Desegregating the Past, by Robyn Autry (introduction)

DESEGREGATING THE PAST THE PUBLIC LIFE OF MEMORY IN THE UNITED STATES AND SOUTH AFRICA

ROBYN AUTRY

INTRODUCTION Desegregating the Past It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

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entrance of the Apartheid Museum located just outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, visitors face a dilemma: they must choose between two passageways marked in Afrikaans and English as “Blankes/Whites Only” or “Nie-Blankes/Non-Whites.”

Generally, this causes a commotion, especially on days when large groups of schoolchildren and tourists descend, as visitors uncomfortably consider their options. On many occasions, people sort themselves and file into the separate entrances even if it means splintering groups that arrived together. This powerful moment speaks to the complacency still ingrained in us when it comes to the use of racial classification as a sorting mechanism as much as it does to our willingness to obey rules, whether those of the museum or society at large. Visitors are quickly reunited as the passageways join, but the initial entrance is unsettling and immediately places the visitor in a simulated space that feels more real and personal than most museum experiences.

Filled with visual, textual, and audio material that depicts the settlement of Johannesburg after the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand and the racial nightmare that had just begun, in this somber memory space visitors confront the brutal history of colonialism and apartheid. Confined within the dimly lit mazelike museum—around each corner a new set of images, text, objects, and sounds—guests are effectively submerged. This total sensory

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Entrance to the Apartheid Museum; Johannesburg

experience is an emotional appeal for personal alignment that is inescapable as they pass a series of oversized mirrors placed midway through the tour.

There is little relief as visitors exit the museum. Still reeling from the onslaught of graphic images, 131 hanging nooses, and survivors’ testimony outlining the staggering violence, they must now contend with the reality of museums as part of a competitive tourist industry. The roller coaster, the casino, and busloads of tourists all seem out of place.

As one stands in the sprawling parking lot echoing with excited shrills of delight and terror emanating from the nearby theme park, the line between history and entertainment is anything but clear. How did the country’s first museum dedicated to telling the history of apartheid end up as part of the Gold Reef City recreational complex? As an offshoot of the casino, the museum was built to comply with national casino licensing regulations that mandated investment in a public project. Represented by Abe and Solly Krok—twin brothers who amassed their family fortune by selling skin-lightening creams at the height of apartheid—the casino developers pitched the idea of building a museum.1 With this peculiar trajectory, the Apartheid Museum illustrates that beneath the surface of sacred sites of memory lurks the profane.

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Indeed, revisiting the past is a lot more involved than meets the eye. Why revisit it at all? What makes some versions of the past more believable than others? What does it mean to know the past in the first place? Research on what is often termed “truth and reconciliation” tends to focus on transitional government structures, truth and reconciliation commissions, and disputes over the redistribution of political and economic resources—raising fundamental questions about the way societies reemerge and stabilize after periods of intense internal conflict. How is collective memory reconstructed in these fragile social contexts? What role does it play in resurrecting the inclusive rhetoric of nation? In the aftermath of state violence, how is nationhood reconstructed to acknowledge painful histories, while rhetorically drawing all citizens into an imagined unified community? In the United States after the civil rights movement and in South Africa after the antiapartheid struggle, citizens and governments alike have grappled with an impossible task: the desegregation of the past.

Ostensibly, the ability to fashion a shared past hinges on people’s abilities to come to terms with periods of conflict and violence—to settle the historical record, so to speak. This does not necessarily involve the types of truth telling, confession, and witnessing that we recognize in debates about postconflict negotiations and transitional justice.2 It does, however, demand constructing some form of social consensus over what happened and its placement in, or confinement to, the past. This consensus or its illusion involves fitting past events into a narrative of nation that contextualizes difficult moments as regrettable but as paving the way for the current improved, if not altogether peaceful, state of affairs. As classic studies of nations and nationalism have shown, museums and other sites that convey a shared past are essential to imagining nation and to restoring a sense of wholeness and unity to other wise heterogeneous and even divisive societies.3 I started this project interviewing curators and museum directors about the promise of historical museums to revise, confront, reconcile, and heal. I often encountered puzzled looks and responses from staff more preoccupied with the material aspects of content development or the mundane realities of operating a museum. Considering that museums have become some of the only public spaces where

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periods of conflict are openly discussed, the fact that these material aspects were so crucial in how they were created and maintained raised a new set of questions about the making and unmaking of collective memory narratives. Once representations are produced, how are they maintained over time, by whom, and with what resources?

Touring black history exhibitions, sometimes guided and other times self-directed, I recognized that what was on display was the familiar narrative of black identity formation that I had been consuming and encouraged to identify with as long as I could remember. While I recognized it as a collective identity narrative, it did not always resonate with my personal understanding and experience of blackness. The details of this personal accounting are less important than my awareness of a gap, an identity gap or dissonance, which led me to reconsider the practical and ideological work of museums in promoting specific orientations toward imagined pasts as markers of collective identity.

This study seeks to examine the way history museums have emerged as sites where collective representations of painful periods are displayed. In both the United States and South Africa, the exhibition of histories of racism, oppression, and intolerance should not be taken for granted. The inclusion of these events as part of the national story remains contentious and uneven within each country and across different types of museums. Throughout this book, I explore this unevenness in terms of agitation around the development of museums, as well as examining the content itself. This approach treats museums themselves as objects of analysis as much as their installations and programming, as I seek to explain why some representations of the past appear more empowering, threatening, nostalgic, or authentic, than others. I show how particular forms of racial subjectivities—or ways of making sense of the world—are elevated as inevitable, the morally righteous products of history. Through museums and a variety of other socializing agents, we learn to orient ourselves to each other and the social world at least partially through our tangled, and oftentimes ambivalent, relationships with the past.4 Such an interpretive treatment of museum content and practice highlights the social construction of moral worth deeply embedded in the act of representation and narrativity as attempts are made to create order by making sense of the past.

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On the one hand, this comparative approach seeks to explain similarities and dierences in the way history is constructed in South Africa and the United States. However, this is not a traditional comparison where patterns and mechanisms are contrasted across the two settings to test general theories about the world. Instead, in order to understand how the past is staged across the twenty-nine museums included in this study (thirteen in South Africa and sixteen in the United States) as a cultural phenomenon, I juxtapose the aesthetics and politics of representing two very dierent histories in two very different countries that nonetheless invoke each other. This introductory chapter begins with a discussion about logic of comparison. Next, I link debates about historical representation to deep-seated tensions between multicultural and universal strands in national culture. I consider how these deliberations about the relationship between history and national culture also inform our understandings of collective memory. Finally, I take up the question of museums as sites of memory that exist at the intersection of symbolic and material worlds.

FROM SELMA TO SOWETO (AND BEYOND) For more than three decades, freedom struggles shook the core of U.S. and South African societies, challenging established systems of racial segregation and exclusion. While the antiapartheid struggle reached its crescendo during the 1980s, well after the height of the U.S. civil rights movement, the tactics and moral logics of resistance that challenged white racial domination are routinely compared.5 The demands of these democratic movements reverberated throughout both countries, triggering a collective reassessment of social norms and values, leading to the demise of outright racial rule with the passage of key civil rights legislation during the 1960s in the United States and the ďŹ rst democratically elected president in South Africa in 1994. Prompted by these immense upheavals, black cultural activists and their allies interrogated the restrictive social boundaries that denied them citizenship, including those that shut them out of museums and other public culture institutions claiming to represent national culture.

Their agitation provoked heated debate about the participation and

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representation of historically marginalized communities at museums and sparked a reconceptualization of museum-society relations.

From Hollywood films to scholarly monographs, parallels in the way ideas about race and racial difference organize South African and U.S. societies have fascinated observers for decades. In particular, the 1980s marked the growth of comparative investigations into the structures and implications of racial domination in both places. This rich tradition of comparative work reflects on the peculiar, but oddly familiar, histories of race as a principle for organizing society. The centrality of black-white racial dichotomies in both countries spawned critical insights into processes of colonialism, segregation, and apartheid, and collective mobilization and resistance.6 At times these studies point us in different directions about the causes of de facto segregation in the United States and how it differs from South African apartheid, but there is general agreement about the centrality of racist thought in fomenting lasting social divisions. As historian Greg Cuthbertson puts it, “South Africa’s racial madness finds therapy in American segregation, as both societies seek asylum in multicultural democracy.”7 More recent work expands this comparative lens to include other cases, most notably Brazil and Israel, to further explore how racial difference became an organizing principle across societies with very different histories.8 Other studies draw attention to lesser known aspects of the central themes—slavery, colonialism and conquest, racialized capitalism, segregation and apartheid, and black politics— in the comparative literature, such as Ivan Evans’s innovative study linking forms of social control and segregation to differences in U.S. and South African cultures of unofficial or extralegal forms of racial violence and terror.9 Granted, racial and ethnic categorization are contentious everywhere, but there are few places where the idea of race has been mapped along a rigid white-black dichotomy that so deeply structured social relations. In fact, South African and U.S. history are typically invoked whenever racial formation, classification, and resistance are discussed in comparative perspective. Indeed, U.S. and South African societies figure as centrally in comparative studies as they do in our popular racial imaginations.

The United States-South Africa comparison promises to shed light on the deep tension between imagined truths and reconciliations after social ruptures caused by the freedom struggles. In South Africa,

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a “negotiated revolution” ushered in a new democratic order charged with the monumental task of uniting a deeply fractured society to halt civil unrest, rampant distrust, and economic collapse during the 1990s. A postapartheid national mythos was inscribed into a new set of institutional arrangements, from the newly established Constitutional Court to the redrawing of provincial and municipal boundaries.10 Radical changes in the political and economic sphere were accompanied by efforts to confront the brutality and trauma of the colonial and apartheid regimes on a national level. Of course, museum development has not been the only cultural platform for such engagements. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was the first and most visible and comprehensive effort to come to terms with a traumatic past through publicized confessions, interrogations, and survivor accounts. Despite its limitations,11 the TRC delivered the rhetorical power of reconciliation as a transformative force, one that could harness a collective memory of violence for the foundation of a new national identity.12 In contrast to the dramatic restructuring of South African society, the U.S. civil rights movement yielded less radical reforms in a very different sociopolitical setting. On the one hand, it prompted the passage of key legislation that desegregated public spaces and institutions, opening the space for the growth of a black middle class and increased political representation. Yet the United States did not pursue any national-level dialogue or convene truth commissions to confront that nation’s history of slavery, racial violence, and segregation.13 More than any other platform, commemorations—from naming streets and schools to debates about reparations—have sustained public conversations about legacies of racial segregation and Amer ica’s slave past.14 Lacking nationally structured channels for these confrontations with the past—and in the absence of more radical restructuring of society—the memorial landscape of the United States has been somewhat bifurcated along racial lines, especially since the growth of the black history movement.

In the post-civil rights and postapartheid eras, race and racism remain key areas for comparative research because both societies still display festering racial divisions and inequalities despite new political dispensations, socioeconomic gains, and rhetoric of inclusion.

Indeed, the idea of race and racial difference is implicitly and explicitly

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woven into policy solutions for these dilemmas, marking the need for continued comparative research. However, this is not a comparative study of racialization or racial logics in contemporary U.S. and South African society, nor is it a comparison of their histories. Rather, I draw on these cases to better understand the representational project attempted in many societies that have undergone mass atrocities: the construction of collective memories that correspond to specific notions of collective identity that minimize unrest. In both settings, the struggle to achieve an inclusive society has involved revisiting and restoring key moments from the national past that inform presentday social life as part of understanding the dynamics of contemporary political debates in the aftermath of racial conflict and challenge.

However, as sociologist Barry Schwartz cautions, it is imperative to interrogate the basis and politics of official or traditional histories.15 We must also unpack the way alternative accounts are produced.

Although black history museums represent movement toward exposing the “symbolic violence” integral in reproducing systems of inequality, this book is neither an endorsement nor a celebration of the revisionist impulse to revisit the past. And it is not an evaluation or a critique of the historical accuracy of revised accounts.16 Rather, it is an examination of how and why history is constructed in museums—settings with an air of secular sacredness. And it looks at the ways identity narratives can mask the material or political-economic and institutional aspects of revision and museum work, irrespective of the content on display.

IDENTIF YING WITH THE PAST What difference does the past make in our lives today? Beyond understanding how present-day social relations and institutions are shaped by historical events, we also turn to the past to help construct and assert our identities. What does it mean to be American or South African in the twentieth-first century? How does that meaning vary across racial-ethnic, gender, or religious communities? We typically conflate collective and personal identities, assuming that the latter represent idiosyncrasies or variations on the overall collective experience. To a large extent, the way we think about the past conforms to

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the logic of collective or public life: it is not so much that we mine the past for evidence to support contemporary understandings of society; rather, we share an impulse to use an aspirational lens to gaze at the past. Collective memories represent shared knowledge about the past that helps explain the nature of group membership and identity.17 This is the ambitious project of collective memory: to see the past through the present as a means to draw people into a collective narrative that transcends the individual.

In both the United States and South Africa this process has entailed a ner vous balancing act between the imperatives of national unity and the politics of difference or diversity. South African sociologist Ran Greenstein has commented that despite similarities in the way that race and racial conflict have figured so centrally in the national histories of both countries, actual patterns of racial identity formation differ, with a more consolidated version of black identity emerging in the United States compared to South Africa.18 Greenstein is less interested in why collective identities or collectives matter to people than he is with ahistorical readings of them by academics and politicians alike. While I consider and compare how collective identity and experience is narrated in museums, I also question the underlying yearning for collective identification as a way of grappling with difficult emotions, such as fear, disappointment, shame, and grief, all of which reside at the heart of public life. Remarking on our narrative tendencies in the face of pain and suffering, Saidiya Hartman writes, Loss gives rise to longing, and in these circumstances, it would not be far-fetched to consider stories as a form of compensation or even as reparations, perhaps the only kind we will ever receive.

The loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them. So it is tempting to fill in the gaps and to provide closure where there is none. To create a space for mourning where it is prohibited. To fabricate a witness to a death not much noticed.19

Yet, there are any number of ways to tell stories that represent the past; those deemed restorative of the collective may or may not resonate with individuals’ subjectivities or relationships to the past. This is especially true of stories that minimize the more ambiguous, ambivalent, and elusive qualities of life for both the living and the dead.

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The fact that collective memory-making is a contentious project is unsurprising, given the way that such “stories of peoplehood” demand selective ways of thinking about social identities and group membership.20 Indeed, the struggle for cultural recognition that is regularly contrasted with the politics of redistribution rests at the center of debates about the representation of the past, particularly of divisive periods. Although cultural matters are routinely viewed as primarily discursive or symbolic, it is clear that material aspects or political economic implications call into question their separation from discussions about structural change and redistribution. It is difficult to separate demands for the end of forms of cultural domination that support ideologies of hate and systems of oppression from equally powerful demands for socioeconomic justice.21 This terrain became particularly treacherous in the United States during the 1980s and 1990s with the so-called culture wars, an umbrella term used in reference to a wide range of public debates and controversies about national identity and values ranging from bilingual education to gays and lesbians in the military. Others use the phrase “identity politics” to refer to that period as a continuation or a new wave in the mobilization around group identities that took off during the 1960s and 1970s.

During this period, traditionalists and progressives invoked the imagery of war in reference to the struggles around the way national histories were constructed and represented in the public realm—from school curricula to museum exhibitions. The so-called history wars were waged among people who saw themselves in a contest over the future of the country as much as its past. Yet, the hegemonic, heroic, and celebratory narratives of U.S. history and expansion were never fully accepted by all residents, certainly not by women and people of color. Yet direct challenges to these imperialist narratives began to appear in mainstream media as civil unrest grew and mass protests gained national attention in the 1970s, signaling a weakening of the “invisible hand” that supported earlier forms of cultural domination. Some viewed this opportunity to view history from the perspectives of those at the margins as a welcome retreat from the illusion of national consensus, whereas others viewed the inclusion of counternarratives as an indication of the unraveling of society.

This public mood translated into an increase in the production and consumption of popular history, evident in the spike in museum

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attendance from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. As Eric Foner points out in Who Owns History?, since the 1970s there has been a growth in public interest in historical material that has translated into an explosion of historical documentaries, feature films, and heritage sites.22 The type of mass appeal for dramatic television series like Roots signaled not only a thirst for historical information; it also signaled a sense of longing for origin stories, and it represented an effort to understand the more recent strug gles around identity and representation through the past. At the height of these public debates about national history and culture, public cultural institutions like history museums became leading sources of information about the past.

Adults became far more likely to visit a museum than to read historical scholarship.23 One of the most visible indicators of how deeply the public expected to identify with museum exhibitions as reflections of their own perceptions of self and national identity came with reactions to the Smithsonian’s Enola Gay exhibition in 1995.24 At this time, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum had to alter its display about the atomic bomb because it was seen as too sympathetic toward the Japanese and presented U.S. military might in a less-than-favorable light.25 This type of reaction helps us understand the politics involved in presenting historical material that resonates strongly with individuals’ senses of personal and collective identity.

In effect, conflict and violence become stylized artifacts rearranged to explain what it means to belong to different social groups. And these artifacts become the primary vehicles through which histories of violence and intolerance are displayed, particularly those that are relatively recent.

Professional historians were not immune to this shift in orientation to the past and in popular interest. The use and construction of consensus-driven national histories as a way to describe and celebrate nation faced serious challenges during the 1960s and 1970s in the United States. Consensus-driven history was preoccupied with telling deceptively cohesive stories of the national past in ways that celebrated traditional social values and norms—such as gender divisions and gender roles—in how historical topics were devised, studied, analyzed, and ultimately presented. Themes like conflict and social division were discussed through familiar tropes like the Horatio Alger myth, whereby anything was possible in the United States if one

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worked hard enough. The many voices and experiences sidelined and altogether ignored in this tradition took center stage during the social protests of the 1960s and 1970s. During that time, social history became a key site where alternative visions of the past and its relation to contemporary society were articulated. Indeed, the “new social history” movement became an important vehicle to assert uplifting, proud, and optimistically emancipatory identities for people at the margins of mainstream society.

Although the language of cultural wars and clashes is usually reserved for conversations about American identity—and it certainly captured the public imagination for decades—it can be extended to other settings, because these are essentially arguments about the limits and meaning of belonging in relationship to discourses about social difference and multiculturalism. This tension between the universal imagery of nation and the particularism of diversity has been a mainstay in countries of the Global North and South. Across Europe, divergent ways of defining national identity exist, all of which have been called into question in one way or another by rising demands from immigrant communities. Throughout Latin America, the complexities and contradictions of national identity across racial and ethnic groups are also evident in conflicts around defining national culture and classifying populations.26 In South Africa, in particular, with the collapse of apartheid and its associated ways of defining national identity, history, and culture came an urgent push to recast the past to better suit a reconstituted notion of nation and of “the public.” The new social history movement in South Africa gained traction during the 1970s and 1980s as progressive academics sidestepped professional conventions to assemble histories that included the voices of people who had been written out of the national story as a way to rationalize state oppression.27 Current public historical and museological approaches to creating more inclusive national narratives reflect heightened interest in lived experience and embodied knowledge—which involves the expansion of public programming and outreach efforts, as well the growing use of oral histories, sound archives, dance performances and other forms of intangible culture that break new representational ground. In South Africa, people have paid a great deal of attention to the way history should be rewritten, taught, and studied as

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part of social transformation. For instance, social transformation is not just about political and economic change; it also involves reinventing cultural symbols and traditions that resonate not just for the survivors and their descendants, but also for the former perpetrators and their descendants.28 Indeed, in South Africa the close association between symbolic and material forms of injustice is particularly visible due to the way cultural domination and imperialism dovetailed with efforts to forcibly assimilate indigenous populations. In the United States, the obliteration of indigenous communities has meant that very little content in recent debates around representing national culture has been sensitive to issues surrounding indigenous identity and life.

As it has been in other settings, new generations in the United States and South Africa pressed against older ways of thinking about the past as they sought a history that resonated with their lives and with changes underfoot. Yearnings for representations of collective identities rooted in shared historical experience or consciousness reflect anxiety about changing contours of belonging in the context of political and demographic shifts. The United States saw the rise of new social history and South Africa witnessed an expansion of social history as ways to challenge previous historical accounts that excluded the majority population or treated them not as subjects but as objects of history. In both places, previous consensus-driven histories whitewashed national history, glossing over the genocidal nature of colonial conquest and expansion, and diminishing the exploitation that allowed for capitalist development. The critique of earlier modes of historical production was that they were elitist and exclusionary and that these alternatives offered something different, and history museums were places where these efforts took form.

However, it is a mistake to accept these alternative histories as necessarily radical or even unconventional. They may be produced with different people in mind and they may in fact be produced by different categories of people, yet the outcome is still centered on a desire to reach consensus about what happened and to reproduce the logic of race and nation as meaningful categories of existence. Because historical accounts typically create an illusion of historical continuity and the resilience of collective life by “chronicling extraordinary events that embody our deepest and most fundamental values”29 it is

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a mistake to accept the ones that resonate more with the rhetoric of inclusion as natural and unproblematic. The desire to construct a history that resonates with people on a deeply psychic and emotional level, orienting them toward socially acceptable identity claims and assertions, remains intact.

Considering that these are recent histories with living memories, at times museums have experimented with bringing in individuals to recount personal narratives or “living memories” as a way to complement more conventional displays. For example, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) sponsored a virtual “memory box” that allowed people to record their personal experiences and encounters. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute (BCRI) relies on former freedom fighters to provide personal reflections for curious guests as they make their way through the gallery space. In South Africa, where the history is even more recent, museums have developed a number of initiatives to include personal accounts, ranging from the use of former political prisoners as tour guides at Robben Island Museum to the collection and display of personal testimony from residents who survived the notorious residential evictions at the District Six Museum. In addition to these intimate accounts, this study also considers how and when people speak out against museum developments and collective representations. These considerations reveal how the almost-primordial longing to identify with the past is as much a personal issue as it is a collective one.30 How does this desire for a representative past shape conceptions of a shared or collective memory? What does it mean to refer to memory as a collective phenomenon?

CONSENSUS- DRIVEN MEMORY Despite the fact that multicultural or pluralistic approaches are regularly presented as opposing ways of viewing society, they are not incompatible with more traditional consensus-driven models of social life. Indeed, revising earlier triumphant and homogenizing histories does not necessitate the opposite—the production of nonconsensus histories; rather, a new consensus is sought. This time, consensus revolves around the most socially productive ways to manage differ-

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ence, to weave diverse voices and volatile events into a national portrait. In this respect, the struggle for recognition discussed above can feed into the standardization of a collective narrative of social difference as categories like race and ethnicity are not refuted, but rather the logic supporting them is revised. In the aftermath of conflict, this revision can restore the consensus society or the forms of peaceful public life premised on our consent to be members of a shared society, to be a part of the collective. In fact, the act of mutual agreement over which aspects of the past will be publicly acknowledged is a defining element of collective memory.31 By interrogating the “collective” of “collective memory,” this book revisits some of the earliest conceptions of social life in sociology. The power of collective representations and forms of remembrance were paramount in Emile Durkheim’s study of different types of societies.

He analyzed the way members of societies elected to represent themselves, subscribe to rituals, and uphold tradition and the way these actions correspond to the relative strength or weakness of social norms, shared values, and a moral community.32 In other words, these representations were “social facts” that fortified society by elevating and justifying socially acceptable forms of behavior over those deemed deviant. Later, Durkheim’s student, Maurice Halbwachs, stressed that the line between personal and collective memories is imagined because our present identities and social positions shape how and what we remember (and forget).33 This logic can be extended to characterize how and what we remember (and forget) as a collective. The relation of this claim to the previous discussion of identity claims and cultural domination is evident in sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel’s insistence that all collectivities or societies exhibit “rules of remembrance” that shape patterns of recognition and misrecognition.34 People belong to various memory communities defined by personal ties and familial connections as much as by social categories like race and ethnicity.35 Understanding these rules can shed light on how social consensus about difficult historical periods is sought, constructed, and disputed.

Collective representations, according to Durkheim, were instrumental in revealing how the line between sacred and profane was established and observed as a guide for human behavior in any given society. Like him, I am less interested in the historical accuracy or

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alleged authenticity of these collective phenomena—in this case, museum exhibitions—than in how their assemblage bolsters claims about the social world and how we are meant to navigate it. In other words, I consider how the sacredness of the collective is restored not only despite difficult histories, but also because of them. Through a variety of museum developments and displays, I also consider the work or the production of the collective as sacred. Unlike Durkheim, I argue that the symbolic and material cannot be distinguished because consensus is illusory and efforts to fix the past to a narrative regardless of how many marginalized or dissident voices are included are inherently homogenizing, as details are always glossed over in epic narratives of race and nation.

This glossing over of fine details is more than an unintended consequence of narrativization. On a more profound level, scholars have commented on the way dissident or anticolonial histories come at a cost; they tend to minimize or diminish the experiences of some in the ser vice of a larger goal, such as the end of racial oppression.36 In other words, mobilizing around racial justice can overlook the fact that members of a racial group may also be marginalized along other social lines, including gender, sexuality, and disability. To the extent that silencing such intersectionality is intentional, pursued in the name of securing ostensibly more core goals, they are considered strategic. Indeed, postcolonial and subaltern studies scholar Gayatri Spivak uses the term strategic essentialism to refer to a tendency to downplay internal group differences in the interest of advancing political goals.37 Such comments raise questions about who among the marginalized is in the position to define these goals and determine which forms of simplification are deemed necessary and which amount to yet another instance of symbolic violence. The desire to construct and broadcast consensual accounts about a collective past should be interrogated along these lines. More introspective concerns around identity and identification with the past must be balanced with the more banal aspects of representation that takes place within institutional settings like museums.

Consensus-driven collective memory has a great deal in common with the shifts in historical thinking and scholarship discussed earlier. The central criticism of the historical tradition was that it was too reductionist, both politically and psychologically. In short, the issue

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was that there was a conflation between how one identified politically and with individual preferences, beliefs, and sentiments. The alternative historical project was bent on exposing these values and assumptions that made the grand histories possible—to expose on whose backs they were crafted and at what cost. This is a valuable lesson for those interested in collective memory, especially in the way it gets constricted or represented in the aftermath of intense national conflict.

One of the key motivations is to expose such silences and breathe life into alternative ways of thinking about and memorializing the past that were repressed or unfathomable under previous sociopolitical regimes.

Sharing many affinities with the new social history movement of the 1970s and 1980s in the United Kingdom, the Popular Memory Group derided the historical status quo as a manifestation and justification for socioeconomic inequality and advocated the use of oral history and amateur historians to access the memories and stories of disenfranchised groups, especially the working class, minorities, women, and LGBTQ communities.38 Since then, others have stressed the rising importance of everyday people—not only members of socially marginalized groups—in shaping collective memory or representations of it at museums and memorials.39 However, just as with historical production, such memory work should not be considered an alternative to the consensus project discussed earlier, but rather as a variant of it. This book shows how the alternative accounts presented in museums dedicated to representing previously silenced histories and experiences are still involved in the project by reproducing the collective as sacred along with circumscribed interpretations of group identities and differences. From national to local, at history museums of all sorts, this project entails positioning itself as sacred public space where the backstage political, economic, institutional, and ideological work of creating and maintaining that space is benignly assumed or actively masked.

MUSEUMS: BET WEEN HISTORY AND MEMORY This book is focused on the role of museums in communicating national identities and culture, and it is motivated more by a concern

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with the production and politics of representing the past than with the past itself. As James Young demonstrated with his study of Holocaust memorials, commemorating violent histories is complicated by the desire to neither avoid nor celebrate pain and trauma.40 This paradox takes center stage at museums where practices of remembering (and forgetting) are institutionalized as part of the public life of memory. Sometimes they are located at historically significant sites, like where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee; or sometimes they develop out of grassroots activism like the District Six Museum in Cape Town, located near the iconic mixed-heritage neighborhood that was bulldozed during apartheid.

Museums such as these are considered “sites of memory” or places where memory “crystallizes and secretes itself,” according to French historian Pierre Nora. He and others have argued that the proliferation of museums, monuments, and memorials are signs of a postmodern predicament or crisis: a sense that we are losing our connection to the past.41 He focuses on these sites as alternatives to the types of accounts produced by professional historians who strategically sort through the past.42 Yet, as mentioned earlier, sociologists view memory as also being produced, selective, and constructed. And museums, while certainly sites where collective memory is on display, also incorporate historical scholarship and even professional historians as researchers, curators, and consultants. The line between history and memory is less distinct than is often assumed, and museums surely operate within the murky overlap between the two spaces. This somewhat precarious position is exacerbated by contemporary expectations that museums balance pressing demands to observe, acknowledge, and even celebrate difference—while at the same time emphasizing what all visitors have in common.

Popular discourse around historical museums treats them as simple transmitters of information about the past revealed through the distillation of complex scholarship into linear and seemingly agreed-upon visual narratives.43 Such consensus-driven practices tend to create an illusion of harmony and unity by relying on familiar tropes and cultural scripts that resonate with the status quo. However, this impression is difficult to sustain when the memories involve unresolved or traumatic historical episodes; public representations of

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these periods are often more likely to provoke controversy than to deepen unity. Yet, this does not preempt museums from working to fit these difficult periods into tidy narratives; to do other wise would be to disrupt one of the fundamental tasks of museums.

Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, the emergent field of museum studies or “new museology” has flourished by positioning museums as theaters where identities are performed, ideologies interrogated, and cultural symbols reinvented. Unlike more traditional studies of museum conservation practices and administration, museum studies involves a deeper examination of the hidden assumptions and biases embedded in museum collections and exhibitions.44 Research in this subfield of memory studies focuses on both the production and consumption of museum content, from the exhibitions and guided tours to interactive technologies and public programming.45 As a whole, museum studies powerfully refuted commonly held beliefs that museums were value-free by tracing the ways some group experiences and their cultural and artistic traditions had been systematically ignored or marginalized in mainstream museums. In particular, some began to question the ritualistic nature of museums and the function they served for society by looking at public programming and forms of engagement (or disengagement). Carol Duncan investigated museums as secular “ritual structures,”46 while Duncan Cameron emphasized that community engagement, historical revision, and social interpretation had transformed museums into public forums that hardly involved any essential museological practices, such as acquiring and collecting material objects.47 All of this work came at the time when rhetoric about the culture war was at its height.

Museums have played a critical role within these processes. Museum developers often succumb to an urge to create an illusion of consensus by showcasing seemingly agreed-upon narratives. For example, a variety of discursive, visual, and technological moves are involved in presenting a narrative of South Africa’s apartheid past that appears consensual and discourages disagreement over the accounts at museums like the Apartheid Museum.48 Another way to see museums is to view them primarily as educational institutions, and in fact, most museums, especially historical and cultural museums, consider public education to be a key aspect of their mission. While these museums are a primary source of historical information for the public,

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they must compete with other venues where information about ongoing racial violence is publicized, particularly through social media sites. Unlike Twitter or Facebook, for example, museums are structured in such a way that injustice is treated as an object of history, rather than continuous or ongoing. While museum exhibitions, like television programming and films, are far more responsive to historical revisions than school curricula, which are more tightly regulated and monitored, they showcase content, in this case racial conflict, that appears resolved. As an object on display, the imagined past is controlled, the sharp edges rounded.

As cultural products of modernity, museums face a conundrum in contemporary life characterized by a fragmentation, hybridity, multiplicity, and virtual realities. Such postmodern conditions call the authoritative power and practices of the museum into question. In Simulacra and Simulation, postmodern theorist Jean Baudrillard observed that today’s “museum, instead of being circumscribed as a geometric site, is everywhere now, like a dimension of life.”49 What role do museums play in a time of hyperreality or simulated reality when mass-produced reproductions abound, when the line between the object and its display is no longer relevant as our perceptions become reality? If we are indeed surrounded by simulations and are part of them ourselves, what does it mean to visit a museum in the first place? Some museum scholars contend that the museum as a distinct social institution need not be cast aside, that instead its work should be reinvented with more emphasis on interpretation, personal experiences, and engagement as opposed to object-driven exhibitions mounted by experts.50 This line of questioning raises issues about the social construction of authenticity as much as it does about the future of museums as legitimizing social institutions. Yet, these are not concerns of postmodernists alone; sociologist Erving Goffman observed that social life is characterized by a series of manufactured or produced performances.51 For Goffman the question is not whether such per formances are authentic—indeed, authenticity is always imagined—but rather whether they are deemed credible by audiences. Accordingly, the museum is the setting within which a variety of performances are displayed by curators, tour guides, and visitors, as well as less visible actors, such as donors. These productive and consumptive per for-

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mances are the basis for the generative power of museums even today. The fact that people continue to visit museums and treat their performances or displays as somehow distinct from the ones they encounter in their everyday lives makes them an ideal site for studying the stories we tell ourselves about the past.

The development of historical and cultural museums offers a promising window through which to understand how new historical information is incorporated or marginalized in the mainstream, as well as how revised accounts are institutionalized. This sociological perspective supplants that of the museum critic, who is more concerned with the accuracy of museum content and the depth of historical knowledge; I explore a broader set of questions about the relationship between social change and cultural representation, along with other organizational and institutional dynamics that shape the choices museums must make—including pressures like tourism and urban development, as well as national culture. I draw on these themes to understand similarities and differences in the way the past is represented in U.S. and South African museums.

Even more than outlining rules of rebellion or the basis of social order, museum exhibitions blur the line between individual and collective, as we are meant to identify on an almost primordial level with the past. In fact, the power and efficacy of the collective story is the extent to which we take it on as our own story, our own memory, our own identity; we are meant to identify with the past. In museum exhibitions devoted to difficult material, this is evident in the way identity narratives are used. We are each located within the narrative and we belong to the collective to the extent that we not only accept but also identify with the collective representations. In postconflict settings, the consensus society is premised on our acceptance of a common way to contextualize the past. For democratic societies and in the wake of the power of the social history movement, the project of consensus-driven collective memory is to craft collective representations that accommodate difference, but do so without disrupting the notion of a collective or a mutual consenting public. At museums, this is generally achieved through the use of identity narratives, the multiplication of identities and stories to reflect those identities that all conform to similar conventions of storytelling.

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DESEGREGATING THE PAST In both South Africa and the United States, museum professionals contend with the challenges of displaying unifying collective narratives in the context of long histories of racial antagonisms. At first glance, however, this comparison would suggest an almost perfectly inverted story: similar black-led movements for nonracial citizenship triggered a radical social reorganization with black-majority rule in one case and a more modest integration of a small black minority into a white-dominated society in the other. However, these demographic facts do not account for similarities in the way that museums dedicated to preserving these histories have emerged at the fore of debates about national and racial identities, reconciliation, economic development, and public culture in both countries. Desegregating the Past illustrates that similar concerns over representation and access to resources and audiences shape how and why traumatic histories are preserved, edited, and displayed in the public realm. Indeed, the comparison of the politics of representing U.S. and South African societies vis-à-vis their troubled pasts revolves around an investigation of the dilemmas facing museums as they exhibit and promote collective representations as sacred, authentic, and incontrovertible.

All of the museums in this study are dedicated to commemorating the histories of struggles to desegregate and upturn racial logics in the United States and South Africa. Yet, in doing so they also contribute to a wider, more profound social project about the ordering of time, the segregation of the past from the present and future. That is, they locate or orient the present in relation to what is defined as the past. Through chronology and narrative structure, the past is rendered both visible and knowable, an object to be contained. The ephemeral nature of memory and its off-kilter, dizzying rhythms, along with the unevenness of identity or subjectivity is effectively tamed, a casualty in the pursuit of digestible moral lessons to be projected onto other imagined periods: the present and the future. The coercive power of how time should be regarded or organized, by way of history-making and collective memory projects, and how we should orient ourselves toward both, is evident in moments of resistance or among those I refer to as memory deviants who openly refuse to abide by conventional styles and tropes used to represent the past.

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Chapter 1 explores the role of memory entrepreneurs—those individuals and organizations that create and seize opportunities to shape collective memory52—in revising historical content. It asks: If history is written by the victors, then who revises it? I answer this question by identifying the key actors involved in positioning museums as sites of revision, paying attention to how their institutional locations and interests help explain the cultural politics of revision. I discuss revision in terms of historical content as a gateway to a deeper consideration of revision as a source of renewing social consensus and reshaping public (historical) space. This chapter links the cultural work of museums dedicated to preserving histories of violence to long-standing criticisms of mainstream history and museum culture. The chapter compares the development of a family of black history museums operating in opposition to whitewashing of U.S. history to the overhaul of national museums after the fall of apartheid in South Africa. It outlines how this social environment paved the way for the construction and ultimately the standardization of certain types of revision and collective narratives.

In chapter 2, I examine how violent histories are recounted through the lens of group identity formation in exhibitions. I discuss how relying on the conventions of collective storytelling—the rules and norms around both plot and structure—blunts the sharp edges of history. This chapter analyzes the visual and discursive turns used to construct a metanarrative of group identity forged through collective trauma. In South Africa, this collective experience is articulated as a national one, whereas in the United States interrogation of the society’s racist past is the purview of so-called ethnic or black museums.

In other words, American histories of racial oppression are converted into a narrative that depicts how blacks were transformed from racial subjects to citizens. On the other hand, in South Africa the long history of colonial rule and racial subjugation is told as part of the story of national transformation from a racial dictatorship to a liberal democracy. Despite some differences in framing and racial versus nationalistic allusions, the overall narrative structure, sentiment, and approach are similar: both emphasize personal humility, collective perseverance, and the inevitability of democratic rule.

Chapter 3 treats the museum not only as a site of memory, but also as a site of employment. It considers how the collective representations

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require management over time, focusing on some of the banal or profane dimensions of memory work: the budgets, the political wrangling, staff composition and training, and construction costs and woes. Museum curators and directors must contend with a cluster of political-economic and institutional factors that deeply determine their capacity to represent the past. I found that all the museums I studied faced related concerns about funding, attendance, membership development, and exhibition design. This chapter examines how these issues affect displays across relatively older (civil rights and apartheid-era) museums compared to ones founded during the 1990s and 2000s. By comparing the myriad ways that liberal ideologies such as constitutionalism, inclusion, and citizenship intersect with material considerations—such as budgets and building design— this chapter investigates the diverse types of work involved in constructing collective memory. It also addresses the influence of the tourism industry on the public life of memory.

Building on the previous discussion, chapter 4 asks: What can deviant forms of remembering tell us about the normative project of collective remembrance? This chapter draws on newspaper articles, blogs, and interviews to explore the world of memory deviants who refuse to engage in socially responsible forms of remembering and the identity constructions implicit in them. This chapter investigates the limits of constructing a consensus-driven collective memory through the lens of dissenting voices, particularly those of the people meant to identify with revised collective narratives. From journalists and politicians to artists and torture survivors, I consider such resistance as evidence of the need for counterpublic (historical) spaces. I compare and contrast how competing interpretations of the past and its role in contemporary society inform debates about multiculturalism, reconciliation, and empowerment. This chapter also examines how the illusion of a consensus-driven collective memory is shattered through various modes of artistic expression that deviate from the curated past discussed in chapter 1. In doing so, this chapter also considers the differences between subverting memory conventions in history museums compared to art museums and galleries.

Finally, in the conclusion, I revisit the puzzle of collective memory and the politics of representation or the “museumification of memory.”

I argue that memory and identity become artifacts in the interest of

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reconstituting the collective in the aftermath of prolonged and intense conflict. The conclusion also questions the motivations for and implications of the construction and production of consensus-driven narratives as the basis of collective memory. Ultimately, it considers the extent to which museum practices can transcend the familiar visual and discursive language of racial and national identities that is itself rooted in histories of oppression and exclusion.

NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY While I use common terms such as “race,” “true,” “real,” “collective,” and “nation,” this book calls them into question as ideas, not things. In particular, although race, ethnicity, and nation operate as powerful social identities and categories, they are socially constructed. Every society has different ways of classifying populations and people use any number of ways to internalize, reinvent, or reject official classifications. These schemes vary both across time and space, which complicates cross-national comparison. For example, coloured is a label with resonance in both countries at various periods (at least tonally), but with wildly different meanings. In South Africa, it is an official racial designation created during apartheid to classify people of mixed descent—generally indigenous, Dutch, Indian, and African—and a rich cultural heritage and identity has formed around it; the term “coloured” is not typically considered offensive, despite its origins in apartheid classification schemes. In contrast, the term “colored” in the United States had been considered a polite way to refer to people of African descent before it became closely linked to the discursive and visual culture of Jim Crow laws and is now considered derogatory.53 These labels are fraught and have become points of contention in debates around the representation of history and culture. Although the naming and renaming of groups lends legitimacy to the flawed notion that there is some correct or authentic way to reference human differences, I use the latest census classifications for both countries to refer to racial, ethnic, and national groups.

PRAISE FOR

DESEGREGATING THE PAST

“As both a historian and museum curator, I believe that Robyn Autry’s sociological analysis of museums as institutions and as producers of collective memories is groundbreaking. Her extensive UHVHDUFK LQ WKH 8QLWHG 6WDWHV DQG 6RXWK $IULFD LOOXPLQDWHV WKH GLIÂżFXOWLHV RI SURGXFLQJ FRQWHPSRrary national narratives from the messy, contentious, and violent elements of both nation’s pasts.â€? ²)DWK 'DYLV 5XIÂżQV FXUDWRU 1DWLRQDO 0XVHXP RI $PHULFDQ +LVWRU\ “Although comparisons of the anti-apartheid and civil rights movements abound, until now no scholar has attended to the comparative place of these struggles in the collective memory of the allegedly ‘postracial’ United States and in South Africa’s ‘Rainbow Nation.’ Desegregating the Past brilliantly reveals the power and limits of museums to reckon with a troubled racial past, casting new light on how we publicly remember the struggles against apartheid and segregation—and by doing so, how we forget.â€? —Alex Lichtenstein, professor of history, Indiana University, and coauthor of Margaret Bourke-White and the Dawn of Apartheid “As the United States and South Africa wrestle with simmering legacies of cruel, racist histories, Autry’s bold and layered text investigates how representations of a divided past are reconstructed into an imagined, ‘desegregated’ present. Invoking the museum as her mode of exploration, Autry ISBN: 978-0-231-17758-0 powerfully reveals the compound and competing imperatives—ideological, political, economic, institutional—that have informed the maintenance and creation of public sites of memory as two 9 780231 177580 nations transcend and transform their collective narratives.â€? —Andrea Durbach, author of A Common Purpose: The Story of the Upington 25 and director, Australian Human Rights Center, University of Sydney “Desegregating the Past is a remarkable study of how collective perceptions of the past are shaped and displayed through contestation between public and private memory agents. Using a comparative context, Autry examines the formation of racial and national identities in the United States and South Africa and the balance among discourses of victimhood, solidarity, and resistance in GHHSO\ GLYLGHG KLVWRULHV ,W LV DQ LPSRUWDQW FRQWULEXWLRQ WR RXU XQGHUVWDQGLQJ RI KRZ FRQĂ€LFW DQG resolution are presented and re-presented in different historical contexts.â€? —Ran Greenstein, associate professor of sociology, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS | NEW YORK CUP.COLUMBIA.EDU ISBN: 978-0-231-17758-0

9 780231 177580 Printed in the U.S.A.