Exhibiting repair in twenty-first-century reinstallations of African collections
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 18995809 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lyndsey P Beutin (0000-0001-6311-2542, corresponding author), Lyndsey Beutin |
| Year | 2014 |
| Volume | 28 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 690-719 |
| Publication date | 2014-07-04 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cultural Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0950-2386 • E-ISSN: 1466-4348 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/09502386.2014.891409 |
| OpenAlex | W1965055261 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 30 |
This article analyses three twenty-first-century reinstallations of African objects in the United States and South Africa that use gallery space to explicitly address and symbolically redress an institutional history of problematic representations of Africa, and by extension, of blackness. Each project has updated its interpretation to reflect black cultural studies scholarship that emphasizes dynamism within diasporas and attempts to intervene on the ways that museums produce knowledge. While each institution has used its African displays to engage local black communities, this paper inverts the notion that appeals to ‘the community’ are intrinsically anti-authoritative and that objects are necessarily static by suggesting the reparative potential in objects and the paradoxical logic of authenticity that undergirds the museological turn to community. Drawing on gallery observations, interviews and visual analysis, the particularities of each approach reveal that it is not the specific curatorial techniques – whether object-based or community-focused – but the relationships encircling those strategies that mediate reception. Offering a museological window into ongoing discussions of how cultural producers/curators and the audiences they presume/produce interface, these case studies signal the centrality of trust to reparative projects and to transforming social relations within the museum and beyond it
Aesthetics · Art · Centrality · Dynamism · Epistemology · Institution · Media studies · Political science · Redress · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · Law · Museums and Cultural Heritage
Museums and communities
The black Atlantic
Exhibiting cultures
Exceptional Violence
The Changing Same
Reinventing Africa
The museum’s redemption
Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926
Cast, Miscast
Exhibiting Africa
That Event, This Memory
Scaling Governmentality
Against race
African Art and Authenticity
A Historian's Brief Guide to New Museum Studies
The recognition and misrecognition of community heritage
Civilised Off the Face of the Earth
The Uses of Diaspora
The Predicament of Culture
Where Is "Africa"? Re-Viewing Art and Artifact in the Age of Globalization
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,08 |
| Citation span | 2014 - 2014 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |