Curating America's Painful Past

In Curating America’s Painful Past, Gruenewald poses an important thought experiment in the book’s conclusion: “Imagine a national memorial dedicated to the memory of America’s painful past on the National Mall (195).” The book presents a convincing argument that the four museums already on the mall—the National Museum of American History (nmah), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (ushm), the National Museum of African American History and Culture (nmaah), and the National Museum of the American Indian (mnai)—are inadequate to the task. Gruenewald analyzes the museums’ location, exhibits, films, and administrative histories specifically to provide insights into how each site misses opportunities to communicate how the “systematic crimes against humanity over centuries on US soil were not remembered in the National Mall (3).” His timely critique of the National Mall certainly fits within the purview of memory studies and public history to investigate the position of visitors at sites of public memory and to consider the consequences of ignoring these neglected aspects of U.S. history.For the Smithsonian’s nmah, Gruenewald focuses exclusively on the depiction of African Americans and Native Americans. He rightly points out that the museum’s emphasis on war as the dominant symbol of patriotism diminishes the importance of nonwhite people, women, and children. One of Gruenewald’s strongest arguments in this chapter and throughout the book, concerns the representation of Native Americans. His rhetorical analysis of the exhibits illustrates the myriad curatorial decisions that tend to diminish Native Americans’ experience in the United States. Avoiding a binary framework of remembering and forgetting, he instead highlights the politically informed decision-making process. One of the nmah exhibits shockingly describes President Jackson’s Indian Removal Policy as “the best solution” and Black and Native American children’s experiences during slavery as similar to that of free white children (59).Gruenewald’s appreciation of the ushm sets up his critique of the National Museum of the American Indian (mnai). Whereas the ushm effectively conveys the enormity and horror of the Holocaust through the listing of names, the identity cards assigned upon entry, and the exhibits—including a railcar that transported victims, as well as shoes and hair—this emotional aspect is missing from the nmai. Yet he rightly critiques ushm’s endorsement of the U.S. military and its general neglect of worldwide genocides despite the museum’s stated mission to promote social justice and instances of “contemporary significance” (105). Gruenewald pairs the nmaah with the ushm because of their similar depictions of collective violence and their overall narratives of the “US national ideology of liberation and progress” (116). Both museums’ blind spots concern their relegation of the harm experienced by Jews and African Americans to the past.Gruenewald’s strongest chapter discusses the National Museum of the American Indian (nmai). His skill in reading the ideological implications of the site’s location, exhibits, orientation film, and visitor experience is obvious. The nmai building’s rhizomatic structure symbolically resists any notion that Native Americans exist only in the past; Gruenewald accordingly emphasizes their survivance. Nonetheless, Gruenewald laments the museum’s missed opportunity to communicate the U.S. genocide of Native Americans and to provide more complex and accurate depictions of its subjects.Rather than ask the four museums to shoulder the responsibility of representing the United State’s painful past, Grunewald argues for a separate memorial in the National Mall to disrupt the ideological reliance on military accomplishments and the “one-dimensional celebration of American triumph” (211). His well-researched study provides evidence for the need to change traditional forms of commemoration in the United States to represent the past with all its blemishes and to end the charade of American innocence—a laudable goal indeed

Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Depiction · Literature · Media studies · Patriotism · Political science · Public history · Rhetorical question · Sociology · The Holocaust · Visual arts · History · Law · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration