EMERGING DISCOURSES AROUND IDENTITY IN NEW SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS
Titel:
EMERGING DISCOURSES AROUND IDENTITY IN NEW SOUTH AFRICAN MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS
Auteur:
Soudien, Crain
Verschenen in:
Interventions
Paginering:
Jaargang 10 (2008) nr. 2 pagina's 207-221
Jaar:
2008-07
Inhoud:
This essay looks at key post-apartheid museum initiatives with a view to understanding the character of the new counter-apartheid identity forms they are beginning to generate. Important questions framing this enquiry deal with the content of this new and inclusive South African identity: what does it stand for and what are the politics that underpin it? During apartheid, as Deacon (2004: 119) explains, the project of the museum was largely to provide a justification for white supremacy. A series of policy initiatives, as part of the transformation process, was instituted to change this. What, however, the new post-apartheid South African museum is saying about identity is an important question to ask. How is it using its new-found power to delimit and project identity? Drawing on the work of museum theorists such as Crane, Duncan and Clifford, the argument that the essay makes is that in taking on the burden of representing the South African nation, a particular politics of memory has surfaced in the new South Africa. This politics has, not unexpectedly, a great deal to do with the relationship between apartheid and post-apartheid. This politics is represented by discourses which sit along a spectrum, consisting, on the one hand, of discourses of nostalgia, and, on the other, discourses of reconstruction. It is the latter that the essay focuses on. These are further subdivided into discourses of empiricism, triumphalism and deconstruction. The first two of these are described as being multicultural in their essence. It is from the last that I suggest a critical memory of the past could emanate.
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