National Museums The Memory Of Nations

National Museums and the Origins of Nations provides the first international survey of origins stories in national museums and examines the ways in which such museums use the distant past as a vehicle to reflect the concerns of the political present. Offering an international comparison of institutions in China, North and South America, the Middle East, Europe and Australia, the book argues that national museums tell us more about what sort of community a nation wishes to be today, than how and why that nation came into being. Watson also reveals the ways in which narrative and exhibition design attempt to engage the visitor in an emotional experience designed to promote loyalty to, and pride in, the nation, or to remind visitors who are not citizens that they do not belong. These narratives of origin are, it is claimed, based on so-called factual accuracies, but this book reveals that they are often selective, emotional and rarely critiqued within institutions. At a time when nationalism is very much back on the political agenda, this book highlights how museums reflect current political and social concerns. National Museums and the Origins of Nations will appeal to academics and students engaged in the study of museums, heritage, politics, nationalism and history.

Art museums today face the challenge of opening themselves up as institutions to a changing society. This publication offers new perspectives on museological trends that are developing in various countries and cultures. Through increasingly flexible, inclusive and unexpected museum typologies, institutions aim to give their visitors greater access to art. The essays define the role of the museum as a medium of social change, as a protagonist in an education process and as a technologically innovative platform. Art historians, but also practitioners from the museum world – including curators, architects and psychologists – examine what is expected of art museums using case studies and against the background of the humanities and social sciences.

This book explores the Holocaust exhibition opened within the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in 2000; setting out the long and often contentious debates surrounding the conception, design, and finally the opening of an important exhibition within a national museum in Britain. It considers a process of memory-making through an assessment of Holocaust photographs, material culture, and survivor testimonies; exploring theories of cultural memory as they apply to the national museum context. Anchored in time and place, the Holocaust exhibition within Britain’s national museum of war is influenced by, and reflects, an international rise in Holocaust consciousness in the 1990s. This book considers the construction of Holocaust memory in 1990s Britain, providing a foundation for understanding current and future national memory projects. Through all aspects of the display, the Holocaust is presented as meaningful in terms of what it says about Nazism and what this, in turn, says about Britishness. From the original debates surrounding the inclusion of a Holocaust gallery at the IWM, to the acquisition of Holocaust artefacts that could act as 'concrete evidence' of Nazi barbarity and criminality, the Holocaust reaffirms an image of Britain that avoids critical self-reflection despite raising uncomfortably close questions. The various display elements are brought together to consider multiple strands of the Holocaust story as it is told by national museums in Britain.

Europe’s national museums have since their creation been at the centre of on-going nation making processes. National museums negotiate conflicts and contradictions and entrain the community sufficiently to obtain the support of scientists and art connoisseurs, citizens and taxpayers, policy makers, domestic and foreign visitors alike. National Museums and Nation-building in Europe 1750-2010 assess the national museum as a manifestation of cultural and political desires, rather than that a straightforward representation of the historical facts of a nation. National Museums and Nation-building in Europe 1750-2010 examines the degree to which national museums have created models and representations of nations, their past, present and future, and proceeds to assess the consequences of such attempts. Revealing how different types of nations and states – former empires, monarchies, republics, pre-modern, modern or post-imperial entities – deploy and prioritise different types of museums (based on art, archaeology, culture and ethnography) in their making, this book constitutes the first comprehensive and comparative perspective on national museums in Europe and their intricate relationship to the making of nations and states.

National Museums and the Origins of Nations provides the first international survey of origins stories in national museums and examines the ways in which such museums use the distant past as a vehicle to reflect the concerns of the political present. Offering an international comparison of institutions in China, North and South America, the Middle East, Europe and Australia, the book argues that national museums tell us more about what sort of community a nation wishes to be today, than how and why that nation came into being. Watson also reveals the ways in which narrative and exhibition design attempt to engage the visitor in an emotional experience designed to promote loyalty to, and pride in, the nation, or to remind visitors who are not citizens that they do not belong. These narratives of origin are, it is claimed, based on so-called factual accuracies, but this book reveals that they are often selective, emotional and rarely critiqued within institutions. At a time when nationalism is very much back on the political agenda, this book highlights how museums reflect current political and social concerns. National Museums and the Origins of Nations will appeal to academics and students engaged in the study of museums, heritage, politics, nationalism and history.

This volume examines the ways in which the violent legacies of the twentieth century continue to affect the concept of the nation. Through a study of three societies’ commemoration of notorious episodes of 1930s state violence, the author considers the manner in which attention to the state violence authoritarianism, and exclusions of the last century have resulted in challenges to dominant conceptions of the nation. Based on extensive ethnographic research in El Salvador, Spain, and the Dominican Republic, Remembering Violence focuses on new public sites of memory, such as museum exhibitions, monuments, and commemorations – powerful loci for representing ideas about the nation – and explores the responses of various actors – civil society, government, and diasporic citizens – as well as those of UN and other international agencies invested in new nation-building goals. With attention to the ways in which memory practices explain ongoing national exclusions and contemporary efforts to contest them, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in public memory and commemoration.

National Museums is the first book to explore the national museum as a cultural institution in a range of contrasting national contexts. Composed of new studies of countries that rarely make a showing in the English-language studies of museums, this book reveals how these national museums have been used to create a sense of national self, place the nation in the arts, deal with the consequences of political change, remake difficult pasts, and confront those issues of nationalism, ethnicity and multiculturalism which have come to the fore in national politics in recent decades. National Museums combines research from both leading and new researchers in the fields of history, museum studies, cultural studies, sociology, history of art, media studies, science and technology studies, and anthropology. It is an interrogation of the origins, purpose, organisation, politics, narratives and philosophies of national museums.