinteren Coverseite

"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

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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...