Exhibiting repair in twenty-first-century reinstallations of African collections

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Exhibiting repair in twenty-first-century reinstallations of AfricancollectionsLyndsey BeutinPublished online: 11 Mar 2014.

To cite this article: Lyndsey Beutin (2014) Exhibiting repair in twenty-first-century reinstallations of African collections, Cultural Studies, 28:4, 690-719, DOI:10.1080/09502386.2014.891409

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Lyndsey Beutin

EXHIBITING REPAIR IN TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY REINSTALLATIONS OF AFRICANCOLLECTIONS

This article analyses three twenty-first-century reinstallations of African objects inthe United States and South Africa that use gallery space to explicitly address andsymbolically redress an institutional history of problematic representations ofAfrica, and by extension, of blackness. Each project has updated its interpretationto reflect black cultural studies scholarship that emphasizes dynamism withindiasporas and attempts to intervene on the ways that museums produce knowledge.While each institution has used its African displays to engage local blackcommunities, this paper inverts the notion that appeals to ‘the community’ areintrinsically anti-authoritative and that objects are necessarily static by suggestingthe reparative potential in objects and the paradoxical logic of authenticity thatundergirds the museological turn to community. Drawing on gallery observations,interviews and visual analysis, the particularities of each approach reveal that it isnot 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 culturalproducers/curators and the audiences they presume/produce interface, these casestudies signal the centrality of trust to reparative projects and to transformingsocial relations within the museum and beyond it.

Keywords Africa; museums; authenticity; community engagement;redress; trust

Museum displays of Africa have historically operated as proxies for representa-tions of blackness in the West and its colonies. Destroying African sophisticationby presenting ‘primitiveness’ has been a part of numerous national politicalprojects to culturally denigrate blackness. Displaying Africa as backwards hasbeen used to reinforce ideologies of racial hierarchy and white supremacy aswell as to justify the civilizing mission of colonization (Clifford 1988, Karp andLevine 1991, Conn 1998, Witz 2006). Correcting museological representationsof Africa has also been the subject of various artistic and curatorialinterventions. South African artist Pippa Stoknes’s Miscast rebuttal to the SouthAfrican Museum’s ‘Bushmen Diorama’ (Kasfir 1997) and Susan Vogel’s (1991)

Cultural Studies, 2014Vol. 28, No. 4, 690–719, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.891409

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2014.891409

temporary exhibitions about the politics of displaying African art as ethnographicartefacts are just two examples of the acknowledged need to simultaneouslycritique extant presentations of ‘Africa’ and offer revised visual narratives.

Despite a wave of scholarly critique and curatorial analysis in the 1990s andearly 2000s (Clifford 1985, 1988, Stocking 1985, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991,Kasfir 1992, Coombes 1994, Ogbechie 1997, Mirzoeff 2000, Phillips 2002,Karp et al. 2006), the permanent exhibitions of African objects in encyclopaedicart and anthropology museums have been slow to change. Museums are not animble technological platform, as Franz Boas pointed out as early as 1905(Jacknis 1985), and are subject to dwindling funds, structural and preservation-based limitations and institutional inertia, even if (and when) their curators’ideological positions match the vanguard of critique. Since the turn of thetwenty-first-century, though, museums have been publicly correcting them-selves: a slew of African reinstallations occurred in the early 2000s and anotherround of revisions in major museums has taken place since 2010.

This paper analyses three twenty-first-century reinstallations of Africancollections in American and South African museums. The Brooklyn Museum’sAfrican Innovations, the Penn Museum’s Imagine Africa audience engagementgallery project, and the South African Museum’s !Qe – The Power of Rock Art livewithin very different institutions, with different histories, goals and relationshipsto their existing and desired audiences. In each case, the institution has updatedthe collection’s interpretation to be more consistent with newer thinking in thestudy of the African diaspora. The interpretations emphasize African dynamism inpast and present, histories of innovation, and global exchange as correctives tolong-standing representational tropes that suggested primitivism, the staticethnographic present and an essential root of all black culture.

Beyond updating the narrative itself, these projects all attempt institutionalrepair through altering and re-theorizing the modes of knowledge productionwithin the museum exhibitions. Instead of speaking with a neutral, omniscient,de-historicized voice, each project provides text-based historical transparencyregarding the colonial provenance of the collection. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (2006, p. 40) has called this strategy ‘a museology that includeselements of self-critique and self-indictment’. The epistemological repairs inthese projects go further: the Brooklyn Museum disrupts mutually exclusivecategorization with spatial interventions; the Penn Museum experiments withsharing authorship; and the South African Museum creates a palimpsestic displaywhere new interpretations are layered onto old ones that remain visible. Eachproject has attempted to change the way in which the narratives are created, evenas they similarly emphasize African innovation. Using epistemology as areparative method is particularly compelling in the ethnographic museum space,where an original project of the nineteenth-century museum was to create, justifyand reproduce the scientific ‘truth’ of racial difference through amassing anddisplaying cultural objects from different global regions. As such, changing how

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museums create knowledge – and not just the specific messages theycommunicate – potentially offers a structural repair to the institution, and astep towards improved interracial social relations, without requiring theinstitution to dissolve.

While the Penn Museum’s project most clearly centres the audience in itsapproach, each institution’s relationship with local black communities was acritical aspect of their chosen repair project. In the era of participation,involving audiences in the production of representation is an important, ifincreasingly expected, inclusion (Bishop 2006, Graham 2012, Finkelpearl2013). My evidence illustrates, however, that the objects on display remainparamount, either as the central exhibition focus or as the stated preference ofvisitors. By showing how these projects hold the simultaneous priorities ofobject and audience together, my research offers an important limit on thenotion that community engagement is inherently libratory and that objects arenecessarily static. Ultimately, my analysis suggests the potential for archives tobe reparative rather than solely authoritative (Thomas 2013), and that the turnto audiences may counter-intuitively remain underpinned by a conventionallogic of authenticity. These insights are made visible by considering theparticularities of the community/institution dynamics across these cases andidentifying that trust, more than specific curatorial technique, circumscribes theconception and reception of new representations.

Before examining the local constellations of history, power, community,identity and trust in each repair project, I offer historical and theoretical contextfor the narrative updates of the gallery spaces. My insights about each museumproject are derived from field observations, interviews and visual analysis of theexhibitions, spanning September 2008 to December 2012.

Material traces of dynamic pasts

Scholars of black cultural studies and the African diaspora in the New Worldhave grappled with the tension between the ideology of origin and return andthe problematic implications of black essentialism and African changelessnessthat those ideologies can suggest. The challenge to name the condition wherebytraces of the past inform and remain visible in present practices and realitieswithout being reducible to them has been undertaken by many scholars. In his1963 essay, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) coined the term ‘the changing same’ todescribe continuities from originary African religious practices to contemporaryblack musical production (McDowell 1995, p. 182). The term has since beenapplied to myriad aspects of the black experience. Stuart Hall (1997, p. 294)describes how tradition is not teleologically transmitted to the future, but isreworked in response to and under the force of the present. He explicates thecapacity for being ‘both located in a tradition and yet not constrained by it’.

6 9 2 CULTURAL STUD I ES

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Paul Gilroy (1993, 2000) resists the idea of roots in racial identity because,for him, it implies that all people of the African diaspora share an unchangingbiological essence that is more real than the social experience of race. Gilroy(2000, p. 129) describes syncretic cultural forms that are created throughdiasporic movements, seeing tradition as change rather than ‘simple repetition’.His scholarship evinces African diasporas that have and will continue to change.Brent Hayes Edwards has applied the analogy of an articulating joint to furtherelucidate dynamic diasporas: movement requires both separation and connec-tion, but the gap of the joint remains its own elusive space (2001, p. 66). Thesescholars emphasize the continuity of change within the diaspora, rather than onthe continent, to complicate how a roots and return ideology concretizes both aone-time, one-way dispersal and a static Africa available for return.

Theorizing these ‘traditions of change’ helpfully draws out the movementand innovation that can be overlooked or minimized in ideologies reliant uponAfrican origins and classicalism. David Scott (1991, p. 268) has aptly arguedthat there is an anthropological assumption that people of the African diasporaneed a ‘foundational guarantee of an authentic past’ which paradoxically reinforcesthe concept of African pastlessness. Museums displaying African collections havehelped create and perpetuate the impression that Africa is permanentlyprimitive. They have also been sites where diverse constituencies can seeevidence of a material black African past. Herein lies the paradox: museumshelped create the image of savagery that theoretical frames of Africology andAfrocentrism are, in part, intervening on, and they hold the objects that evincetraces of African splendour and tradition that roots-based ideologies desire.

The polysemy of objects can be mobilized as an avenue for repair.Recontextualizing and restaging African objects to tell the stories of innovationand dynamism, as the cases I describe do, operationalizes Scott’s (1991, p. 278)call to use tradition to ‘secure connections among a past, a present, and afuture’. And, using objects can make ‘issues that might otherwise seem abstractor academic look material and immediate on display’ for audiences (Starn 2005,p. 70). From this insight, I would like to refine Scott’s argument by suggestingthat in the context of institutions plagued with legacies of actively destroyingAfrican histories of innovation, correctives that also certify the past are stillnecessary and desirable. Materially evincing the past need not be read solely as adiasporic identity-based ‘Africa interest’ (Drake cited in Edwards 2001, p. 47)or an instance of black Orientalism, but could be understood as audience desirefor visible certification of a dynamic past that can make dynamic futurespossible. In other words, these exhibitions present audiences with materialexamples of how to hold tradition and dynamism together, a more tangibleversion of the scholarly pursuit of theorizing traditions of change in Africandiasporic life.

Each of the cases below reframes collection objects within diasporic theoryto visually demonstrate Africa’s innovative past and present. While this new


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narrative is informed by scholarly positions and maintains a museologicalemphasis on visual epistemology, each project also adds a new avenue forcreating knowledge in and through an exhibition.

Africa has always been global: the Brooklyn Museum

The latest installation of Brooklyn’s African collection compellingly reasserts afocus on objects, through the interpretive lens of cultural change and innovation.In so doing, African Innovations (2011) repairs the previous installation of the Arts ofAfrica (2001) by discarding the spatial and textual elements that situated Africa inthe ethnographic present, removing the problematic ‘contextual’ representationsof Africans, and highlighting the colonial provenance of certain objects. Thehistory of African display at the Brooklyn Museum cannot be reduced to anarrative of negative portrayals recast as positive representations, however.A brief institutional history reveals the broader contours of the history ofAmerican museums, the challenges and potential of the ‘turn to audience’specifically in spaces of ‘Africa’, and the transformational possibilities withinhighly authored exhibitions once community rapport has been established.

The Brooklyn Museum has a proud tradition of being a communityresponsive institution and of displaying its African collection as art. Themuseum originated as the Apprentice Library in 1825 with a mission ‘forenlarging the knowledge, and thereby improving the condition of mechanics,manufacturers, artisans, and others’ (text panel, viewed 8 November 2012).Over the next several decades the library transformed into the BrooklynInstitute and began to acquire and display European art for the betterment ofthe working classes.1 In 1890, the Institute expanded to include the sciences andbegan exhibiting natural history specimens as well as art. This transitioncorresponds with the American museum boom during the last quarter of thenineteenth century. The growth of encyclopaedic museums was propelled byscientific theories that postulated that the meaning of objects was self-apparentand thus could be conveyed to the public by arranging and displaying themappropriately (Conn 1998). The collection and display of world artefacts wasalso used to demonstrate the West’s ability to know the world, to assert asaviour status by preserving ‘vanishing’ ways of life, and to create and promotepseudo-scientific justifications of racial difference and racial oppression (Clifford1988). All of these functions corresponded to anxieties around industrialization,imperialism and racial proximity.

In the same period, Stewart Culin left the directorship at the PennMuseum tobecome the first curator of Brooklyn’s newly created Department of Ethnology(Conn 1998). During his tenure at Brooklyn, he amassed the core collection ofAfrican objects, primarily through expeditions to Europe (Lawrence and Whyten.d.). In 1923 he arranged Primitive Negro Art, Chiefly from the Belgian Congo, andBrooklyn became the first American museum to display African objects as art


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(Culin 1923, Siegmann 1995). That exhibition opened on the tails of EuropeanCubism’s fascination with West African figural sculpture and just prior to AlainLocke’s (1925) call for New Negro artists to view African art as an inheritedlineage of black abstract artistic production upon which to build.2 The BrooklynMuseum holds an important transitory space: its collection was largely gatheredas ethnographic artefacts, but it led the way in interpreting these objects as art.

The history of the display of African art at Brooklyn largely reflects thecuratorial discussions of each period. At the turn of the twenty-first-century,the Arts of Africa gallery underwent a series of reinstallations culminating in the2001 exhibition that remained on view until African Innovations opened inAugust 2011 (Siegmann 2009). The 2001 exhibition grew out of tensions in thediscourse on how best to represent Africa to Americans: there was a desire tobalance the objects’ formal aesthetic qualities alongside their uses in everydaylife while emphasizing that visitors understand the objects in their culturalcontext and have access to multi-modal learning opportunities (Vogel 2001).

The 2001 exhibition text worked hard to counter stereotypes of Africa,explicitly stating that it is a diverse continent with cities, using videos todemonstrate how masks are danced in ceremonies, and including onecontemporary African art piece. However, the exhibition’s design underminedthe text by reinforcing stereotypes of Africa through bright wall paint, vaguelytribal geometric wall patterns and contextual photographs of half-naked, ruralAfricans.3 In one example, a beaded Dinka corset was presented as a work ofart, on solo display, but was contextualized with a large photograph of twoDinka men wearing nothing but the corset. While the photograph was intendedto show how the ornament is worn, the Dinka men’s exposed buttocksreinforced stereotypes of Africans as uncivilized. The documentary photographwas presented to visitors as a whole picture of what life is like in Africa, but as adocumentary fragment, it was creating its own truth (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett1991), and it manipulated American perceptions of Africa in the process. Withcontextual elements often overpowering the objects themselves, the goals ofproviding context and countering stereotypes were often at cross-purposes inthe 2001 exhibition.

In his essay reflecting on the installations, long-time curator of the Africancollection Bill Siegmann (2009) stresses the role that the audience played in theconceptualization of the design of the 2001 gallery. His previous installationshighlighted the objects by designing serene viewing opportunities and relying onlabels to provide context about production and use. The 2001 installationchanged this: ‘the institution’s interest in developing new audiences andincreasing attendance by members of the neighborhood community dictated anew emphasis in presentation style’ (Siegmann 2009, p. 26). The bright, multi-media atmosphere was meant to enliven the space and actively involve visitors;the photographs and videos were intended to demystify the objects and makethem more accessible. These loud techniques may have drawn in audiences, but


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what impression of Africa did they leave with?4 Based on audience research, theBrooklyn Museum found that the general public was ‘overwhelmingly positiveabout the experience’, even though connoisseurs and critics found the ‘multiplecolors and photomural distracting’ (Siegmann 2009, p. 26). These dividedopinions foreshadow a similar reception among Penn scholars and the public inImagine Africa; the aesthetics of accessibility – bright wall paint and interactivedevices – was also assumed at Penn.

The Brooklyn Museum conceptualized the space of ‘Africa’ as the conduitfor building relationships with its largely African-American and West Indianneighbours. A decade later, the African collection enjoys strong support from aloyal, invested, local audience (Dumouchelle interview, 15 November 2012).The African collection is one of the most visited collections in the museum andhas been a cornerstone of the Brooklyn Museum’s public programmes forcommunity members.5 When the African galleries were slated to close forbuilding renovations, the popularity of the collection influenced the adminis-tration to retain part of the collection on view (Valladares interview,23 November 2012). Associate Curator Kevin Dumouchelle used theopportunity to update the gallery’s narrative and modes of display; AfricanInnovations opened in 2011.

The loud design and ethnographic photographs were immediately removed:Innovations returns to a muted colour palette to showcase the objects andpresents more objects in singular glass cases to be viewed in the round. Themasks and dances are characterized as a form of ‘performance art’, rather thanritual. The videos portraying the dances in situ are themselves contextualized asart objects with labels that identify the filmmaker and other production details.6

These aesthetic changes situate the objects more firmly as art, as opposed toethnographic artefacts, and make the presentation more consistent with the restof the museum.

The exhibition arranges the objects chronologically, instead of geograph-ically, to ‘emphasize the continent’s long record of creativity, adaptation, andartistic achievement’ (Dumouchelle 2011). The interpretive ‘Crossroads’bookends signify the endurance of international exchange: from fifteenth- andsixteenth-century trade networks to independence movements and transna-tional artist identities. Innovations still endeavours to balance the objects’ formand function, but characterizes the function of art as solving problems, ratherthan daily life activities. It advances a theme that catalogue contributor, JosephAdande (2009, p. 29), elucidates: ‘Art provides a solution, offering tools toalleviate the weight of sorrow by making problems disappear or by helpingpeople to find clarity or acceptance’. This tweak of ‘use’ emphasizes the agencyof African artists and demonstrates the dynamism of African traditions andcultural production.

Several display cases evince the productive mutability of cultural traditionsin the face of colonial invasion. In these instances, the museum repairs both a


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stagnant representation of Africa and exposes colonial impact on Africansocieties. The ‘Arts of Protection’ wall text reads:

The profusion of power figures and protective masks, while part of anongoing local history, is certainly related to the growing Europeanpresence on the continent, which brought iconoclastic missionaries, localapocalyptic movements, economic exploitation, and the loss of politicalindependence … Through these works, African artists sought control of aworld changing around them.

This statement is visualized in the display of three Gelede masks (Figure 1). Allthree are dated to the same period, but one looks traditional and is interpretedby the text, ‘Gelede dancers express Yoruba ideals of male and femalebehaviour’. The mask immediately beneath it has a similar form but replacesthe traditional female headscarf with a French soldier’s hat. Its label describeshow it depicts a colonial soldier, and ‘was likely performed as a critique ofFrench personal and political behaviour during the colonial period’. In thisjuxtaposition, traditions are not only preserved through cultural performance,performances incorporate and respond to contemporary conditions. Rather thanreinforce a pristine, primitive view of the world, this pair reveals globalexchange. It offers a concrete example of Stuart Hall’s (1997) articulation thattraditions adapt to address new problems. African Innovations uses its collectionobjects to reframe African art history as enduring and dynamic, reflectingrecent diasporic scholarship.

Brooklyn’s exhibition is object-centred and strongly authored by the curator,yet, it attempts an epistemological repair by destabilizing the categories ofknowledge that have been built into the collection parameters and the building’sfloor plan. Innovations includes several works of contemporary African art in theAfrican gallery. Their inclusion is a spatial intervention against a spatializedepistemology of cultural evolution. The ascending stack of the permanentcollections has long been used to communicate hierarchical orders of evolution,skill or sophistication associated with the global region represented. The museumno longer aims to convey this message, but the collections largely remain in theseconfigurations, with African art on the ground floor, American art on the fifthfloor and the non-geographically specific Contemporary collection nowoccupying the fourth floor. Contemporary African art easily fits within theContemporary collection (where it is acquired and displayed at Brooklyn), but itis structured out of the African collection, which is understood as comprisingtraditional African art. African changelessness is reified if ‘contemporary’ and‘African’ are mutually exclusive. Curators of African art are acutely aware of thisdilemma: one of their hottest discussion topics is how to balance contemporaryagainst historical projects (Dumouchelle interview, 15 November 2012, ACASA2011). Brooklyn’s inclusion of contemporary pieces in the space of Africa situates


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those artworks as recent examples of a history of African artistic innovation andhelps offset the reinforced notion that Africa remains only in the past.

Many of the contemporary artworks in African Innovations also reflexivelycritique the notion of a recoverable, authentic Africa. Yinka Shonibare’s fabricsdraw attention to the ‘web of economic and racial interrelationships betweenAfrica, Asia, and Europe’ by illuminating how iconically ‘African’ textiles comefrom Dutch wax printing and Indonesian designs (chat label, accessed online). Anabstract painting by Senegalese Viye Diba ‘evokes the possibility of liberation’ andits joint purchase by the Contemporary and African collections means its free to

FIGURE 1 Installation detail of Gelede mask case at African Innovations. Photograph byauthor at the Brooklyn Museum.


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appear in both gallery spaces (Dumouchelle 2011), allowing the work to refusemutually exclusive categorization. Adding contemporary works to historicalworks intervenes on Africa’s representation in America in multiple ways: itvisually represents a global, dynamic, transnational Africa; it expands theaesthetics understood as ‘African’; and it disrupts categories of knowledge ininstitutions predicated on using spatial distinction to make objects meaningful.

Brooklyn’s African Innovations is a stellar example of making apparentAfrica’s dynamism and globality in past and in present through objects. It offersexamples of how traditions have remained significant but not static throughoutAfrican history and gives visitors concrete objects for thinking through howthese relationships may be imagined and reimagined in their own lives. Theexhibition touches on themes of repair by revising outdated modes of displayand discussing colonialism. The exhibition’s challenge to categorization makesvisible how knowledge is both produced and situated, while removing the falsechoice between being modern and being African.

Analysing African Innovations alongside previous installations demonstrates thepotential for objects themselves to engage and delight audiences, once trust hasbeen established and ‘new’ audiences become loyal audiences. By the vectors ofdesign, presentation and authorship, African Innovations is a conventionalexhibition. It was authored by the curator, the objects are paramount and thecontextual elements are muted. Its message, however, is exciting in the landscapeof African exhibitions. The positive reception by both audiences and criticsillustrates that audience projects do not require a loss of sophisticated presentation,and that the objects – when fit into narratives that resonate with the targetaudiences – have the power to entice and enliven without flashy prosthetics. Theinstitution did not have to rely on audience co-production or excessive interactivedevices for community approval because of its established relationship of mutualrespect. The community trusted the museum to appropriately represent Africaand thus additional modes of interpretation and authorship were available to themuseum.

Repair requires trust: the Penn Museum

At the same time that Brooklyn unveiled African Innovations, the Penn Museumintroduced a temporary gallery project called Imagine Africa.7 Imagine Africa wasconceived to address several problems with the museum’s current installation ofAfrican artefacts. Its permanent display is ethnographic, with collections ofobjects categorized by use in glass cabinets with little interpretive material(Figure 2). The ethnographic mode itself may seem more appropriate at anactive museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, as opposed to Brooklyn’s artmuseum, but the room feels dark and antiquated and has not been updatedsince the 1980s (Quinn and Schott interview, 12 October 2011). One visitor’sfeedback aptly described the space and its implications: ‘Turn the lights up


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please. Exhibit lighting too dark to illuminate artifact details. Africa is not adark, gloomy cave in history’ (October 2, 2011). Dimming the lights protectsobjects on extended display, but also conveys a larger message about Africabeing positioned ‘in the dark’ and in the past.

Museum staff members are aware of the problems with the display and itsimplications, but they do not have funds to hire a full-time curator of theAfrican collection or to complete a full reinstallation. In order to attract moresupport for the collection – from visitors, individual donors and philanthropicinstitutions increasingly interested in the social functions of museums – thePenn Museum needs to develop and improve its relationships with thesurrounding West Philadelphia community, the majority of whom identify asBlack (Non-Hispanic) or African-American (US Census 2010). Imagine Africawas envisioned as the platform to address these issues. The ambitious projectupdates the representation of Africa, attempts to share authorship with visitorsand uses the gallery space as an avenue for building new relationships with blackcommunities in Philadelphia.

Imagine Africa stands immediately adjacent to the permanent installation andacts as its foil. Its high production design is bright and lively, with touch screensand upbeat African music throughout the gallery (Figure 3). Objects are arrangedby themes, instead of utility, and photographs of Africans working in science labs

FIGURE 2 Installation view of African collection on 3 December 2011. Photograph byauthor at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.


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and selling their work at art fairs contextualize traditional objects amidstcontemporary African life. The new design makes the space feel modern anddynamic, as opposed to a relic of the past; that message is transferred onto visitorimpressions of the continent itself.

The content within the text panels directly responds to cultural critique ofAfrican displays in the USA (Wilson 1991, 1993, Gonzalez 2008). Theintroductory panel explicitly states: ‘Africa is huge and diverse in every way’and ‘Egypt is in Africa’. The panel also addresses the colonial history of themuseum’s collecting practices and contains a colour-coded map of the variousorigins of the collection. There are ‘Contemporary Connections’ labels in eachthematic area that provide historical context for both the objects and currentconditions across Africa. A panel in the theme devoted to ‘Power’ and ancientAfrican kingdoms reads:

What are the contemporary issues dealing with power? Power struggleshave existed throughout Africa. Many of the kingdoms discussed at thistable have disappeared, or if members remain, they are small groups withinlarger countries. The European colonization of Africa that began in 1900continued through the 1960s. During that time, European forces drewmany of the boundaries that make up the modern map of Africa. Most

FIGURE 3 Installation view of Imagine Africa on 29 November 2011. Photograph by authorat the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.


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nations require centuries to evolve and attain stability, while most nationsof Africa have had only decades. The nations formed during the colonialperiod often represent ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diversepeople who had themselves grouped together by an arbitrary boundarycreating opportunities for conflict.

The above text is illustrated with a current map of the national borders withinAfrica and a map re-drawn by the boundaries of its ancient kingdoms. The‘Power’ section contextualizes media representations of African state violencein colonialism’s history while reframing Africa as a continent with a long historyof powerful, as opposed to impotent, governing bodies. These design andnarrative changes repair past representations of Africa while acknowledging theinstitution’s history.

Imagine Africa also endeavours to make an epistemological repair byexperimenting with shared authorship in the gallery. The concept of ImagineAfrica was to present an installation-in-progress and invite visitors to tell themuseum what they wanted to see and know about Africa (Quinn and Schottinterview, 12 October 2011). To this end, Imagine Africa presents eightpotential interpretive frames that could be used for the future reinstallation ofthe permanent collection. Visitors are asked to sample the different themes andprovide feedback, which the museum will then use to inform the second stageof the project. The museum tracked visitor movement around the exhibition,conducted on-site interviews with visitors and provided online surveys. Theyalso installed large whiteboards at each section for visitors to leave theirimmediate reactions (Figure 4). The whiteboards functioned as the main visualindicator that the museum was trying to cultivate shared authorship. Museumstaff did not censor the boards, even though visitor comments ranged frominsightful critique, to offensive commentary, to nonsense (Figure 5). Visitorwriting became part of the gallery display through the whiteboards. They wereintended to make the space feel unfinished to communicate the installation-in-progress concept, and they certainly indicate the museum’s aim to partiallyrelinquish control of the display, but the frenetic space of the whiteboards couldalso be interpreted by visitors as disrespectful or childlike.

One of the major barriers that Imagine Africa has faced is communicating itsconcept: the museum does not consider it an exhibition, but an experiment inusing the museum space to gather feedback prior to embarking on a newexhibition (Schott interview, 12 October 2011). Almost all of the signals thatthis project is about inviting audiences to help construct the representation ofAfrica are buried in the wall texts. What a visitor sees is a highly designedinstallation that feels completed. The options for giving feedback might appearinnovative to visitors but could also be read as high-tech comment cards,increasingly common in museum spaces. The miscommunication that ImagineAfrica was the product, and not a process, is further reinforced by museums’


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general role as authorities (Schott interview, 12 October 2011) that decidewhat is true and how best to communicate those truths to the public.

The project merged a highly authored installation with an attempt at co-production. Imagine Africa was not co-created with audiences; it was themuseum-produced platform for generating participation and building relation-ships with Philadelphia’s African and African-American communities. However,because of the lack of an existing relationship between these groups, several ofthe mechanisms the museum devised to spur engagement were initially metwith scepticism. The museum signalled its desire to get people involved byrepeatedly asking, ‘How do you imagine Africa?’ in promotional materials andin the gallery. This phrase can feel naive, reinforcing the idea that Africa is ablank slate onto which Westerners can project their fantasies, or that Africa isnot a real place at all, and it alienated many scholars who saw it as anotherinstantiation of the colonial imagination at work rather than a corrective to it.The sub-themes throughout the display had a similar effect. Asking visitors to‘Imagine Power’, ‘Imagine Healing’ and ‘Imagine Beauty’ reinforces the notionthat Africa does not and has not always had those attributes. The designers wereattempting to challenge the dominant American representation of Africa – as acontinent riddled with wars, epidemics and poverty – by posing these questions

FIGURE 4 Installation view of ‘Imagine Strength’ thematic pod with centre whiteboard on2 November 2011. Photograph by author at the University of Pennsylvania Museum ofArchaeology and Anthropology.


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and then using the collection objects and their interpretation to evince thestrong traditions of Africa’s contributions and positive attributes (Quinninterview, 12 October 2011). Yet, a lack of trust in the institution’s ability toappropriately represent Africa and its diaspora undermined the museum’sintention to use the word ‘imagine’ as an invitation to participate. Similarly, themuseum conceptualized its attempt at co-production as inviting and democratic,but it was interpreted by some critics as abdicating responsibility for theproduction of a sophisticated and informed representation of Africa.

Trust was also central to the relationship-building component of ImagineAfrica. Outreach to black communities was largely funnelled through pre-existing networks. The museum assembled a high-powered communityadvisory board of local black leaders who helped shape the public programmesrelated to Imagine Africa and encouraged their respective constituents toparticipate in the project. In one example, Hon. Stan Straughter, advisory boardmember and Chairperson of the Mayor’s Committee on African and CaribbeanImmigrant Affairs, announced at his November 2011 meeting that theCommittee was working with the Penn Museum because they have ‘donetheir homework’ and want to make the museum more relevant to Africangroups (field notes 9 Nov 2011). Advisory board members also sponsored Free

FIGURE 5 Detail view of whiteboard in ‘Imagine Healing’ pod on 9 October 2011,demonstrating range of commentary in response to question ‘What can Western medicinelearn from traditional African healing practices?’ Photograph by author at the University ofPennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.


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Community Days that dramatically increased visitorship to the gallery by peopleof colour (Kosty interview, 29 November 2011). Building inroads throughengaging networks of trust effectively increased participation and explained theco-production concept of the gallery project.

An event hosted by advisory board member and Penn Sociologist, DrTukufu Zuberi, illuminates how the relationships among institutional andpersonal history, trust, repair, representation and community work together.While discussing his documentary film, Zuberi described his productionnegotiations with mainstream networks who persistently requested that thefilm’s opening scene show him standing on the shore of West Africa, picking upsome soil, and saying solemnly, ‘Africa. Where my ancestors left from’. Zuberipoignantly told the crowd, ‘They think that’s the narrative that I have of Africa,but that’s not the one that I have’. His story succinctly captured the myriadways Americans imagine Africa. Zuberi’s resistance to this narrative surprisedand confused some members of the audience and it prompted an audience-driven conversation about black Americans’ specific relationship to Africa.A black woman in the audience shared her own anecdote about how powerfulthe idea of traditional Africa remains to her understanding of self. She expressedher sincere anguish when during her first trip to Africa, Africans called her‘little white girl’ despite her longing ‘to be an African’. Zuberi responded bysharing his first experience in Africa:

The first thing I did was bend down and pick up some dirt. I still have thedirt and I still have the ideas that made me pick up that dirt, but what’schanged is my appreciation for what’s happening now. I had to realize thatAfrica didn’t stop existing when my ancestors were taken away. You knowI think a lot of us think about Roots [the book and TV mini-series] when wethink about Africa. But if your mentality is Roots, your Roots is going to bedestabilized. We need to develop some level of sophistication in thinkingabout Africa. (field notes 20 Oct 2011)

The moment captivated the audience, prompting expressive side conversations,nervous laughs and exclamations. The combination of Zuberi’s scholarlyauthority and his sincerity encouraged the audience to share with one anotherand participate critically in the gallery project. Many visitors entered the galleryafter the lecture, a few wrote on the whiteboards, but many more sharedstories of their travels to Africa and their experiences there with colour,cultural identity and personal expectations. The episode demonstrated thatmeaningful community space could be created in Imagine Africa when initiatedfrom a foundation of respect and trust.

As the project has gained momentum and visibility with the targetedcommunities, the museum has hosted additional public programmes and madechanges within the gallery space to clarify its concept. After months of collectingvisitor responses, the museum displayed the information in the gallery itself.


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Based on feedback received, the museum removed the least popular thematicpod, added a very traditional-looking object case of artefacts related to daily lifeand eating and posted several infographics that report audience preferences(Figure 6). While this change evinces the museum’s commitment to quicklyoperationalizing the feedback, ironically, this area now looks the most ‘scientific’and similar to the adjacent display. It represents the visitors’ voices throughthe iconography of facts and authority. One of the findings seemed to surprise thestaff: visitors reported that their favourite part of the exhibition was looking at theobjects, even though they spent much more time playing with the interactivedevices. Some visitors discussed howmuch better Imagine Africawas than the ‘old’gallery in the comment books. These preferences indicate that objects remaincentral to visitor expectations for the African collection and audiences favourseeing those objects contextualized in a dynamic space.

The Penn Museum’s Imagine Africa project is an important corrective to theexisting display of African artefacts. It updates the interpretation of the objectsthrough a luminescent design that conveys energy and power. The text-basedinterpretation is more transparent about collecting practices, complicity incolonial expeditions, object dates and temporal location in history. Thejuxtaposition of the older and newer spaces communicates to the audience

FIGURE 6 Installation view of audience response section on 27 September 2012.Photograph by author at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology andAnthropology.


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that the institution recognizes the problems with the permanent collectionand is transitioning. Leaving the permanent installation open also puts thepolitics of knowledge and representation on display. It illustrates how thesame objects can tell vastly different stories depending on the social andpolitical context of installation and reception. Visitors, in experiencing bothspaces together, maintained access to the wealth of objects in the permanentdisplay, but were given the opportunity to experience additional narratives:an Africa thematized as skilled and contemporary and a meta-narrative aboutthe institutional production of knowledge.

The project further attempts to change the way that the institution createsnarratives about Africa by inviting visitors to help shape future representations.Sharing authorship can be a corrective to authoritative models that have creatednegative and misleading representations. Yet, the mixed response to thisaudience engagement project offers an opportunity to reflect on the lesslibratory aspects of the heralded turn to community in museum studies (Tchen1992, Simpson 1996, Gogan n.d., Finkelpearl 2013). There was some internalconcern that using the African collection as the medium for forging arelationship with black Philadelphians could be perceived as presumptuous(Byrne interview, 12 October 2011). This fear was alleviated by the positiveresponse of the community advisors and the overall warm response the museumexperienced from visitors of colour (Byrne interview, 12 October 2011, Kostyinterview 29 November 2011). The concern, though, highlights importantanxieties and assumptions about the relationship among Africa, racial identity inAmerica, and ‘the community’ who are simultaneously real individuals, astrategic alliance and an imagined cohesive entity sought out by the institution.

As an identity project, Imagine Africa risks reifying an automatic andchangeless connection between Africa and American blackness that scholarshave complicated. Inviting community input should productively alter powerdynamics and representations, but, in the case of diasporas, deciding who to invitecan rely on a logic of authentic, rooted blackness, rather than correct it. Instead ofrepairing past representations by ‘questioning their own claims about identity’(Karp 1992, p. 31), museum desire for black authentication can perpetuateconventional museum epistemology: collecting authentic, authoritative evidence(once objects, now commentary) to tell stories about Africa and the past thatresonate with present, local circumstances. Ultimately, the contours of theImagine Africa project affirm the persistence of, rather than the surpassing of, aquestion long held by scholars, communities and now, institutions: What is theplace of Africa in its diasporas? And, who gets to decide?

Producing knowledge is political: the South African Museum

One of the more infamous museological representations of ‘Africa’ is housed inthe South African Museum of natural history in Cape Town. Until 2001, the


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museum had a very popular and disturbing exhibition: The Bushmen Diorama(Kasfir 1997). The diorama displayed lifecasts of indigenous San people engagedin primitive daily life activities such as cooking by fire, resting in a thatch hutand shooting a bow and arrow. After South Africa’s transition to democracyunder black majority rule, the diorama was closed because, in the words of themuseum chief executive officer (CEO), it was ‘offensive to black people’ (J.Lohman 2001 cited in Witz 2006). Yet lifecasts of San people remain on displayin the African Cultures/Ethnography gallery to this day. In 2003, the museumopened a new exhibition called !Qe – The Power of Rock Art that presents ancientSan rock art as part of a long history of the technological and cultural innovationof San people. The exhibition explicitly incorporates the voices of living Sanpeople into the interpretive materials and was designed in consultation with Sanelders and descendants. The two exhibitions of San cultural history existalongside one another in the museum and powerfully demonstrate therelationship between the politics of knowledge and politics in the world.8

The history of the Bushmen collection reflects many institutional historiesof ethnographic display with the added local specificities imposed by Apartheid.The Bushmen collection was initiated by the museum in 1825 to preserve a‘racial type’ that was being decimated by colonial conquest (Skotnes 2001). In1910, coinciding with Britain’s consolidated control of the new Union of SouthAfrica, the museum authorized the creation of casts from life of San people inorder to collect the physical type of the Bushmen before they disappearedforever.9 The lifecasts were then installed as ‘The Bushmen Diorama’ whichdisplayed the San people frozen in time. The presentation reinforced all theproblems with ethnographic display: attempting to make visible and thereby‘prove’ racial difference, situating indigenous people in the timeless, staticethnographic present, and using depictions of rural indigenous lifeways toreinforce the uncivilized status of the San and therefore justify their oppression.Even though the diorama has been closed, these conventions of display persist inthe African Cultures gallery, where many smaller dioramas represent thecultural history of various groups of people indigenous to southern Africa,including the San. The scenes feature mannequins wearing beaded clothing,weaving intricate baskets or wielding handmade tools and weapons.

The African Cultures gallery is now resigned to a dark corner of themuseum. Those visitors who do wander into the gallery will see an institutionalattempt to turn the outdated gallery into a teachable moment about theproduction of knowledge. In 1993, the museum added an interpretive layer tocontextualize the African Cultures gallery called ‘Out of Touch?’ which isintroduced by the following panel:

This gallery was constructed in the 1970s and since that time approaches toexhibiting African culture have changed. Do these exhibits create theimpression that all black South Africans live in rural villages, weartraditional dress and use only hand-made utensils? What about those people


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who live and work in towns, travel abroad, or become industrialists? Dothey not challenge conventional ethnic stereotypes? African culture is notstatic. Why, then, are many labels in this gallery written in the presenttense, as if time had stood still? Many black people regard the term ‘Bantu’as an insult. Although intended to refer to language, the term Bantuacquired derogatory connotations under the apartheid system, whichdenied basic rights to black South Africa. New images have beenintroduced into the gallery to create awareness of these issues.

The newer images are black and white documentary photographs that depictblack African life in the townships under Apartheid. The captions focus on thehardships and oppression that Apartheid imposed on black Africans and theindustrious ways that blacks survived.10 An image of a woman standing proudlyin a geography of poverty reads, ‘“Shebeen Queen” Many women started illegalshebeens, which gave them financial independence’. Adding this image insertsblack urbanity into the representations of traditional Africa and its textualinterpretation reinforces the post-Apartheid state project to redeem life in thetownships.

The ‘Out of Touch?’ images are placed on top of the diorama scenes, oftencovering up what is on display behind them (Figure 7). The images helpfullydisrupt the prehistoric representation of black Africans, but they are alsoconfusing, offering no clear pattern to how they relate to the dioramas theycover, except to reinforce the relationship between specific primitivizingrepresentations and the much broader state project to oppress blacks. Whilethis arrangement easily gives the impression that the museum is hiding the olderdisplay, the concept of a palimpsestic exhibition offers several innovations: itacknowledges the institutional history by leaving it on display but interruptingit, it draws attention to how exhibitions are never objective and are alwaysproducts of the political and historical moments that inform them, and it is anaffordable stopgap for museums with colonial collections to acknowledge theirproblematic histories and representational modes.

!Qe – The Power of Rock Art is adjacent to the African Cultures gallery andoffers a third layer of the palimpsest as well as a substantive corrective to therepresentational damage the South African Museum has done to the San peopleand their cultural history. Its introductory panel explicitly addresses theinstitution’s history and motivations for the new exhibition:

!Qe – The Power of Rock Art is a milestone in the history of this Museum, theoldest on the African sub-continent. For almost a century the South AfricanMuseum housed some of the most significant examples of rock art producedby San artists, however it was better known for displays of plaster body caststhat emphasized the physical features of San people rather than their historyand culture. The tragic history of dispossesion, brutality and cultural loss thatbefell the San people at the hands of colonial settlers was overlooked in


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favour of idealized displays that reinforced stereotypes. In 2001 the so-calledBushmen Diorama was closed to allow for a process of consultation withdescendant communities. In planning the rock art exhibition we initiated aconversation with Khoe-San communities regarding the ways that Izikopresents their cultural heritage. This has enriched the exhibition immenselyand the dialogue will continue.

In this introduction, the museum identifies the relationship between the newrock art exhibition and the Bushmen Diorama, while signalling to visitors thatthe new display is not only more appropriate, it was informed by and consentedto by Khoe-San communities. The high production value of the exhibitionmakes it feel special and on par with the other major exhibitions in themuseum. Consistent with trends in museum display, and similar to the othercases reviewed, it features several videos and interactive stations as well asoriginal artefacts. The exhibition’s interpretive frame emphasizes the innova-tion, advanced artistry and technologies involved in rock art. Its focus is onancient and pre-colonial archaeology, but rather than relegating the San to anancient past, the exhibition names these practices and compositions as advanced.The voices of San people are incorporated throughout the interpretive texts,

FIGURE 7 The image portrays part of a 1970s-era display showing the material culture ofSotho and Tswana people in the Anthropology Gallery at the Iziko: South African Museum.This installation view shows the “Out of Touch?” images layered on the display glass on3 August 2012. Photograph by author.


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which contextualize this San art form in a lineage of cultural traditions. Theseactions attempt to repair past exhibitionary practices while legitimizing newones by involving the communities that are being represented in the exhibitiondesign.

!Qe – The Power of Rock Art also displays the process of collecting informationand creating knowledge. One object represents a 1968 interview between ananthropologist, Richard Katz, and a San healer, Kau Dwa. The interviewerbegins ‘You have told me that in kia [trance] you must die. Does that meanreally die?’ The two men then exchange a series of clarifications, with theanthropologist grasping to understand what the healer means by dying but alsoimporting his own understandings of life and death into the questioning. Theexchange follows:

Does that mean really die?YesI mean really dieYesYou mean die like when you are buried beneath the ground?Yes, Yes, just like thatThey are the same?Yes, the same, it is death I speak of.No difference?It is death.The death where you never come back?Yes, it is that bad. It is the death that kills us all.

The anthropologist pushes forward, insisting that there must be some misunder-standing because he knows that the healers are not actually dying. Finally, Katzstates what he knows to be true:

But the healers get up and a dead person doesn’t.That is true, Kau Dwa replied quietly with a smile, healers may come aliveagain.

In this exchange, the assumptions and processes of gathering knowledge are ondisplay. Representing the anthropologist’s quest for understanding and his biasacknowledges the relationship between indigenous knowledge systems andcolonial knowledge systems. The anthropologist’s situated knowledge initiallyprevented him from accessing other ways of conceptualizing life and ritual. Theexample shows visitors one way the museum has collected information aboutSan rock art, while demonstrating that producers of knowledge are not neutralobservers. The exchange also incorporates a historical example of the voice of aSan person, who is an agent rather than an anatomical object.


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The South African Museum’s contemporary conversations with Khoe-Sancommunities are a critical step towards relationship building. Inviting Sanpeople to assist in the production of their own representation helps ensurecultural competence. This community-based work, in a similar vein to the PennMuseum’s, marks an important repair to previous authoritative modes ofrepresentation, but once again flags my concern with the logic of authenticity.Since the San are the people explicitly represented by the old and new displays,directly engaging them may feel more immediate and appropriate than similarappeals in the diaspora. Yet, primitivist representations of the San were part ofa larger political project about white–black racial difference that had negativeeffects far beyond the San themselves, as the ‘Out of Touch?’ labels articulate.Limiting conversations to a specific group of black Africans, deemed closest tothose originally casted, minimizes to whom and for what the museum shouldapologize.

The community conversation approach can also veer towards continuedessentialism rather than correct it. Invoking the institution-initiated conversa-tions in the interpretive materials reifies the idea that ‘the community’ is acoherent entity that exists outside of the institution (Waterton and Smith2010), rather than one partially imagined and created through the institution’sown notorious representation of it. In other words, it recreates the insider/outsider binary it seeks to dismantle (Ogbechie 1997). Community conversa-tions can operate as an authenticating tool, where the symbolic participation ofpreviously alienated publics shields the institution from further culpability andreassures visitors of the museum’s good intentions. Attempting to shareauthorship with the San may have libratory aspirations, and certainly involvescritical trust-building efforts, but even well-intentioned modes of repair canremain undergirded by the museum’s longstanding source of wealth and power:the authentic object.

I would like to suggest that the South African Museum’s greater epistemo-logical intervention is an understated, and perhaps unintentional, one: thepalimpsest. The African Cultures gallery, ‘Out of Touch?’ labels, and !Qe areexhibitions on top of or next to one another that attempt to represent the samegroup of people. The visibility of these layers exposes multiple political projects ofrepresentation and the startling symmetry between the politics of knowledge andpolitics in the world. The revealing juxtaposition fosters critical thinking thatencourages visitors to interrogate the politics of representation even in the mostup-to-date installation.Maintaining and critically interpreting past representationsalso reminds visitors why redress for the recent past remains necessary. Mostimportantly, these layers create a type of institutional accountability that does notrely only upon community-endorsed redemption (Dibley 2005) and its recourseto authenticity.

Embracing the palimpsest design, as both Penn and the South AfricanMuseum are poised to do with their current arrangements, does not mean


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shirking institutional responsibility to foster sincere relationships with diverseaudiences; that remains an essential and ongoing task of museums and theirsocial role. Rather, the palimpsest refuses a seductively quick redemption. Itacknowledges the intrinsic challenges and limitations of representation withoutabdicating responsibility or externalizing the burden of representation to thoserepresented in name or by proxy. While museums begin the long process ofbuilding trust and relationships among those constituencies that their displayshave alienated, exhibiting one’s own history demonstrates a commitment toredress far beyond a rush to reconstruct an institutional image in the pursuit ofself-preservation. Following from Deborah Thomas’s call, promoting asustained engagement with historical representation that is attentive to ‘theplace of the past in the present’ has the potential to turn these institutionalredemption projects into reparative ones (2011, p. 238).

Conclusion: from objects and others to history and trust

The reinstallation projects at the Brooklyn Museum, the Penn Museum, and theSouth African Museum have all put forth a new representation of Africa. Eachproject revises historic representations of static African traditions by acknow-ledging the institutions’ role in perpetuating such myths and by re-presentingAfrica as a dynamic, sophisticated and complex place in the past and in thepresent. Reconceptualizing Africa as such has been influenced by black culturalstudies scholarship as well as changing political conditions and socialdemographics. Within each project, the museums have also tried to changethe way that knowledge about Africa is produced: the Brooklyn Museumreconfigures available categorizations, the Penn Museum recruits the audienceto help decide the interpretive frame, and the South African Museum bares itsdisplay history to exhibit the politics of knowledge. These narrative correctivesand epistemological repairs help museums represent Africa more ethically andremain relevant institutions in changing social contexts.

Reading these cases together foregrounds reparative thinking in theproduction of ‘Africa’ and demonstrates that institutional motivations to repairhistory come from a sense of responsibility to previously alienated publicsand a desire to cultivate those publics as ‘new’ audiences. Black communityinvolvement has been central to how institutions have envisioned their repairprojects, affirming that museological representations, then as now, are aboutsocial relations at their core. Yet, the variety of design and curatorial approachesthat the institutions have employed demonstrates that increasing communityengagement need not sacrifice interpretive sophistication, rely on potentiallycondescending aesthetics of accessibility or privilege interactive devices overcollection objects.

Objects may be meaningless without interpretation, as curators have argued(Crew and Sims 1991), but they are effective at visually evincing the messages


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they are arranged to convey. They also remain popular with visitors, evenwhen surrounded by flashier digital devices, as feedback from the Brooklyn andPenn projects demonstrate. The reparative potential of the archive ismaterialized in an object’s simultaneous openness to interpretation andimmediacy for visitors. The information inheres in the object, waiting to beactivated by the relationships surrounding it: the narrative in which it’sensconced, the interpretive layers piled on top of it, and the ideologies andexperiences of the visitors who view it.

It is precisely those relationships that this paper seeks to emphasize. Beyondarticulating the potential in objects and the limitations of the turn tocommunity, my goal in inverting the conventional logic of objects andaudiences in repair projects has been to illuminate the role that relationshipsplay in mediating the reception of any specific curatorial strategy. The success ofthe Brooklyn Museum’s highly authored African Innovations affirms that the localcommunity trusts the institution to appropriately represent Africa. The initialscepticism around the Penn Museum’s shared authorship and co-productionstrategies reveals that if trust has not been cultivated, even progressive attemptsto deconstruct museum authority can be compromised.

All three cases signal the need for reparative projects, more broadly, toorient towards building sincere and robust relationships and away from quickfixes. Initiating relationships in the absence of trust is prone to suspicion; yet,the absence of relationships across power and privilege keeps problematic logicsintact. Repair is a delicate choreography that simultaneously requires trust,builds trust and is sustained by trust. But rather than promoting paralysis,I would like to offer that trust-building can be initiated through sharingvulnerability; that is, power must make itself vulnerable, without demandingvalidation in return. This is the path that the exhibitionary palimpsest makespossible.

Returning to the cases at hand, then, offers a roadmap for how such circularprocesses can lead to productive relationships. The community/institutionrelationships that the Brooklyn Museum has built over time, beginning with aninstallation aesthetic of accessibility similar to Penn’s Imagine Africa, suggeststhat these audience recruitment strategies – being explicitly invited in – even ifinsufficient, can initiate a path to building neighbourly relationships. Thoserelationships, deepened with continued attention and institutional resources,may lead to increasingly innovative and robust interpretive approaches thatproduce more satisfyingly complex representations. But, as the South AfricanMuseum most poignantly shows us, representations are always limited. Theyundermine complex subjectivities and invent identities. Keeping historicalrepresentations on view, through the palimpsest design, alerts viewers to thealways present politics of representation while holding institutions accountableto them. And, baring institutional histories of producing homogenized culturalidentities contextualizes the paradox of museum redemption: institutions


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emphasize revised narratives of African dynamism while the concept of staticcultural identity remains implicit in their community engagement projects. Thisis the presence of the past in museum epistemology.

Notes

1 This uplift ideology originated in Europe and gained traction as Americanmuseums grew. See Bennett (1998), especially Chapter 6 and Arnold (1932).

2 According to Siegmann (2009), Culin frequently corresponded with Lockeand Countee Cullen (p. 15).

3 My observations and analysis of the 2001 exhibition are derived fromnumerous research visits to the exhibition from 2008–2009, as well as on 18June 2010 and 9 July 2010. I also was employed as a museum educator at theBrooklyn Museum from 2008–2009, wherein I often taught lessons to schoolgroups in the Arts of Africa gallery.

4 Interestingly, the 2001 style was largely informed by the extremely positiveresponse to a 2000 exhibition of documentary photographs of Africa garneredfrom the local African American community (Siegmann 2009, p. 25). Over thedecade, these display conventions became outdated and more problematic.

5 Based on the 2007/2009 American Communities Report, the community districtwhere the BrooklynMuseum is located (#8) is 68.4 per cent Black. The report liststhe district’s ‘top five ethnicities’ as African-American (35.4 per cent), African(7.6 per cent), West Indian (4.4 per cent), Jamaican (4.1 per cent) and PuertoRican (3.5 per cent). In the 2000 census from the same area, ‘African’ did notmake it on the list of top five ethnicities. Available at: http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/pub/departments/csb/documents/csb/Community_District_8_Brooklyn_Neighborhood_Report_3-12-12.pdf

6 My observations of African Innovations come from research visits to theBrooklyn Museum on 15 August 2011 and 8 November 2012.

7 My observations of Imagine Africa’s installation come from numerousmuseum visits from 2011 to 2012: 18 September 2011; 2, 5, 7, 9, 20October 2011; 2, 16, 29, 30 November 2011; 3 December 2011; 26, 27September 2012.

8 My observations of the African Cultures Gallery and the !Qe – The Power ofRock Art exhibition are from my visit to the museum on 3 August 2012 and 6August 2012.

9 Just three years later, the government passed the Native Land Act of 1913,which greatly restricted the rights of natives and blacks to own land. Manygroups were dispossessed of land they occupied or were restricted from landsthey had previously used for herding.

10 In South Africa, ‘African’ generally means black and ‘European’ means whiteeven if the ‘Europeans’ have been living in Africa for generations. For clarity,I have used the term black Africans in this paper.


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http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/pub/departments/csb/documents/csb/Community_District_8_Brooklyn_Neighborhood_Report_3-12-12.pdf



Notes on contributor

Lyndsey Beutin is a doctoral student at the Annenberg School forCommunication, University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests includerace and representation, systems of redress for racial injustice and the memoryand metaphor of slavery in social movements. She has previously worked as amuseum educator and community organizer in New York and North Carolina.She holds an MA in Communication from Penn and a BA in Cultural Anthropologyfrom Duke.

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Documents

Exhibiting repair in twenty-first-century reinstallations of African collections