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Annie E. Coombes and Ruth B. Phillips

The transformation masks of the Northwest Coast are among the most famous artistic genres created by North American Indigenous artists. When first seen in ceremonial dances they appear as clearly identifiable beings – a human, a thunderbird, a wolf. In performance the dancer pulls on hidden strings and reconfigures the mask’s moving parts to reveal an entirely new being – the animal becomes a human, the human a radiant sun. The onlookers realize that appearances are deceptive and that they had not understood the true nature of the ancestral beings they had first seen. Yet, because the ability to transform is the essential nature of the primordial beings who are represented in these dances, we might just as easily say that their fundamental identity has not changed but been revealed.

Something of the same conundrum faces us when we consider the transformational potentials of museums. As institutions, museums are quintessential inventions of the modern era. The literature of critical museology has persuasively analyzed the modern Western museum as a primary public site of authoritative articulation, inscribing in its visitors the Eurocentric hierarchies of race, class, and gender and the ideological formations required for the social and political reproduction of imperial nations. Museums expose our regimes of knowledge, tell us our histories of progress, and form us as citizens through spectatorial experiences that position us as knowing subjects in command of the objects and truths set out before our gaze (see Bennett 1995; Duncan 1995;). But do they still function this way today in an era that proclaims itself as postcolonial and global rather than imperial and Eurocentric? When we survey the museums of the early twenty-first century we see a confusing array of installations, practices, and institutions, some of which continue to exhibit the modernist features just summarized, while others appear to have reconfigured familiar conventions and practices to produce new, less hierarchical, and more socially interactive kinds of exhibits, programs, and relationships. How thoroughgoing are these transformations? Were the potentials they now exploit always already present and available to projects of reconfiguration? And, if so, do those in control of the strings and levers have the ability to pull these changed guises back into the old patterns?

During the last decades of the twentieth century, museums, as primary sites for the public visualization of Western narratives of history, culture, and knowledge, presented themselves as natural targets for deconstructive critique. Many became sites of contestation and the working out of a “politics of recognition” which, as Charles Taylor (1992) has argued, emerged from the identity politics of the second half of the twentieth century. In this process, the subjects of museum representation assert their right to “recognize” themselves in the public images that museums create according to their own formulations of their histories and cultures. In numerous institutions around the world, professional museologists and members of marginalized communities have come together to affirm the museum’s potential to rectify past silences and to set the record straight. Pressures toward decolonization and greater democratization have led to the development of collaborative processes of exhibition and program development and to a greater multivocality – processes and models we have sought to instantiate in this volume through the close collaborations that inform many chapters and the voice boxes used by many of the authors.

No one volume can, of course, address such a large issue comprehensively. We focus here on museums of art, history, and ethnography because these sectors of the museum establishment were the first to be subjected to rigorous critical analysis by community activists and poststructuralist and postcolonial theorists. In many ways, we would argue, the innovative responses these kinds of museums developed have provided models for change in other types of museums and heritage sites. Our framing of the large topic of museum transformation through democratization and decolonization and the revisionist narratives they demand inevitably reflects our own research in Africa, North America, and Europe. We draw on these experiences for many of the specific examples discussed in this introduction, but we also urge that they closely parallel patterns of museological change found in other parts of the world. Museum creation, as many case studies show, has proved particularly adapted to the desires of decolonizing communities and minorities to memorialize past oppression and advocate for social justice. The contributions we have assembled reveal the cross-influ-ences between museum transformations that have involved the representation of racial and political oppression within Europe and those impelled by the dynamics of decolonization. Kavita Singh, in Chapter 2, for example, recounts the close study of Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial to the Holocaust made by Sikh founders of the Khalsa Heritage Museum, while Paul Chaat Smith, in Chapter 22, notes the generative importance of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum to the founding of the National Museum of the American Indian. In Chapter 5, Gabriel Koureas explores the conflictual representation of nationhood in Cyprus in the National Museum of Struggle in Nicosia.

The three parts of this book trace a movement from representation to action, to innovation. We begin with a set of essays that discuss the role of the museum in the narration of difficult histories that have previously lacked sites of articulation. Public recognition of past histories of political and racial oppression and colonization in the museum emerges as a necessary first step in changing the social attitudes and political structures that enable oppression. It also invites social action in the present, and the second set of essays thus addresses the linked issue of the museum’s affirmation of its social agency. Activism, in its turn, takes the museum into the arena of experimentation – new roles require new strategies. Accordingly, the last part of this volume presents a set of exploratory projects that mix disciplinary paradigms, work to change power relations within institutions, and exploit the reflexive and communicative potentials of new media.

All of these transformational energies have been unfolding in tandem with a growing awareness of the porosity of the national frameworks within which museums are commissioned and funded. The speeded-up movements of people, capital, and information that we term “globalization” has made museums increasingly answerable not just to local but also to world audiences. The collections and exhibitions of older Western museums are now accessed not only in real space by more diverse local audiences and ever larger legions of tourists, but also in virtual space over the Internet. The engagement in museum creation by new nations and communities all over the world has led analysts to think about the museum not just as a set of bricks-and-mortar institutions but as a technology of representation that can be recruited to the needs of new constituencies. In this context, furthermore, as Paul Basu and Sharon Macdonald (2007) have argued, we can think of museum exhibitions as “laboratories” for experimentation and the development of new practices. Both in institutions inherited from the heyday of Western imperial power and in more recent institutions that adapt the museum model to new and socially activist projects, this culture of experimentation is expanding older definitions of “the museum.” Globalization

Casual visitors to today’s national museums would probably say that, in their presentations of colonial histories, they have taken on board the criticisms leveled at a set of flawed but pioneering late twentieth-century exhibitions that first attempted to rethink the specter of the imperial legacy in narratives of art, history, and culture.¹ Multiple voices are now audible, articulating the different perspectives of both the colonizer and the colonized. Many revisionist biographies of the objects in their collections have been incorporated into museum exhibitions, sometimes in a piecemeal and fragmented way and very occasionally in a more substantial structural sense whose impact changes the overall historical narratives represented by the institution’s collections and modes of display.

And yet, simultaneously, many old tensions have resurfaced in art and ethnology museums today, as well as in those national collections that see themselves inhabiting the middle ground of the universal survey museum where distinctions between such categories are deliberately blurred. Inevitably, conflicts erupt between a cultural relativist agenda and an essentializing maneuver which causes individual artifacts to be displayed as if they possessed immanent value and shared some spuriously identified aesthetic criteria. If we thought those days were gone, and that museums now recognized the social and cultural distinctions between attitudes to producers (“artists” or otherwise), models of consumption, and the subsequent (or negligent) attribution of value to their communities of origin, then we were wrong.²

In the current political climate, in both northern and southern hemispheres, these outdated display conventions are particularly pernicious. On the one hand, museums of “world cultures,” such as the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam and the Museum of World Cultures in Gothenburg, have prompted a genuine attempt at understanding how globalization can result in a differentiated cosmopolitanism worldwide, generating an interest in diasporic culture as a corrective to the reification of “authenticity” conveyed by older art and ethnography displays (see Karp et al. 2006, particularly the introductory essay by Kratz and Karp, 1–31, and Clifford 2013).³ On the other hand, globalization is again being presented in the museum as the benign face of capitalism and as evidence of an unthreatening cultural diversity divested of the tensions and struggles which actually characterize it. Globalization’s promoters in today’s museum world are only too adept at negotiating the labyrinthine threads and connections between the objects in their museums’ collections and their communities of origin. Yet the beneficiaries of these negotiations are not always clear.

An outstanding example is A History of the World in 100 Objects, a joint project of the BBC and the British Museum (BM) brokered by its director, Neil MacGregor. Broadcast in 2010 over 20 weeks, the project also produced an extensive website and a book of transcripts of the radio programs. MacGregor (2009) used the project to publicize his museum’s collections and promote its ability “to gather the whole world into one building,” in terms of “a universality of ambition that embraced not just its collection but also its intended public.”⁴ A History of the World in 100 Objects was in many ways an impressive initiative which was careful to incorporate revisionist histories of many of the objects in the BM’s collections.⁵ Significantly, however, these insights have rarely been integrated into the narratives of the permanent displays. The inconsistencies and gaps in the stories that are told through the selected objects are, however, revealing of how globalizing rhetoric can be used to maintain rather than disrupt neocolonial relationships.

How the museum tells the history of, for example, the encounter between Europe and polities that would later become colonized is the critical component for shifting our understanding of such histories and envisaging different relationships in the present. And, in this digital age, we also need to attend to what gets incorporated into the more ephemeral – though also more widely available – web version in relation to the narratives on display in the museum’s real-space galleries. To cite one representative example, the website from the BBC program includes a description of a brass plaque looted from the palace of the Oba of Benin after it had been sacked by the British punitive forces in 1897. It focuses on an important but highly selective aspect of the European encounter:

The kingdom of Benin dominated trade with Europeans on the Nigerian coast from the late 1400s to the end of the 1900s. When Portuguese traders arrived in Benin in the 1400s they brought brass bracelets, known as manillas, to exchange for pepper, ivory and slaves. The artists of Benin transformed this European brass into plaques to decorate the Oba’s palace. (BM and BBC 2014)

Both on the website for the program and in its galleries the BM remains mute about its own role in the acquisition of this precious material, which is still the subject of many demands for restitution from the Nigerian government. Indeed one text panel reads almost like a justification for the looting: “When the British reached Benin City in 1897, the royal palace was being rebuilt with brass sheeting, and some 900 brass plaques from the old building were found half-buried in a storehouse.” Additionally, although it is true that, “when these plaques were first seen in Europe in the late 1890s they astounded art critics who couldn’t believe that such technically accomplished sculptures were created by African artists” (BM and BBC 2014), even by the nineteenth century there was already considerable written and oral evidence in support of an African origin for the brass and ivory work from Benin City. This evidence was widely cited by academics and museum professionals at the time of the punitive raid and the subsequent exhibition of Benin work at the BM in September 1897 (Coombes 1994). The constant reiteration of Benin’s exceptionalism today (for example, at the Royal Academy’s blockbuster Africa: The Art of a Continent), often accompanied by the awed astonishment of modern commentators who write as if these artifacts have only just been discovered, has had iniquitous implications that serve various political and institutional agendas, silence a long history of contact and exchange between West Africans and Europeans, which the BM itself acknowledges in its galleries, and, conversely, could end up denying West Africans any independent invention.⁶

There are other significant occlusions which speak to the relationship between the politics of display and globalization at the British Museum – a globalization articulated in the following example as benign cross-cultural exchange and resilient tradition. In the Sainsbury Africa Galleries, Sokari Douglas Camp’s sculpture Otobo (Hippo) Masquerade is promoted as a cosmopolitan expression of the Kalabari masquerade traditions in southern Nigeria’s Niger Delta region. Nearby, contemporary masks made out of recycled and unconventional materials from the same area are also shown to demonstrate the thriving continuity of the local masquerading practices (see Figure 0.1). The contemporary political context in the Niger Delta and its effect on the kinds of practices celebrated here are, however, nowhere to be seen. Nothing is mentioned about the destruction of the fragile ecology of the region by multinational oil companies, and no mention is made of the Nigerian government’s execution (in November 1995) of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other environmentalist activists from Ogoniland who protested against the oil companies’ pollution of the Delta region (Human Rights Watch, 1999, 2002). Nor is there any mention of the threat this pollution poses to the very masquerade tradition on display, whose imagery calls up the cosmology represented by the water-loving animal life in the Delta and whose resilience and inventiveness are celebrated by the BM.

FIGURE 0.1 (a) Display of masks made by the Kalabari peoples from the Niger Delta in Southern Nigeria in the Sainsbury Africa Gallery at the British Museum, London. The explanatory labels exclusively foreground the importance of water spirits in the masquerades and the use of new materials: “These are various fish masquerades, made over a period of a hundred years and drawing on changing materials and techniques.” (b)

(b) Detail of a Kalabari fish mask showing the incorporation of recycled cardboard boxes.

Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. Photos © Annie E. Coombes.

Radical revisions to conservative museum narratives are much more often found in artists’ interventions. A case in point is the Throne of Weapons, which remained on view in the BM at the time of our writing. Initially exhibited in 2002 as part of the exhibition Swords into Ploughshares, organized by Christian Aid for London’s Oxo Gallery, the sculpture represents a real attempt to acknowledge African agency and to introduce a contemporary context which challenges standard frames of reference for display at the BM. Constructed out of decommissioned weapons from the Mozambique civil war (1977–92), the “throne” was made in 2001 by the Mozambican artist Cristóvão Canhavato, known as Kester. It was part of the Transforming Arms into Tools project made possible by an amnesty which allowed fighters to exchange their arms for tools to help reconstruct their war-torn country where over one million people had been killed.⁷ A moving account of the conception behind the “throne” is supplied by Kester himself: “The war was just so horrendous, so difficult; I don’t know how to talk about it.” The rifle butts on the throne, he continues,

are smiling at each other as if to say “now we are free” … I didn’t carve the smile, it’s part of the rifle butt. The screw holes and the mark left from where the strap was attached to the gun. I wanted to just use the gun as it was, not change it. So I chose the guns and the weapons that had the most expression. Also the back of the chair is curved. You can see a kind of archway or a door of a church. You can imagine you are at the door of a church. (Kester 2014)

The piece has been shown internationally in exhibition venues promoting peace such as Belfast’s Ulster Museum and several prisons, contexts which allowed the throne to shine a spotlight on the international arms trade.

In the drawing that represents the “throne” on the BBC website for A History of the World in 100 Objects each armament is carefully labeled and the country which supplied it named. This kind of detail is missing from the gallery display, though the label declares that “during the war, seven million guns – none of them made in Africa – poured into the country.” In the Africa Galleries, the complicity of countries and institutions in the international arms trade is spelled out in a video on a related exhibit. The Tree of Life was commissioned by the BM and Christian Aid specifically for the Sainsbury Africa Gallery and created by Mozambican artists Adelino Mate, Fiel dos Santos, Hilario Nhatugueja, and Kester (Figure 0.2). Bishop Dom Dinis Sengulane is filmed speaking to camera saying, “Mozambique does not manufacture guns,” and close-ups of individual weapons are paraded before the camera sporting the names of the countries which supplied them during the Mozambique civil war from 1977 to 1992. These include Rhodesia, South Africa, Russia, and Germany. The website for A History of the World in 100 Objects unwittingly exposes some of the controversial issues raised even by commendable initiatives such as these. A comment submitted by an aid worker recently returned from Mozambique draws attention to the question of access to the “throne”:

Where I am we don’t have communications and certainly little art and no stimulating radio. So firstly I am reminded how lucky we are here to feed so richly in these ways. I am currently working with my community to construct a monument to peace; 15 people died in the war years, 7 boys killed with large knives, 3 women and 5 men with a mixture of guns as depicted in this chair. Thank you for bringing this fascinating interpretation of the war to light and I wish the insight provided by your interviews, and mainly the art work could sit prominently in our local town Pemba.⁸

FIGURE 0.2 The Sainsbury Africa Gallery at the British Museum, showing the Tree of Life, 2004, in the foreground, with the video explaining its relationship to the international arms trade in the background. The sculpture by the Mozambiquan artists Kester, Hilario Nhatugueja, Fiel dos Santos, and Adelino Mate is made out of recycled military hardware handed in after the civil war in Mozambique.

Courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. Photo © Annie E. Coombes.

The two examples above also expose the confusing inconsistency in the way issues of globalization and its attendant power relations are acknowledged in the displays in the Africa galleries and elsewhere in the BM. On the one hand, the international arms trade is proclaimed as the culprit responsible for fueling the civil war in Mozambique, and, on the other hand, the role of multinational oil companies in the decimation of the ecology of the Niger Delta is thoroughly denied.

On a more practical note, from 2005 to 2010 Tony Blair’s New Labour government’s Africa initiative provided the museum with funding from the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport to develop collaborations with African museums, supplemented by additional funding from the Ford and Getty Foundations. MacGregor has insisted on the important role played by the BM in the cause of soft diplomacy and has been explicit that international partnerships between museums are a tool for nation building and even for peace. As a result, museums in West and East Africa have benefited from skills-sharing initiatives and curatorial and conservation training. Paul Basu’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 15) describes a collaboration between British museums and the National Museum of Sierra Leone that began in the context of these projects. As it suggests, such programs have real potential for local capacity building and are to be welcomed. They are also, however, highly sensitive to power shifts within Western culture and heritage ministries and the museums they sponsor. Elections of conservative governments and the climate of fiscal restraint of the early twenty-first century have resulted in the shutting down of many promising initiatives of international collaboration, as well as of collaborative projects within Western museums.

At the beginning of the new millennium, in 2002, a consortium of directors representing some of the wealthiest major museums in Europe, Russia, and North America came together to defend the “importance and value of universal museums.”⁹ This defense was launched in the face of more than a decade of deconstructive postcolonial critique and an even longer history of demands for the return of treasures of world art that had entered European museums during and after the colonial era. Disingenuously claiming to speak for the “international museum community,” the directors marshaled globalization and internationalism as key arguments against restitution: “Although each case has to be judged individually, we should acknowledge that museums serve not just the citizens of one nation but the people of every nation.”¹⁰ Interestingly MacGregor’s speech two years later, in 2004, on the occasion of the British Museum’s two hundred and fiftieth anniversary celebrations, turns on a similar contradiction using the three (and as we have now seen, rather controversial) examples already discussed – Sokari Douglas Camp’s sculpture Otobo, the Benin bronzes, and the Throne of Weapons – as justification for the Museum’s status as guardian of the world’s culture. According to MacGregor, these three objects offer the viewer, “a range of different approaches – personal, political, sacred, military, historical, cultural and international.” “I don’t know,” he says, “where else a visitor can apprehend Africa in so many contexts. A collection that embraces the whole world allows you to consider the whole world. That is what an institution such as the British Museum is for.”¹¹ Thus, MacGregor’s initiative in A History of the World in 100 Objects represents a somewhat different and more knowing response to an old argument, but its effect and the underlying political motivation are predictably similar.

What does it mean that governments in Western nations such as the United Kingdom, Sweden, Canada, and Australia are shoring up borders, excluding refugees and limiting benefits to immigrants while the museums they sponsor are celebrating “world art”? Are these contradictions evidence that in an era of “globalization” such museums continue to be used to create false consciousness and to finesse the neocolonial activities of sponsoring governments?

Yet we also find other museums, sometimes in the same cities, which are less invested in promoting their institutions as global guardians and which have been increasingly inventive in involving a mixed and representative local community. London’s Wallace Collection is not far from the British Museum and is best known for its exhibitions of medieval armor and eighteenth-century French paintings. Spurred on by the Heritage Lottery Fund’s criteria of cultural diversity and inclusivity, it became the unlikely site of the innovative Refugee Tour Guides program.¹² The museum offered training sessions to refugees who took visitors on guided tours, inflecting their narratives about the collections with interpretations and perspectives drawn from their own cultural backgrounds (Martin 2012). The project began life in 2011 as a collaboration that included Newham Family Learning Services, West Hampstead Asian Women’s Group, Aaina Women’s Group, and West Ealing Deaf Women’s Minorities Group, with the aim of making artwork for an intergenerational community exhibition entitled Journeys East. Supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, it celebrated the refurbishment of the Wallace Collection’s East Galleries which focus on the histories of the Dutch East India Company. The Southeast Asian communities were a target audience, as they were perceived to have been directly affected by the legacies of this period (Martin 2012). Such initiatives may simply demonstrate the degree to which liberal arguments presented in a museum are not yet seen as a threat by conservative governments. But they may also confirm the value of the museum’s semiautonomous status in relation to state patronage – something that has permitted even the boards of trustees of major national institutions to play a liberalizing role in mediating the decisions taken by museum administrators. Importantly, whatever the answer to these questions, the effects for the participants of such initiatives can be both enriching and enabling. It is telling, however, that these liberalizing and progressive programs have often been initiated by education departments or other interstitial environments within the museum rather than by curatorial and exhibitions staff.