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Radical Perspectives
Contested Histories in Public Space: Memory, Race, and Nation
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
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
376 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
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July 2, 2023
This is an edited collection composed of papers originally published in the Public History section of a journal called the Radical History Review, which I occasionally read, though the material in this book was of varying interest to myself. There was a chapter on traditional religion in Cuba that had an interesting premise, but I didn’t enjoy some aspects of the paper… politically I suppose. There was also a chapter on Kathmandu and another on Oaxaca, both places of interest to me, particularly the prior because my master's research was done in the context of Nepal.
The chapters on the anglo-settler colonies were likely of greatest interest to me. There’s a fairly interesting chapter on the once-called Canadian Museum of Civilization. I recall going there as a middle-schooler on a field trip. It is now called the Canadian Museum of History. It’s interesting to see how long Indigenous nations have been struggling with museums on this issue, and the wins they have had over the decades.
Anti-imperialist critiques of the museum have come from other sectors also; there’s this interesting mention of a boycott of a ROM exhibit entitled "Into the Heart of Africa":
“A year later, equally fierce debates erupted around Into the Heart of Africa, organized by Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. In retrospect, the boycott of this exhibit seems to have been sparked more by racial tensions in Toronto than by the exhibition’s curatorial content, which put forward a critique of the colonial origins of the Royal Ontario Museum’s African collections and the complicity of Victorian Canadians in the British imperial project. These two painful episodes marked a turning point in Canadian museology, and both contributed in a significant degree to the articulation of a new, pluralist museum ethos.”
I will just interject here to say there are still many objects in ROM collection that have been called to be rematriated to no effect.
There is an interesting account of conservative backlash on a museum exhibit in Australia that dealt with Indigenous dispossession and colonial violence:
“Since it opened in 2001 the National Museum of Australia (NMA) in Canberra has averaged about eight hundred thousand visitors per year, both foreign and domestic. These are very good numbers for a country of just twenty million, and they reflect the successful reorientation of the museum sector away from education and toward leisure and tourism in the last few years, as well as the museum’s role in the national capital circuit. But the museum has been the object of attacks. There is a kind of inevitability about these set pieces. Initially, there was quite strong media criticism: one reporter insisted that the NMA represented “A Nation Trivialized.” Conservatives both in and outside the museum condemned it for its “sneering ridicule at white history.” Some visitors claimed that it was “profoundly offensive,” “letting the country down, [with] too much ‘blackfella history.’ ”
One of the most controversial areas is the section in the Gallery of First Australians which deals with dispossession and death and the problematic nature these events pose for object-based institutions in terms of representation. The main caption for this exhibit states: “Guerilla wars were fought along a rolling frontier for a century and a half.” This caption reflects al- most thirty years of scholarship, but according to Peter Read, a scholar of Aboriginal history, it is, “if anything, a pretty conservative depiction of frontier violence.””
These are some other excerpts from the book, mostly from the introduction:
“For countries that have been linked by colonial or imperial bonds, historical memory is often contested between metropole and colony (or for- mer colony). For former colonial powers like Britain or France, their own glorious tales of nation-building usually conveniently underplay or ignore the role played by their overseas possessions—and most particularly, the slave labor on Caribbean plantations. This point has been brilliantly argued by Caribbean scholars such as Eric Williams and C. L. R. James but has occupied a marginal place in much European historiography. French historians—even radical or Marxist ones—have been notably uncomfortable about discussing the history of slavery in the French empire and its repercussions in both metropolitan France and the Francophone Caribbean.
One moment when the silence was—at least momentarily—broken came when two Caribbean heroes of African descent—Toussaint Louverture of Haiti and Louis Delgrès of Guadeloupe—were installed in the hallowed Pantheon in Paris. Laurent Dubois’s essay, “Haunting Delgrès,” uses this unlikely event to explore how the legacy of slavery and racial oppression has been understood—and silenced—in France and the French Caribbean.”
“The conflicts that animate these stories reflect some of the contemporary tensions and contradictions facing public historians who seek to en- gage public audiences and win their favor and financial support, even while telling them stories that may upset them, stories they may not wish to hear… such tensions can be traced even further back in these nations’ histories: they also underlay John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s censorship and destruction of Diego Rivera’s mural at Rockefeller Center depicting Marx and Lenin in the 1930s.”
“Some of the most far-reaching challenges to Western museology have come from the scholarly disciplines most implicated in its practices— history and anthropology. Historians and anthropologists were forced to question their own epistemologies and disciplinary practices in the wake of decolonization, the Vietnam war, and the “new social movements,” in particular the newly invigorated movements of indigenous or “first” peoples, particularly in the Americas and the Antipodes. Although indigenous groups have been challenging and resisting Western and colonialist categorization and systems of knowledge production since the 1500s, these efforts have become more visible and urgent, starting in the 1960s and 1970s.”
I read this book fairly quickly for comps, so this reflection certainly does not do it justice, nor the brief and hurried time I spent with this book.
The chapters on the anglo-settler colonies were likely of greatest interest to me. There’s a fairly interesting chapter on the once-called Canadian Museum of Civilization. I recall going there as a middle-schooler on a field trip. It is now called the Canadian Museum of History. It’s interesting to see how long Indigenous nations have been struggling with museums on this issue, and the wins they have had over the decades.
Anti-imperialist critiques of the museum have come from other sectors also; there’s this interesting mention of a boycott of a ROM exhibit entitled "Into the Heart of Africa":
“A year later, equally fierce debates erupted around Into the Heart of Africa, organized by Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. In retrospect, the boycott of this exhibit seems to have been sparked more by racial tensions in Toronto than by the exhibition’s curatorial content, which put forward a critique of the colonial origins of the Royal Ontario Museum’s African collections and the complicity of Victorian Canadians in the British imperial project. These two painful episodes marked a turning point in Canadian museology, and both contributed in a significant degree to the articulation of a new, pluralist museum ethos.”
I will just interject here to say there are still many objects in ROM collection that have been called to be rematriated to no effect.
There is an interesting account of conservative backlash on a museum exhibit in Australia that dealt with Indigenous dispossession and colonial violence:
“Since it opened in 2001 the National Museum of Australia (NMA) in Canberra has averaged about eight hundred thousand visitors per year, both foreign and domestic. These are very good numbers for a country of just twenty million, and they reflect the successful reorientation of the museum sector away from education and toward leisure and tourism in the last few years, as well as the museum’s role in the national capital circuit. But the museum has been the object of attacks. There is a kind of inevitability about these set pieces. Initially, there was quite strong media criticism: one reporter insisted that the NMA represented “A Nation Trivialized.” Conservatives both in and outside the museum condemned it for its “sneering ridicule at white history.” Some visitors claimed that it was “profoundly offensive,” “letting the country down, [with] too much ‘blackfella history.’ ”
One of the most controversial areas is the section in the Gallery of First Australians which deals with dispossession and death and the problematic nature these events pose for object-based institutions in terms of representation. The main caption for this exhibit states: “Guerilla wars were fought along a rolling frontier for a century and a half.” This caption reflects al- most thirty years of scholarship, but according to Peter Read, a scholar of Aboriginal history, it is, “if anything, a pretty conservative depiction of frontier violence.””
These are some other excerpts from the book, mostly from the introduction:
“For countries that have been linked by colonial or imperial bonds, historical memory is often contested between metropole and colony (or for- mer colony). For former colonial powers like Britain or France, their own glorious tales of nation-building usually conveniently underplay or ignore the role played by their overseas possessions—and most particularly, the slave labor on Caribbean plantations. This point has been brilliantly argued by Caribbean scholars such as Eric Williams and C. L. R. James but has occupied a marginal place in much European historiography. French historians—even radical or Marxist ones—have been notably uncomfortable about discussing the history of slavery in the French empire and its repercussions in both metropolitan France and the Francophone Caribbean.
One moment when the silence was—at least momentarily—broken came when two Caribbean heroes of African descent—Toussaint Louverture of Haiti and Louis Delgrès of Guadeloupe—were installed in the hallowed Pantheon in Paris. Laurent Dubois’s essay, “Haunting Delgrès,” uses this unlikely event to explore how the legacy of slavery and racial oppression has been understood—and silenced—in France and the French Caribbean.”
“The conflicts that animate these stories reflect some of the contemporary tensions and contradictions facing public historians who seek to en- gage public audiences and win their favor and financial support, even while telling them stories that may upset them, stories they may not wish to hear… such tensions can be traced even further back in these nations’ histories: they also underlay John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s censorship and destruction of Diego Rivera’s mural at Rockefeller Center depicting Marx and Lenin in the 1930s.”
“Some of the most far-reaching challenges to Western museology have come from the scholarly disciplines most implicated in its practices— history and anthropology. Historians and anthropologists were forced to question their own epistemologies and disciplinary practices in the wake of decolonization, the Vietnam war, and the “new social movements,” in particular the newly invigorated movements of indigenous or “first” peoples, particularly in the Americas and the Antipodes. Although indigenous groups have been challenging and resisting Western and colonialist categorization and systems of knowledge production since the 1500s, these efforts have become more visible and urgent, starting in the 1960s and 1970s.”
I read this book fairly quickly for comps, so this reflection certainly does not do it justice, nor the brief and hurried time I spent with this book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review