Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT: This article outlines some recent museological initiatives aimed at responding to the important issues raised by the famous protest against the exhibition Into the Heart of Africa, organized by the Royal Ontario Museum in 1989. Despite the significant temporal hiatus from the historical protest, many of the questions raised in that context continue to be relevant in thinking of ways to engage and present African collections in a mainstream encyclopedic institution. Rather than rethinking a new, more culturally sensitive narrative, I suggest that the introduction of multiple voices and perspectives may be the only way to disrupt the linear authoritative narratives and promote a more significant and affectively relevant engagement with historical collections.
KEYWORDS: Africa, collections, critical dialogue, Royal Ontario Museum
Michel Foucault (1972, 1986) argued that Western museums, like other cultural institutions, are spaces that operate beyond time and space. They function as "heterotopias," where the vestiges of time are accumulated and simultaneously removed from the flow and messiness of social life and biological rules. Museums were institutionalized as places of accumulation, reservoirs of history, yet at the same time they configured themselves as spaces beyond history, where objects could be selected, classified, and organized according to self-affirming rules that reinforced dominant Western discourses. Yet, in the last three decades of the twentieth century, museum critics, practitioners, and the public started putting into question the hegemonic immobility of the museum and its ability to maintain its relevance as a heterotopic repository. In his seminal 1971 article, Duncan Cameron analyzed the shifting role of museums from temple-like structures to platforms for public engagement. By the end of the 1980s, more challenging confrontations revealed the unescapably timely and political role of museums, forcing a more pointed awareness of the impossibility of cultural heterotopias in contemporary societies. The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto is an oft-quoted example of a confrontational "contact zone" (Pratt 1992: 6-7; see also Clifford 1997) where historical and contemporary social tensions belying the mainstream multicultural ideal of Canadian society came to surface. When a group of activists in 1989 directly challenged the institutional narrative of one of the ROM's exhibitions, the museum's mostly dismissive response created a long-term fracture that still lingered after almost three decades.
This article takes its...