Museums in Postcolonial Europe 0415561353, 9780415561358

Table of contents :
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Museums in postcolonial Europe: an introduction
1 Colonial museums in a postcolonial Europe
2 Negotiating a national memory: the British Empire Commonwealth Museum
3 Finding a home in Hackney? Reimagining narratives of slavery through a multicultural community museum space
4 Museum practices and the Belgian colonial past: questioning the memories of an ambivalent metropole
5 Displaying colonial artifacts in Paris at the Musée Permanent des Colonies and Musée du Quai Branly
6 ‘Le Musée d'Art au Hasard’: responses of Black Paris to French museum culture
7 Will the Musée du Quai Branly show France the way to postcoloniality?
8 Still the family secret? The representation of colonialism in the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration
9 Object/subject migration: the National Centre of the History of Immigration
Index

Citation preview

Museums in Postcolonial Europe The history of European nation-building and identity formation is inextricably connected with museums, and the role they play in displaying the acquired spoils and glorious symbols of geopolitical power in order to mobilize public support for expansionist ventures. This book examines the contemporary debate surrounding the museum in postcolonial Europe. Although there is no consensus on the European colonial experience, the process of decolonization in Europe has involved an examination of the museum's place, and ethnic minorities and immigrants have insisted upon improved representation in the genealogies of European nation-states. Museological practices have been subjected to greater scrutiny in light of these political and social transformations. In addition to the refurbishment and restructuring of colonial-era museums, new spaces have also been inaugurated to highlight the contemporary importance of museums in postcolonial Europe, as well as the significance of incorporating the perspective of postcolonial European populations into these spaces. This book includes contributions from leading experts in their fields and represents a comparative trans-historical and transcolonial examination which contextualises and reinterprets legacies and experiences of European museums. This book was published as a special issue of Africa and Black Diaspora: An International Journal. Dominic Thomas is the Chair of the departments of French and Francophone Studies and Italian at the University of California Los Angeles, USA. He is the author of Nation-Building, Propaganda and Literature in Francophone Africa (Indiana University Press, 2002) and Black France: Colonialism, Immigration and Transnationalism (Indiana University Press, 2007).

Museums in Postcolonial Europe Edited by Dominic Thomas

First published 2010 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2010 Taylor & Francis

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN10: 0-415-56135-3 ISBN13: 978-0-415-56135-8

Contents Museums in postcolonial Europe: an introduction Dominic Thomas 1

Colonial museums in a postcolonial Europe Robert Aldrich

2

Negotiating a national memory: the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum Corinna McLeod

3

Finding a home in Hackney? Reimagining narratives of slavery through a multicultural community museum space Zoe Norridge

4

Museum practices and the Belgian colonial past: questioning the memories of an ambivalent metropole Véronique Bragard and Stéphanie Planche

5

Displaying colonial artifacts in Paris at the Musée Permanent des Colonies and Musée du Quai Branly Fassil Demissie

6

‘Le Musée d'Art au Hasard’: responses of Black Paris to French museum culture Bennetta Jules-Rosette and Erica Fontana

7

Will the Musée du Quai Branly show France the way to postcoloniality? Herman Lebovics

8

Still the family secret? The representation of colonialism in the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration Mary Stevens

9

Object/subject migration: the National Centre of the History of Immigration Dominic Thomas Index

Museums in postcolonial Europe: an introduction Dominic Thomas Departments of French and Francophone Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, USA Government ministries have historically played a central role in sponsoring imperial ambitions overseas, in supporting the establishment of museums in which to display the acquired spoils and glorious symbols of geopolitical power, and in mobilizing public support for these expansionist ventures. In turn, decolonization has entailed an interrogation of relationality between former colonial powers and colonized subjects alongside claims and demands that have been made by ethnic minorities and immigrants insisting upon improved representation in the genealogies of European nation-states. Museological practices have been subjected to greater scrutiny in light of these political and social transformations, and a comparative transhistorical and transcolonial analysis of European museums stands to improve the contextualization of these experiences and legacies. In addition to the refurbishment and restructuring of colonial era museums, new spaces have also been inaugurated thereby further highlighting the contemporary importance of museums in postcolonial Europe as well as the significance of incorporating the perspective of postcolonial European populations into these museums.

Almost nothing displayed in museums was made to be seen in them. (Vogel 1991, p. 191) The visual discourse of race involves a conceptual and categorical slippage between the body as object and the body as subject. A parallel slippage occurs when the material culture of everyday life, such as artifacts collected in museums of art and anthropology or forms of commodity production and consumption, participate in the construction of race discourse by supporting processes of subjection. Objects come to stand in for subjects not merely in the form of commodity fetish, but as part of a larger system of material and image culture that circulates as a prosthesis of race discourse through practices of collection, exchange, and exhibition. (González 2008, p. 5)

The history of European nation-building and identity formation is inextricably connected with complex display practices in which the lines of demarcation between human and material entities have become indistinct, yielding as a consequence an apparatus of signifiers relating to objectivity and subjectivity that require examination and scrutiny (Bancel et al. 2009;

González 2008). The study of exhibition sites in Europe during both the colonial and postcolonial eras provides an opportunity to engage in comparative historical analysis and to improve the contextualization of the official and public discourse they have triggered. Europe and other regions of the world are symbiotically linked through a long history of contact informed by slavery, colonialism, immigration, and a multiplicity of transnational networks and practices. In recent years, these factors have informed both national and pan-European debates concerning the legacies of these encounters and their current reformulation with regard to transhistorical phenomena that impact ethnic minorities and immigrant populations. These concern a broad set of cultural, economic, political and social factors that include reflection on the limits and pertinence of reparation and restitution, the study and reassessment of colonialism, the role and ‘instrumentalization’ of memory (Bancel and Blanchard 2008, p. 140; Coquio 2008; Weil 2008), the status of postcolonial subjects and ultimately the dynamics of a multicultural Europe. The exploration of these issues begins with Robert Aldrich's examination of colonial museums. This historical background proves crucial to the process of assessing the broad range of mechanisms deployed for commemorative purposes, and in particular to improving our understanding of the role played by the museums that actually exhibited empire. The metamorphosis of European museums from the colonial to the postcolonial era effectively mirrors disquiet about the heritage of imperialism, and with decolonization, the inheritors of colonial museums and collections were confronted with the challenge of assessing the legacy of the past and establishing its connection with contemporary postcolonial communities. Moving to a transcolonial application of these findings in postcolonial Europe, Corinna McLeod looks at the British and Commonwealth Museum in an attempt to grapple with Britain's history of imperialism and colonialism. This analysis reveals the tenuous nature of what are inherently contradictory goals, namely the act of celebrating empire and the requisite need to acknowledge Empire's brutality. What emerges from this ambiguous situation is an engagement with questions pertaining to national identity formation and the imperatives of multicultural community alignments in Britain today. The connections with Zoe Norridge's consideration of Hackney Museum's exhibition Abolition ′07 are compelling in terms of the ways in which multicultural museum spaces can assist in the process of

reimagining narratives. In this instance, Norridge demonstrates how this London borough, upon whose residents the slave trade had had a direct impact, memorialized the abolition of the slave trade. The originality of this exhibit came from the concerted effort that was made to encourage young visitors to adopt an ‘ethics of empathy’ that would in turn foster a collective response to the past alongside sentiments of pride in the borough's abolitionist history. Naturally, such an approach is accompanied by significant limitations, but arguably such identifications across time, space and race constitute effective strategies for establishing transhistorical connections. Véronique Braggard and Stéphanie Planche turn their attention to museum practices in Belgium and to the traces left by colonialism on Belgium's architectural landscape. Striking points of commonality are to be found concerning the necessity of confronting the colonial legacy in more complex and creative terms, and the outcome of museological strategies is shown to be increasingly mediated through debates relating to the parameters of ‘national’ identity in a ‘postcolonial’ Belgium. Significant transformations have taken place in recent years on the French museum landscape and postcoloniality has been at the forefront of cultural, political, and social debates. Fassil Demissie examines how the architecture of the Musée Permanent des Colonies and Musée du Quai Branly reflect France's relationship to its colonial past and postcolonial moment. Bennetta Jules-Rosette and Erica Fontana locate historical antecedents to these developments, highlighting for example how Black Paris began to respond to French museum culture as early as the 1940s. But the 1980s witnessed a dramatic increase in interest in African art, phenomena framed around concepts such as globalization, and which ultimately introduced new forms of aesthetic display and artistic diffusion. State-sponsored initiatives such as the Quai Branly Museum are indicative of these new museological arrangements. Herman Lebovics provides both a compelling analysis of the genealogy of the Quai Branly Museum and a carefully articulated critique of its declared objective to be France's first new museum of the twenty-first century. As Lebovics argues, the problematic architecture has much to reveal concerning the unconscious ways in which perceptions of non-Western cultures, which naturally informed the colonial expansionist enterprise, continue to inform contemporary debates on cultural and social diversity. These questions were certainly intrinsic to the apparatus that assembled Paris's newly inaugurated

National Centre of the History of Immigration (CNHI), housed in a building initially constructed for the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition. Mary Stevens investigates the ways in which colonialism has been represented and staged in the CNHI and embarks upon a rigorous analysis of colonial history and memory. The relationship of these to immigration as presented in the new institution is foregrounded through such categories as containment, deferral, disciplinary exclusion, and censorship. As Stevens shows, tensions have been inseparable from the CNHI ever since the planning stages, and Dominic Thomas updates these to a consideration of the public controversy that surrounded its inauguration in 2007 when tensions were exacerbated by the creation earlier that year by newly elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy of a Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-development. This measure was deemed contrary to the primary objective of the CNHI which was to foster a new approach to immigration history based on its constitutive relationship to French history. Thus, closer scrutiny of the CNHI project provides helpful insights into the political landscape of twentieth-century France, the symbiotic relationship between government ministries and cultural practices, the tenuous connections between national politics and globalization, while also suggesting the kinds of measures that will have to be taken for decolonization to finally occur. Numerous new museums have appeared on the European landscape in recent years, altering and in some cases dramatically reconfiguring its topography. From the Bilbao Guggenheim Museum (Spain) to the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki (Finland), and from Tate Modern in London (UK) to the Kunsthaus in Graz (Austria), new display practices have been experimented with and in some instances even been eclipsed by the spectacular architectural projects that contain them (Giebelhausen 2006). The role of European nations in the slave trade and in colonialism has been acknowledged, although the assessment of the respective roles played by particular nation-states remains contested. Nevertheless, this history has been explored in a multiplicity of ways throughout Europe in such diverse spaces as the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (UK), the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Belgium), and the Tropenmuseum (Netherlands), all of which have undergone elaborate and expensive refurbishment in recent years. Alongside these, significant additions have been made, such as the Quai Branly Museum and the

National Centre of the History of Immigration (CNHI, France), and special exhibits held at the International Slavery Museum (Liverpool, UK), the Hackney Museum (London, UK) and the National Maritime Museum (Amsterdam, Netherlands). As Carol Duncan (1991) has argued, ‘As much as ever, having a bigger and better art museum is a sign of political virtue and national identity – of being recognizably a member of the civilized community of modern, liberal nations’ (p. 89). Naturally, these early twenty-first century transformations happened together with changes in European demography, the emergence of new political constituencies and geopolitical alignments. Examining antecedents to these changes make such investigations all the more interesting, particularly when one considers that these mutations have occurred in some instances within the very structures (such as the Palais de la Porte Doree in eastern Paris) initially built for ideological and propagandist ventures. Panivong Norindr (1996) has underscored this point: Spatial reterritorialization of indigenous buildings and monuments produced a particular understanding of the French colonial empire. Native architectural space was altered to make way for a transfigured vision of indigenous buildings that conformed better to French aesthetic and political ideals. In the 1930s, architecture was elevated to the rank of ‘leader’ among all artistic expressions because as art total it was said to embrace, and even subsume, all arts. During the 1931 Exposition Coloniale, architects were invested with the authority and power to promote l'idée coloniale. The palais d'exposition was conceived as an architectonic colonial manifesto, a public and official display of French colonial policies, which determined its discourse, circumscribed its space, and revealed its ideology. Significantly, all of the buildings constructed for the exposition were temporary pavilions not designed to last beyond the duration of the fair, with one notable exception, the Musee Permanent des Colonies, which still stands today. (pp. 234–235)

Such observations naturally require additional historical contextualization given the role these institutions played as propagandist mechanisms for furthering imperial expansionist objectives, for according them legitimacy as a humanitarian undertaking, and in fostering public support for the enterprise (this was certainly the goal of the International Colonial Exhibition of 1931 held in Paris). There is of course a world of difference between the project of colonialism (and recourse to institutions such as the Royal Museum of Central Africa built by King Leopold II to stage Belgium's empire) and the concern with eliminating obstacles to the integration of postcolonial communities into European society (by rewriting the national narrative, as for example the CNHI in France has endeavored

to do), but historical precursors in both nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe also reveal compelling transco-lonial trajectories involving: concerted strategies by both parliamentary parties to promote the concept of a homogenous national identity and unity within Britain. Imperialism was one of the dominant ideologies mobilized to this end. The Empire was to provide the panacea for all ills, the answer to unemployment with better living conditions for the working classes and an expanded overseas market for surplus goods. (Coombes 2004, p. 232)

The development and expansion of overseas marketing opportunities and the incorporation of these international spaces into a European economic sphere of influence are indissociable from museum history. From the monarchical sponsorship of explorers to the inventory of European conquests that resulted from massive subventions provided by government ministries, the spoils acquired as a result of these projects and subsequently placed on display in European museums as glorious symbols of geopolitical power have necessarily become a component of social processes commemorating and questioning these complicated histories. As Roger G. Kennedy (2004) has shown, the history of ‘triumph’ is a problematic one, that is, Hauling after you possessions taken from others – indeed, hauling them, too, in chains, cages, or in effigy – is a practice of many imperial peoples. Museums that present the artifacts taken at gunpoint from aborigines, or museums demonstrating the superiority of the collector to the collected, are vestiges of the triumphant school of museum-building. (p. 304)

For example, more is often known about the proprietorship of collections than the history of acquisition and the source of materials, and questions of conservation and preservation continue to be exacerbated by economic disparities between the economically prosperous zones of the world and the global south that is ‘preserved and displayed’ (Aldrich 2005a, p. 6). The politics of circulation – as it relates to objects and subjects – also of course concerns collective histories of conquest commemoration and memorialization while also complicating European debates on the singularity of genealogy. It will therefore come as no surprise that new museological practices have overlapped with these modifications and that museums have addressed the shift in concerns and priorities that have accompanied new audiences. Indeed, if as Susan Crane (2004) has argued museums ‘had begun as an elite undertaking to save, record, and produce the cultural heritage of the

past and the present’ (Coombes 2004, p. 320), then ‘Where collections are made up of remnants of living cultures expressed by actual people, they who are “collected” are now demanding a voice in their own representation’ (Klein 2000, p. 42). The intersection between museological concerns and socio-political ones is quite apparent from a cursory overview of the collections and holdings of major European museums. Thus, the matter of the ‘representation (or absence) of non-Western traditions in Western museums’ (McClellan 2008, p. 92) and the ways in which museums ‘might be refashioned so as to transform them into “differencing machines” committed to the promotion of cross-cultural understanding, especially across divisions that have been racialized’ (Bennett 2007, p. 46; Kratz and Rassool 2007) remains of crucial importance. Such measures have been fraught with controversies and divisive debates in which the accuracy of historical accounts has been questioned and revisionist approaches denounced by critics for whom the very principles that informed colonial expansionism and the accumulation of objects on display require urgent recontextualization as a prerequisite for advancing community-building in postcolonial Europe. These are daunting questions for which answers often remain elusive. When one considers the extent of the French colonial fracture (Blanchard et al. 2005), critics such as Robert Aldrich have even asked ‘whether these museums should be, can be, “decolonized”?’ (Aldrich 2005b, p. 97; Deleporte 2005). However, societies should not circumvent these twenty-first-century issues and realities merely because they are complex; rather, they call for assiduous engagement of the kind Corinne A. Kratz and Ciraj Rassool point to precisely because, The many ways of belonging are layered onto the museum along with other meanings and narratives […] redefining museum, exhibition, and public cultures in the process. It is essential to keep in mind that these recastings, remappings, and reorganizations always require negotiating the political economies of resources and power and that help define the very terms of engagement. But these are challenges that must be undertaken boldly, with no fear of friction. (2007, p. 356)

This seems the logical point at which to turn our attention to some of the concrete ways in which museums have adapted to these imperatives and responded to new museological taxonomies (Anderson 2004; Marstine 2006; Preziosi and Farago 2004). To begin with, one should highlight the fact that the International Council of Museums (ICOM) which has overseen museum practices since 1946 has itself undergone some changes

‘Following a thorough review of the ICOM's Code in the light of contemporary museum practice, a revised version, structured on the earlier edition, was issued in 2001’ (www.icom.org, emphasis added). These revisions have primarily concerned Article 6 given the degree to which: Museum collections reflect the cultural and natural heritage of the communities from which they have been derived. As such they have a character beyond that of ordinary property which may include strong affinities with national, regional, local, ethnic, religious or political identity. It is important therefore that museum policy is responsive to this possibility.

Two particular measures are of relevance to this discussion, namely 6.2 Return of Cultural Property and 6.3 Restitution of Cultural Property. In thinking about the multidimensionality of the postcolonial era, several strategies have emerged with which to confront colonial history: (1) the willingness to rethink the ownership of museum holdings within the context of reckoning with acquisition procedures; (2) responding to the repositioning of museological agendas from aesthetic to political ones (Duffy 2004); (3) privileging the experiential (in exhibits such as Hackney Museum's exhibition Abolition ′07); and (4) narrowing the representational gap between the ‘us’ and the ‘them’ in order to recognize that audiences are also ‘postcolonial’ and that the parameters of the nation-state are no longer the same. As Susan Crane has demonstrated: The museum is not the only site where subjectivities and objectivities collide, but it is a particularly evocative one for the study of historical consciousness. A museum is a cultural institution where individual expectations and institutional, academic intentions interact, and the result is far from a one-way street. A range of personal memories is produced, not limited to the subject matter of exhibits, as well as a range of collective memories shared among museum visitors […] Personal feelings and memories, whether accurate or appropriate or not, indeed are always a factor in the contexts in which historical consciousness is made, because they shape how an experience is remembered. (2004, pp. 319–321)

However, this process of constructing postcolonial memory and foregrounding the components of a shared and constitutive history has proved highly problematic. Former French President Jacques Chirac attempted to build a twenty-first-century globalized museum (the Quai Branly Museum, centralizing holdings from Oceania, Asia, Africa and the Americas, www.quaibranly.fr) that would illustrate France's commitment to global cultural diversity, updating earlier examples of French rayonnement (radiance) in the world (Lebovics 2004). In his inaugural address (20 June 2006) President Chirac underscored the importance and urgency of

combating ‘uniformity’ and respecting ‘alterity’, a lesson France had learned following a ‘tumultuous history’ (p. 6), and which somewhat paradoxically according to him globalization threatened to erase: ‘Diversity is a treasure which more than ever we need to protect’ (p. 6). Critics were quick to draw attention to the contradictions inherent to his characterization of history (Clifford 2007; Price 2007; Vogel 2007), while of course simultaneously showing how his rhetoric – claiming for example that ‘there are no hierarchies between peoples’ (p. 3) – was at odds with his policies on immigration and ethnic minorities (Thomas 2008). Today, most European countries have devoted space to museums that focus on colonial history, postcoloniality, or immigration history. In fact, commenting on the absence of such a space in Germany, Karen Margolis (2008) wrote ‘It's not a solution to the problems of immigrants or their fellow citizens, but it would boost the confidence of foreigners living in Germany — it would affirm they have a place of their own in the national cultural landscape, and are here to stay’ Thus, in addition to the Quai Branly Museum, ‘one of the world's largest collections of African arts, with almost 70,000 items from the Maghreb, sub-Saharan Africa, and Madagascar’ (www.quaibranly.fr), the National Centre for the History of Immigration (www.histoire-immigration.fr) opened in 2007 in the Palais de la Porte Doreé, a space designed as the Museé Permanent des Colonies in the 1930s and later occupied by the Museé des arts africains et océaniens (MAAO) whose collection was incorporated to the holdings of the Quai Branly Museum. Jacques Toubon, the former government minister responsible for the CNHI project, explained the importance of providing ‘recognition of the place of immigrant populations in the destiny of the Republic is important, and should help every French person arrive at a more accurate idea of French identity as it stands today, while also reconciling the multiple components that make up the French nation with those values that represent its strengths’ (2004, p. 9; Green 2007). As with the Quai Branly Museum, this initiative has also been surrounded by controversy given that the museum's intentions have been seemingly partially undermined by the fact that the opening coincided with newly elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy's disquieting approach to immigration and ethnic minorities (as confirmed by the creation of the Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-development) and statements concerning Africans (2007), delivered in Dakar, Senegal) that were infused with racist constructs

(Mbembe 2007; Sarkozy 2007; Gassama 2008) and that revealed the lingering nature of such discourses in postcolonial Europe. Comparative analysis on the relative effectiveness of museological projects in addressing the complexity of racial formations and historical processes can, at the very least, provide indicators on the postcolonial condition in the context under investigation. Britain has, like any other European nation-state with historical ties to slavery and imperialism, struggled to reconcile this heritage with the demands and exigencies of a contemporary multicultural and postcolonial society (Gilroy 1987). Certainly, recourse to legal devices such as the Race Relations Act as early as the 1970s served to advance tangible reform and to partially recalibrate perceptions and mindsets concerning formerly colonized subjects. For example, in 1994, National Museums Liverpool opened the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery, the first of its kind in the world. This gallery has achieved huge visitor numbers and impact, but there is now a pressing need to tell a bigger story because of its relevance to contemporary issues that face us all. (http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk)

The success of this focused exhibit (with similar outcomes measured at the numerous others held in 2007 to commemorate the bicentenary of abolition) drew attention to the interest, receptiveness and willingness of new museum-going audiences to learn about past actions and to connect these to the present in a transhistorical framework. Likewise, the decision in 2007 to relocate the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (www.empiremuseum.co.uk) from Bristol (where it opened in 2002) to Britain's capital city and center of tourism, reveals a commitment to focusing on the legacy of the British empire over a long history, one that includes slavery and the slave trade as well as the colonial era. As the Director of the Museum Gareth Griffiths (2007) explained: Relocation to London presents a major opportunity for the Museum to widen its reach and engage new audiences with this important and formative part of our shared past […] It is anticipated that the move will enable the Museum to expand upon the range of topics covered in connection with Britain's colonial past and continue to address the contemporary legacies of this history today.

The reformulation of the role of the museum on the twenty-first-century European landscape is therefore twofold: on the one hand to rethink its

positionality in postcolonial Europe and on the other to reposition postcolonial European populations in the museums themselves. Two other major European museums have adopted analogous methodologies. In Tervuren, Belgium the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) justified the renovation project that began in 2007 in the following terms: ‘the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) dates from 1910 and despite its unique charm, the presentation of the permanent exhibits is outmoded and its infrastructure is obsolete’ (www.africamuseum.be). Acknowledging that ‘As it's displayed now, the permanent exhibition still reflects the way Europe regarded Africa in the nineteen-sixties’, there is recognition that this is ‘despite a radically altered social context not only in Africa but here as well’. In Amsterdam, the Tropenmuseum which is part of the Royal Tropical Institute, provides an account of the multiple ways in which its mission has changed over time in response to the socio-cultural and socio-political climate: A museum has many stories to tell, and the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam tells stories about non-western cultures. The museum promotes learning about other cultures and encourages interaction through its thousands of objects displayed in temporary and permanent exhibitions […] The development of the museum since it was founded at the end of the nineteenth century and the way the presentation of non-western cultures changed over the past century is a fascinating story in itself […] Integration into the community has been and continues to be an important focus: the aim is an even stronger emphasis on cultural exchange as a drive for ongoing change, starting here and now. Visitors can expect substantial changes to the interior, in which the collection will better express non-material values. The building will follow this trend: a remodeling of the entrance area is planned, in which the openness and transparency serve as a physical reflection of a socially relevant design. (www.kit.nl)

Elsewhere in Europe, the topography is punctuated by traces and remnants of empire and expansionist ambitions, monuments to fallen soldiers in colonial wars and to transoceanic exploits – Lisbon's Padrao dos Descobrimentos (the Monument to the Discoveries; Sapega 2008) and the National Monument Slavernijverleden (National Monument to the legacy of slavery) in Oosterpark, Amsterdam. Needless to say, heated debates are ignited each time new ‘memory sites’ are proposed (Brice 2008). The aim of reaching broader audiences and improving the accessibility and pertinence of museums – of democratizing museums – is certainly understood as an important aspect of museology today, and all the more so within a postcolonial context (Poli et al. 2007). ‘The development of new narratives in art museums’, as Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (2004) has

maintained, ‘demands new ways of thinking about collections and audiences, and new ways of integrating the two […] The function of the museum as a communicator cannot be separated from cultural issues of knowledge, power, identity, and language’ (p. 572; Rice 2003). During the first years of the twenty-first-century, museum directors have reported increases in attendance revealing both an interest and identification with collections and history (de Roux 2007). This has triggered all kinds of responses from observers who have been critical of what they perceive of as a popularization of museum exhibits and appeal to tourism (O'Neill 2002), while others have argued that ‘This is an important approach but tells museums very little about the impact they are having on those individuals and groups, and so must be seen as a way of achieving something rather than being an end in itself’ (Newman and McLean 2002, p. 65). One thing remains perfectly clear though, and that is the importance migration will continue to play in twenty-first-century society and the challenges of interpretation and reinterpretation that will emerge from situating these experiences in national narratives. These concerns have been in evidence outside of Europe as well of course, in such places as the Museo de la Inmigracion in Buenos Aires (Argentina), in Canada's Immigration Museum (Halifax, Nova Scotia), or in Australia's immigration museum (Melbourne). However, when one considers the variations of associations ascribed to the term ‘immigration’ in American history, recent discourse serves to emphasize the degree to which histories of contact remain problematic (Behdad 2005). In 2009, for example, the New Americans Museum opened in San Diego, California. Its stated objective is to serve as ‘a catalyst for celebration of America's past and promise, the Museum provides inspiring educational and cultural programs to honor our diverse immigrant experiences’ (www.newamericansmuseum.org) yet, as a recent newspaper article revealed, ‘the museum had dropped the word “immigration” from its name to quiet objections from the community’ (Klein 2009). Consensus on the European colonial experience has not been reached and measures taken to address the circumstances of postcoloniality have proved inadequate. In an ever-expanding European Union in which there have been alarming instances of cultural and socio-political intolerance, the cohabitation and coexistence of populations with diverse backgrounds will require vigilant monitoring.

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Coombes, A.E., 2004. Museums and the formation of national and cultural identities. In: B. Messias Carbonell, ed., Museum studies: an anthology of contexts. Oxford: Blackwell, 231–246. Coquio, C., ed., 2008. Retour du colonial: disculpation et réhabilitation de l'histoire coloniale. Nantes: Librairie l'Atalante. Crane, S., 2004. Memory, distortion, and history in the museum. In: B. Messias Carbonell, ed. Museum studies: an anthology of contexts. Oxford: Blackwell, 318–334. Deleporte, S.F., 2005. Trois musées, une question, Une République. In: P. Blanchard, N. Bancel and S. Lemaire, eds. La fracture coloniale: la société française au prisme de l'héritage colonial. Paris: La Découverte, 105–111. de Roux, E., 2007. Un public nouveau pour le Quai Branly. Available at: www.lemonde.fr (accessed 1 June 2007). Duffy, T.M., 2004. Museums of ‘human suffering’ and the struggle for human rights. In: B. Messias Carbonell, ed. Museum studies: an anthology of contexts. Oxford: Blackwell, 117–122. Duncan, C., 1991. Art museums and the ritual of citizenship. In: I. Karp and S.S. Lavine, eds. Exhibiting cultures: the poetics and politics of museum display. Washington, DC: Smithsonian, 88–103. Gassama, M., ed., 2008. L'Afrique répond a Sarkozy: Contre le discours de Dakar. Paris: Editions Philippe Rey. Giebelhausen, M., 2006. Architecture is the museum. In: J. Marstine, ed. New museum theory and practice. Oxford: Blackwell, 41–63. Gilroy, P., 1987. There ain't no black in the Union Jack. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. González, J.A., 2008. Subject to display: reframing race in contemporary installation art. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Green, N.L., 2007. A French Ellis Island? Museums, memory and history in France and the United States. History Workshop Journal, 63, 239–253. Griffiths, G., 2007. Available at: http://www.empiremuseum.co.uk/aboutus/relationalnews.htm.

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Colonial museums in a postcolonial Europe Robert Aldrich Department of History, The University of Sydney, NSW, Australia Colonialists made great efforts to mark cities with signs of empire, the monuments that commemorated battles lost and won, the ministries from which imperial power reached to the moving frontiers of the known world, churches enshrining the relics of martyrs to the faith, the remains of colonial exhibitions. Particularly potent among these imperial creations were museums that exhibited empire. This article explores the metamorphosis of museums in London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam from the colonial to the postcolonial era, the way in which their immediate transformation mirrors disquiet about the heritage of imperialism, and the fashion in which subsequent changes testify to a rediscovery of the legacy of empire. The examples comprise several of the major colonialist institutions, though many other colonialist collections and displays existed. With decolonisation, in some cases, objects and displays once designated as colonial simply melded into general collections. The British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, alongside new initiatives such as the Quai Branly Museum and Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration in France, have naturally found themselves at the forefront of important debates. The challenge facing the inheritors of colonial museums and collections comes from assessing the legacy of the past and establishing its connection with contemporary postcolonial communities.

Visitors to Europe's grand old imperial capitals can find many reminders of colonial days and the imperial sunset. In London, Canada House and South Africa House, built for the offices of the settler dominions, bracket Trafalgar Square, with Australia House not far away, while a postcolonial statue of Nehru stands guard outside the Raj-era India House. In Lisbon, travellers may take a quaint tram along the Tagus River to Belém to discover the fortress tower that guided navigators off towards their distant destinations, the Jerónimos monastery built with profits from the Indies standing in the Praça do Império facing a statue of Vasco Da Gama, a colonial botanical garden decorated with busts of ‘natives’ and a Chinese gateway, a grandiose monument to the explorers built for a 1940 exhibition of the Lusophone world, and a monument – an arch left un-triumphantly open at the top – for soldiers killed fighting in Africa against nationalists in

the wars of decolonisation. In Amsterdam's Oosterpark and Paris's Luxembourg Gardens, tourists and local residents can pause before memorials to the enslaved and their emancipation. From Brussels to Berlin, from Copenhagen to Madrid, buildings and monuments scattered across the landscape bear witness to empires past, modern parallels to the now ruined vestiges of imperium in Rome, whose emperors bequeathed arches and columns to later memorialists, just as they left the ideas of conquest and rule to the proconsuls of new empires.1 Colonialists made great efforts to mark cities with signs of empire, the plaques and statues that sanctified great men (but only rarely great colonial women), the monuments that commemorated battles lost and won, the ministries from which imperial power reached to the moving frontiers of the known world, churches enshrining the relics of martyrs to the faith, the remains of colonial exhibitions. Particularly potent among these imperial creations were museums that exhibited empire. Empire-building and museum-building went hand in hand, as naturalists accompanying missions of exploration returned with exotica that filled Enlightenment cabinets of curiosities, collections become so vast that museums rose to house them.2 Natural history museums from the 1700s onwards displayed specimens of flora and fauna, and of arts and crafts, often with mummies and skulls and other bits and pieces of human bodies. Conquest brought booty: the British Museum gained treasures ranging from the Indian diamonds to the bronzes of Benin, and the Louvre in the early 1800s created galleries for objects souvenired by Napoleon in Egypt. A passion for jungles and deserts, bustling ports and verdant islands filled art galleries with paintings of the Levant, the Orient and Oceania. Museums of ethnography opened – in Paris, in the 1870s, for instance – to chronicle the lives of ‘primitive’ folk and strange cultures. Relatively few museums lack some material trace of Europe's engagement with the wider world, even if only a length of silk or a set of china acquired on the other side of the world.3 Museums expressly founded for the purpose of promoting colonialism eventually took pride of place in showing off the colonies. Their builders, backers and curators intended them to proclaim the merits of empire, to win over a not always enthusiastic public about the benefits of colonial adventures that cost many lives and much money, to advance the mission to civilise the ‘savages’ and develop the resources over which colonial flags

flew, to educate the public about the obscure corners of greater Britain or la plus grande France, to stimulate imperial vocations. In each of the colonising countries, which included almost all the great powers and some minor ones as well, explicitly colonialist museums and institutes proudly engaged in propaganda for the empire; they blended politics with aesthetics, and education with entertainment. Though seldom able to rival the older and often larger art museums, colonial museums multiplied and survived right through the era of colonialism.4 Yet when the colonial flags were lowered, what was to become of museums that lost their very reason for being? This article looks at some of these museums – in London, Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam – and their metamorphosis from the colonial to the postcolonial, the way in which their immediate transformation mirrors disquiet about the heritage of imperialism, and the fashion in which subsequent changes testify to a rediscovery of the legacy of empire.5 The examples comprise several of the major colonialist institutions, though many other colonialist collections and displays existed. With decolonisation, in some cases, objects and displays once designated as colonial simply melded into general collections. Many of the smaller and provincial colonial museums established in the early 1900s quietly shut their doors. A few old-style museums with intimate colonial connections, notably the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford, have gracefully maintained their old galleries, serving not only as collections of ethnographic objects but museums of collecting and museography

Building colonial museums The creation of the specifically colonial museums in Brussels, London, Amsterdam and Paris, opened from the 1880s to the 1930s, combined state initiatives with private efforts by colonial lobbies. In London, Brussels and Paris, museum-building followed successful colonial exhibitions with lasting displays of empire, and the hope that such displays, like the empires themselves, would be permanent – a poem composed for the opening of London's Imperial Institute vaunted the ‘Empire of a Thousand Years’. The museums symbolically brought the empire to national capitals, and made imperial capitals out of national capitals. Architects constructed grandiose

buildings in an effort to give colonialism appropriate status to the other cultural endeavours embodied in concert halls, national libraries and the other museums of major cities. The ornamentation and décor displayed motifs drawn from the colonial empires, often accompanied by allegorical figures representing the merits of colonialism. Authorities chose significant sites: the collection of museums and educational institutions in London's South Kensington, a royal domain outside Brussels, a location in central Amsterdam and a neighbourhood targeted for redevelopment in eastern Paris. Royal (or, in the case of France, presidential) patronage provided benediction, and colonial officers, administrators and settlers made donations of works that they had collected. Each museum, though laying out the objects of ‘traditional’ and ‘primitive’ societies in its showcases, hoped to be modern: to show off the achievements of colonial powers and the arrival of ‘civilization’ in the colonies. Each museum devoted most of its attention to the colonies of that particular country, rarely venturing beyond but attempting to show (in the words of the British institution) ‘the Empire under one roof’. The museums all developed numerous auxiliary activities, ranging from lecture and film series to scientific experimentation; indeed, in London and Amsterdam, they took the name of ‘institutes’ rather than ‘museums’. Scientific work to explore and develop colonial resources formed an important part of the activities (except, perhaps, in Paris).6 Each museum built on a tradition of exhibitions of exotic and colonial objects, but now with an explicitly colonialist brief. Avowedly colonial museums were by no means the first collections or displays of art from the empires conquered and consolidated from the eighteenth century onwards. The British Museum possessed Pacific objets d'art collected by Captain Cook, and East Indian works acquired by Sir Stamford Raffles during his tenure as lieutenant-governor of Java. Sir George Grey, governor of New Zealand, presented the Bloomsbury museum with works from Oceania in the 1850s, and the widow of a governor of Ceylon donated items from that island. In 1872, the British Museum bought at auction the largest collection of Indian sculpture in Britain, holdings put together by General Charles Stuart, who had served in the East India Company. The family of Charles Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, presented objects from his realm. These, however, constituted items for an art and history museum; though the pieces had a colonial connection, as

curators were well aware at the time and later critics would underline, the British Museum was not a colonial museum (Francis 1975; Mack 1999). At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the East India Company had opened to the public its collection of Indian art and antiquities, which was transferred temporarily to the India Office after the demise of the Company. The Crystal Palace put more Indian and colonial artefacts on show, and vast numbers of other items entering public collections created a need for other museums for a Victorian public much taken with exhibitions, fairs and similar displays. In response, the South Kensington Museum was set up in 1857, and some of the collections of the British Museum and the India Office moved into the new institution, which concentrated on decorative arts. The intention, according to Tim Barringer, remained didactic: ‘central to the intentions of its founders was the idea of promoting good design among both producers and consumers’ (Barringer 1998, p. 14). European and non-European decorative arts were on show, including items ranging from a plaster cast of Trajan's column (‘significantly, one of the great monuments of Imperial Rome, often seen as a parallel to the British empire’, according to Barringer 1998, p. 17) and casts of Indian carvings, gateways, monuments and other wonders. Indian objects were central to the South Kensington Museum and housed in a designated building, though other extra-European works were added, including the royal regalia of the Abyssinian King Theodore, taken by the British in a military campaign in 1867, and objects seized from the Ashanti in the early 1870s. The South Kensington Museum, renamed the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1899 and still housed in buildings constructed in 1909, became a panorama of the empire, what Barringer calls a ‘three-dimensional imperial archive’ and ‘the most spectacular repository of the material culture of empire’ (Barringer 1998, p. 11, 27). In 1886, the success of the British Colonial and Indian Exhibition inspired the Prince of Wales to spearhead an effort to establish an Imperial Institute, the cornerstone laid to celebrate Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1887. Six years later, the monarch opened its massive home in South Kensington; designed by Thomas Collcutt, the buildings sported a tower, domes and gables, in a hotchpotch of Romanesque, Renaissance and Byzantine styles, with some more exotic contrivances, meant to suggest the architectural wealth of Britain and the empire. Strictly speaking, the Imperial Institute

was not primarily a museum, but was intended to be a centre for the empire in London. Its scientific laboratories pursued agricultural and mineralogical research targeted at increased colonial production; a library and series of public lectures provided information on the empire. Offices housed such societies as the Women's Emigration Association and the Colonial Nursing Association; meeting rooms, dining rooms and a billiard room offered space to visiting colonials and colonialists (Golant 1984; MacKenzie 1986; Sheppard 1975; Crinson 1999; Barringer 1998). According to John MacKenzie, for its first 40 years, the Institute was an ‘almost complete failure’ (p. 122), the ‘mausoleum of imperial hopes’ (p. 122) attracting little enthusiasm. Among its other activities, the ‘colonial exhibits were dreary and failed to stimulate the interest of the public’ (MacKenzie 1986, p. 127). The First World War breathed new life into the Institute, as it found a role in wartime propaganda. In the inter-war years, it wound down scientific work to concentrate almost entirely on propaganda, discovering a new medium in cinema – documentaries and travelogues succeeded in drawing in visitors, including school groups. MacKenzie notes that ‘steps were taken to brighten the galleries, to provide livelier exhibits, in particular dioramas of imperial economic activity’ (1986, p. 133) cloves in Zanzibar, tin in Malaya, etc., joined by displays on such topics as ‘A trip down the Irrawaddy’ and ‘Round Barbados’. Though still a minor museum among the wealth of galleries in London, and only one of a large cohort of imperial associations, the Institute had established its place, and again played a part in imperial and wartime propaganda, in particular, through a series of in-house and extra-mural lectures, often illustrated with slides or film, that attracted hundreds of thousands of auditors around Britain in the early 1940s. Across the Channel, one of the oldest purpose-built colonial museums stands in a park in the Brussels suburb of Tervuren, the Royal Museum of Central Africa (as it is now called), built by King Leopold II to display his and Belgium's empire. An exhibition on the Congo provided its genesis. It was held on the site of the palace (which had burned down in 1867) of Leopold's sister Charlotte, who had gone insane after the execution of her husband, the would-be Mexican emperor Maximilian. Like many subsequent exhibitions, and a few prototypes held previously, the Tervuren fair was filled with artefacts such as ivory statues (testifying to the Congo's

prosperous ivory trade) and ethnographic art, alongside tapestries portraying Civilisation and Barbarity, the Family and Polygamy, Religion and Idolatry, and Liberty and Slavery. Flora and fauna were on display inside the Palais des Colonies, and four ‘African villages’ (with over 200 Congolese) welcomed visitors outside (Wynants 1997; Cornelis 2000; Bouttiaux 1999). The king inaugurated a permanent colonial museum in the old exhibition building in Tervuren in 1898. Charles Girault, architect of the Petit Palais in Paris, meanwhile designed a more commodious African museum – plans for smaller museums devoted to China and Japan (where Leopold hoped to find footholds) came to nought – which King Albert opened in 1910 shortly after Leopold's death. As in other colonial museums in Europe, the enormous building was (and is) charged with colonial motifs. A marble floor pattern in the entry reproduces the star emblem of the Congo Free State. Above tower emblematic statues of Africans, and there was an allegory of ‘Belgium bringing civilisation to the colonies’. A wall engraving bore a quotation from Albert: ‘For a people imbued with justice, the colonising mission can be nothing but a mission of advanced civilization’. Maps showed the extent of Belgium's colonial estate, and a later honour roll commemorated colonial administrators killed in the world wars. A ‘Salle du mémorial’ preserved uniforms, banners and arms, with mementos of colonial pioneers and colourful colonialist paintings. Large galleries displayed art, crafts and commercial goods from Africa. Belgium was a new colonial power (and indeed, since it was created only in 1830, a new nation-state), but the Netherlands was a very old one. Dutch explorers, traders and administrators working for the United East India Company (VOC), established at the start of the seventeenth century, had long collected materials from their travels. The state also amassed collections, including those inherited from the VOC, which it put on display in 1865 in a building in Haarlem. In 1910 a group of parliamentarians and public servants formed an Association of the Colonial Institute to promote the construction of a purpose-built museum in Amsterdam that would better reflect and show off the Netherlands' colonial achievements. Banks, trading companies, the colonial ministry and the Amsterdam city council donated funding, a competition solicited designs, and construction began, unpropitiously, in 1916. With wartime and post-war delays, Queen

Wilhelmina was not able to open the museum officially until 1926: ‘This proud building’, she said, ‘voices the depth and certainty of our conviction that the interests and needs of the East and West Indies are the same as those of the Netherlands; the times in which only a few people understood this are gone forever.’ The Queen added: ‘May this edifice continue to bear witness to compatriots and strangers that the Netherlands and our extensive overseas territory, although separated by wide oceans, are, and for better or for worse, in labour and striving, will remain, united forever’ (Woudsma 1990, pp. 23–24; Legêne 2000). The massive and flamboyant Dutch Colonial Institute, of vaguely Gothic style, accommodated 44,000 square metres for its displays, research units, auditorium, library and other facilities. Sculptures on the entrance include busts of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, first Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, and allegorical figures of a European elder sitting among atlases and books, a young Dutchman holding a Buddha and a miniature elephant (the scene symbolising cultural anthropology), and a Sumatran couple in wedding dress. Another allegorical statue of a Dutch woman is flanked by ones of Europe and Insulindia, a heraldic lion at her feet. A Biblical quotation enjoins visitors to let their lights shine before their fellow men ‘that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven’. Religion, science and government thus joined to give their imprimatur to Dutch imperialism. Similar orientalist and colonialist motifs decorate the inside of the building. France's national colonial museum arrived late on the scene, though museums of ethnographic and Asian art in Paris dated to the late nineteenth century. It was built in 1931 for the Exposition Coloniale Internationale held in the Bois de Vincennes, a site chosen by the commissioner of the fair, Marshal Hubert Lyautey, with the hope of inculcating in the masses of poor eastern Paris the noble ideals of colonialism and saving them from the seductions of Communism (Aldrich 2005, Lebovics 1992, Hodeir and Pierre 1991; Morton 2000). On the side of Alfred Laprade's splendid modernist building – a dramatic architectural contrast to the museums in other cities – is a list of colonial heroes. The front boasts the world's largest bas-relief, a depiction by Adolphe Janniot of what the colonies gave to France, a mass of labourers harvesting rice and rubber, drying beans for coffee and picking grapes for wine, mining and fishing, and shipping wares

to Marseille and Bordeaux. The great hall inside portrays the other side of the colonialist gift exchange, with images of the justice, education, science and good government that France took to its empire. Furniture crafted from exotic timbers fills reception rooms decorated with murals of Asian religion and African social life, and a basement aquarium has a menagerie of fish and ever popular crocodiles. After the 1931 exhibition, the Musée permanent des colonies provided a beacon in Paris for the empire. Displays, under the long-time curatorship of Marius-Ary Leblond, a novelist from La Réunion, laid out the wonders of the French empire – the world's second largest – in an intentionally patriotic and didactic fashion. Alongside art and crafts lay the many agricultural, mineral and other commodities produced in the empire, displays underlining the practical use and monetary value of France's possessions. Though a small anti-colonial exhibition had contested the colonial exhibition of 1931, and opposition to empire remained vocal, the Musée colonial showed off the beneficence of imperialism for both the colonising and the colonised (Viatte 2002; Eidelman et al. 2002). Meanwhile, across town, the old ethnographical museum established in the late 1800s turned into the new Musée de l'Homme, opened in 1937, exhibiting its collections along lines pioneered by the leading anthropologists of the time. The division of collections and purposes between the colonial museum at the Porte Dorée and the Musée de l'Homme in the Palais de Chaillot remained hazy, though the primary function of the Musée colonial – parallel to that of the Imperial Institute – was colonial promotion and propaganda.

Colonial museums in the era of decolonisation Fifteen years after the building of the Paris colonial museum, and barely 50 years after Queen Victoria opened the headquarters constructed for the Imperial Institute, the colonial empires began to crumble. The end of empire meant re-invention. After the independence of Indonesia, the Colonial Institute in Amsterdam restyled itself the Indies Museum, then in 1950 became the Royal Tropic Institute (Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen, KIT) with the museum proper renamed the Tropical Museum (Tropenmuseum). Changed political conditions necessitated an alteration in curatorial practices, and the museum ardently tried to downplay, if not efface, its colonial origin and mission. According to Susannne Legêne,

historian of the museum and curator of its historical section, from the 1960s, the Tropenmuseum took as its principal theme [international] cooperation, development aid and daily life in the Third World. Just as had the old colonial museum, its new approach privileged the contemporary world. Thus, in no way was the presentation of the permanent collections supposed to make reference to the Dutch colonial empire, even though 90% of the collections in the Tropenmuseum found their provenance in colonial connections. This silence about the fact of colonialism and about the fall of the Dutch colonial empire would continue for several decades. (2000, p. 101)

Renovations in the mid to late 1970s continued the erasure of specifically colonial allusions, though much of the décor stayed in place; further renovations in the 1990s updated exhibition styles in the excellent galleries of Southeast Asian and other collections, but colonialism remained essentially a taboo. As we shall see, a return of the colonial to the museum came only later. London's Imperial Institute did not thrive in the post-Second World War period, despite its propaganda role during the war and its administrative transfer to the Ministry of Education to reinforce its educative value. The building and its mandate ill suited the revamped notion of the Commonwealth of Nations. Lack of funding, low visitor attendance and failing enthusiasm joined to sound the death knell of the Institute that had hoped to provide a central meeting-point and showcase for empire in the capital. Imperial College, part of the University of London, in the mid 1950s proposed to take over the site, though developers' plans to raze Collcut's buildings provoked opposition on heritage grounds. William Golant concludes the story: ‘In the same month as the last British troops left Suez (June 1956) a concession was made to the public disquiet. The campanile of the Imperial Institute, as half monument and half obituary of imperialism, was to be preserved’ (1984, p. 31). The gradual demolition of the remainder of the buildings – in 1957, 1962 and 1965 -reflected the prolonged demise of the empire itself. For the new model Commonwealth, the British constructed a Commonwealth Institute in Kensington High Street, funded by gifts from Commonwealth states and opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 1962. Sir Robert Matthew designed a dramatic building with a hyperbolic paraboloid roof sheathed in copper; set amidst pools and fronted by poles bearing the flags of the Commonwealth, the edifice evoked considerable praise. In a

manner similar to the Imperial Institute, whose direct successor it claimed to be, the Commonwealth Institute housed offices, a library and exhibition spaces, and organised lectures, meetings and other activities designed to promote knowledge of the organisation of independent nations over which the Queen remains head. According to the website of the Commonwealth Education Trust: During the next ten years the exhibitions attracted much interest. However once Commonwealth Preference fell away with British accession to the then EEC in the 1970's, so too did the relevance of the exhibitions in the eyes of the Member Nations.

The Member Nations' financial contributions dwindled. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office took control and continued to provide funding. The climate did not prove favourable in the long term, as the winds of decolonisation had blown against endeavours aiming to show off a disparate (and sometimes fractious) group of countries largely joined by their colonial past and royal head, despite some notable achievements made by the organisation in areas such as education. In the late 1990s, the exhibition galleries of the Commonwealth Institute closed, with the objects on display either returned to Commonwealth member states or donated to the new British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. The Commonwealth Institute was reconstituted as the Commonwealth Education Trust with offices at New Zealand House in the Haymarket. In May 2007, after 45 years of existence, the Kensington building was sold.7 In France, as the Franco-Algerian War raged at the beginning of the 1960s, the Minister of Culture, André Malraux, determined to turn the Musée de la France d'Outre-Mer (as it was then called) into the Musée des arts africains et océaniens (MAAO), taking advantage of two of the strengths of the collections of ‘primitive’ art, removing many overtly colonialist materials and reinforcing an implicit division of labour between the Porte Dorée collections and exhibitions, in displays stressing artistic value, and the Musée de l'Homme, whose galleries focused on the ethnography of non-European (and European) societies. The museum building in the Bois de Vincennes – a veritable temple to the colonialist spirit in its iconography – became something of an embarrassment, though heritage concerns prevented any major changes. The Salle des Fêtes with its colonialist frescoes for years remained closed to the public, and many of the colonialist paintings were transferred to a municipal museum in suburban

Boulogne-Billancourt (some of these are again on show in the Musée des Années Trente in Boulogne-Billancourt). Exhibitions downplayed colonialism and its effects, even when accession labels continued to credit donors including various colonial officers, governors or other luminaries or colonial-era agencies. The museum did make a successful effort to expand its collections, filling in gaps (which often concerned artwork from regions not colonised by the French) through purchases and donations. Nevertheless, the Musee des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie (the new name when it administratively became a department of the Louvre) suffered from falling visitor numbers, a certain lack of direction about whether it was a museum of history, art or artefacts, and a marginalised status in the Paris museum landscape, despite heroic efforts by staff to attract interest with some excellent exhibits. These included, for examples, ones on Melanesian art (a bold show of Kanak culture at a time when the Kanak nationalist movement agitated for independence of New Caledonia) and a popular retrospective on European perceptions of the South Pacific (Réunion des musées nationaux 1990; Boulay 2000). A major restructuring of museums occurred in Paris from the 1970s to the 1990s: the opening of the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d'Orsay and the Institut du Monde Arabe, expansion of the Louvre (as the Ministry of Finance vacated offices in the Louvre palace), renovation of the Musée Guimet (France's national museum of Asian art). These counted among other grands projets, such as the new French national library, the Arche de la Défence and the Bastille opera. The Porte Dorée retained its faithful visitors, and the school children came to see the crocodiles, but it languished. The Belgium colonial museum continued business much as usual after the Second World War (when a bomb had caused considerable damage), taking part in the large-scale Brussels-wide world's fair of 1958. Two years later, the Belgian Congo gained independence and, similarly to the Tropenmuseum though to a lesser extent, the Africa Museum refocused on ethnography, broadened its areas of interest to the Americas and Oceania, and downplayed a colonial presence still evident in the building's décor and in many galleries. In the background to these transformations stood many changes to the worlds of politics, academia and museography. Most European countries

wanted to move on from the imperial age, pushing the ideas that had underpinned imperialism out of the way and sometimes wilfully forgetting the imperial past and neglecting its legacy. Universities and museums wanted a break with the old sciences colonials and ideologies of colonial museums. Tiers-mondisme, opposition to neo-colonialism, efforts to see non-European cultures in a more egalitarian light, and attempts to treat the material products of those cultures as more than exotica and primitive curios pointed towards new directions. The old colonial museums, haunted by the ghosts of their pasts, transformed themselves into museums of art and ethnography (or in the case of the Commonwealth Institute, to a celebration of the cultural diversity of a consortium of nations), moving from an affirmation of virtues of a European colonialism that had triumphed over primitivism and decadence to an exploration of the values, achievements and challenges of the indigenous cultures of those previously colonised. In such a context, the Commonwealth Institute, the MAAO, the Tropenmuseum and the Africa Museum largely tried to evacuate colonialism from their galleries while searching for new missions in the postcolonial world. The beginning of the twenty-first century, however, saw some remarkable changes in the old museums and efforts to create new ones concerned in one way or another with the imperial heritage.

The former colonial museums in a postcolonial world In France, the two great museums created in the 1930s, the MAAO and the Musée de l'Homme, appeared ripe for renewal (Lebovics 2004; Aldrich 2006a). Politicians, curators and journalists hotly debated what should happen to the collections of what came to called arts premiers, a name that looked like a euphemism for ‘primitive art’. Discussions ranged from the heritage value of the museum buildings to the political opportunities or necessities of creating new institutions. The debates need not detain us here, but the outcome proved significant (Aldrich 2005; Dupaigne 2006). President Jacques Chirac (elected in 1995), influenced by his friend Jacques Kerchache, a collector and critic of arts premiers, decided that the MAAO would be closed, and that its collections would be united with the nonEuropean ethnographic collections of the Musée de l'Homme, along with a considerable stock of new purchases, to form a new museum. So it came to

pass that the Musée du Quai Branly opened in 2006, the museum taking a street name since no appropriate name could be found other than the awkward arts premiers for the combined collections from the Pacific islands and Australasia, ‘traditional’ cultures of Asia, Africa and the preColumbian Americas. Housed in Jean Nouvel's dramatic building across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower, the Quai Branly museum has quickly become one of the most popular in France, and also one of the more controversial, attracting a burgeoning set of critiques. Every writer seems to find something to like and to dislike in the museum, with some of the more negative appraisals charging that it is little less than neo-colonial (Price 2007). For a historian, the combination of geographical areas into a single museum is rather curious. The objects on display are remarkable, but the absence of discussion of the ways in which many of the items entered French collections during the colonial era, and the general impact of colonialism in the societies which produced them, is unfortunate. Indeed, in the mission statement of the museum, and the mise en scène of its displays, according to Dominic Thomas, we begin to sense a rearticulation of what could very well be construed as a kind of postcolonial mission civilisatrice that simultaneously refuses to engage in any discussion or polemic on the question of the historical origin(s) of the collection (especially the African one), thereby relegating to the margins a socio-political understanding without which any contextualisation and historical framework cannot be undertaken. (2008, p. 147)

The museum nevertheless has hosted several exhibitions, drawn partly from its magnificent collections, which give greater attention to the colonial past than do the permanent displays. An inaugural special exhibition on the ‘history of European views of Africa, America and Oceania’ provided a survey, through paintings, sculpture and decorative arts, of the ways in which Europeans have seen the cultures whose creations fill the galleries of the new museum (Le Fur 2006). The collections were removed from the old MAAO, but the question remained as to what to do with the building itself. Among proposals were to transfer either the Musée maritime (a neighbour of the Musée de l'Homme in the Palais de Chaillot) or the Musée des arts décoratifs (from the Louvre) to the Porte Dorée, to create a new museum of colonialism, or to open a museum devoted to the inter-war period. In the event, authorities decided to

leave untouched the ‘historic rooms’ (the great hall and the reception rooms created for the 1931 colonial exhibition) of the Palais de la Porte Dorée, as well as the aquarium, and to use the remainder of the building as home for the new Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration (CNHI; Murphy 2007). To some, it appeared incongruous, ironic or even shocking to turn the old colonial museum into a new museum of immigration, especially given the sensitive issue of immigration from France's former colonies and debates on such topics as the wearing of the headscarf by Muslim students and the broader subject of multiculturalism in France. In the contestatory manner that marks French public disputes, newspaper columns filled with competing views, resignations from the museum's board occurred, and political figures and curators took sides on whether creation of the CNHI and its localisation in the Porte Dorée building was a good or bad thing (Hommes et Migrations 2007). The museum of the CNHI duly opened in 2007 after renovation of the Porte Dorée facilities. Permanent displays stress the multiple conduits of migration into France over time and the individual experiences of migrants. Personal belongings of migrants displayed in vitrines underline these microhistories, and artworks, many commissioned for the museum, reveal the reactions of French painters and sculptors of migrant origin or ancestry. Several early exhibitions – for instance, photographs of migrants arriving at New York's Ellis Island and a display on the Armenian diaspora (including the large French population of Armenian origin) – affirmed the broad mandate of the museum. In 2008, however, the CNHI confronted head on the subject of colonialism, and the colonial heritage of its home site, with an exhibition on foreigners in France at the time of the 1931 colonial exhibition. Paintings and statues not shown since then were displayed at the entry to the galleries, which then included sections on the migration and work of colonised people and foreigners to inter-war France and the impact of the Depression (when many were sent home). One display showed how French authorities, from census-takers to police forces, kept track of foreigners often considered potentially seditious or dangerous; another display illustrated efforts to politicise migrants, including the activities of the Communist Party, trades unions and anti-colonial organisations. Items on display – posters, film clips and personal testimonies – recalled the colonial exhibition and the vogue

for exotic performances and motifs in the 1930s. The exhibition also showed the daily life of the diverse groups of migrants – housing, religious life, culture – who came as refugees from the Russian revolution or the Armenian genocide, as labour migrants from eastern and southern Europe, or as subjects of the French empire, and it traced how some of them had settled down into France (Blévis et al. 2008).8 In the exhibition, the CNHI thus attempted, with considerable success, to come to terms with its home in the Porte Dorée and with the conjuncture of migration of the 1930s, despite a certain dissonance between the broad mandate of the CNHI and the highly marked surroundings of the old colonial museum. The opening of the Quai Branly museum and the CNHI represents two museographical and political endeavours that reached fruition in France, though typifying a continuing discomfort about the way in which colonialism should be integrated into museums. A third undertaking came to nought. In the 1990s, proposals (that had been floated for a number of years) crystallised into a programme for a new institution in Marseille devoted to the colonial past. The Mediterranean port had styled itself the ‘colonial capital of France’ and the ‘gateway to the Levant’ (porte de l'Orieni) in colonial days, hosting colonial exhibitions in 1906 and 1922. After the end of the Algerian war in 1962, many pieds-noirs from North Africa settled in Marseille, as did groups of Maghrebians and sub-Saharan Africans, highlighting the city's cosmopolitan character though provoking tensions among various communities. This colonial heritage inspired plans for a new institution, but also helps account for the project's failure. From the outset, discord was apparent about what exactly the institution was to be – a museum of colonialism or a monument to commemorate the empire and those who had served in it and died for it. Even the nomenclature caused problems, with planners deciding to call it a ‘Mémorial national de l'outre-mer’ even though the plans drawn up for the site in the Parc Chanot, where the early twentieth-century exhibitions had taken place, clearly centred on a museum. Another issue concerned the contents; under the supervision of Jean-Jacques Jordi, himself a pied-noir and a prolific historian, the exhibition space would be divided between sections on particular themes (views of the colonial world, health and education, violence, etc.) and a specific narrative about Marseille's relationship with the outre-mer. Yet it remained unclear to what extent the

exhibitions would be pro-colonial (as some critics feared), anti-colonial (as others equally warned) or somehow both or neither. Another sticking point concerned stakeholders. Several historians resigned from the steering committee, alleging that the museum would pay too much attention to the positive role of colonialism, while pieds-noir and migrants and their descendants insisted that they have a primary role in guiding and overseeing the museum. National and local authorities meanwhile dithered about finance and curatorial control. These slow-moving developments played out in the midst of renewed discussion in France about the colonial past, from new revelations in 2000 on torture practised by the French during the Algerian war to the passage of a law in 2005 paying homage to colonials and, in a highly controversial clause subsequently annulled, mandating the teaching of the ‘positive role’ of colonialism in state schools (Aldrich 2006b). Plans for the Marseille site stalled. Around 2005 or 2006, it became apparent that they had been shelved, and it seems definite that the Mémorial national de l'outre-mer will not be built (Aldrich 2005, pp. 328–331). In Britain, the decline and finally the closing of the Commonwealth Institute took place just at the time when interest in the colonial past revived – though that interest divided between ‘Raj nostalgia’ and more critical perspectives linked to the discipline of postcolonial studies and a great boom in imperial history-writing (Thompson 2005). Perhaps those currents helped to promote an initiative that resulted in the founding of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum (BECM), opened in Bristol in 2002 under the patronage of the Princess Royal. Housed in Isambard Kingdom Brunel's historic railway building at Temple Meads – the world's first purpose-built passenger rail station – the museum's 16 permanent galleries presented a history of the empire from its early days to its metamorphosis into the Commonwealth. With a relatively limited number of objects, but extensive explanatory panels, the museum evoked many aspects of British expansion and did not avoid such topics as slavery, a subject closely linked to the slave-trading history of Bristol itself. Migration and settlement, colonial exhibitions and cultural imports, leading figures in imperialism but also the daily lives of people in the colonies appeared in the displays. Smiling photographed faces of the family of Commonwealth citizens in the final display did suggest to some a successful outcome to colonialism. Opinions on the museum – even before its opening – were mixed, with praise (and subsequent heritage and tourism awards) mixed with somewhat

predictable charges that its exhibitions represented a revisionist and positive portrayal of colonialism. Crowds did not flock to Bristol in large numbers, despite interesting temporary exhibitions on migration, Native American culture, and the transatlantic slave trade, including a major exhibition on ‘Breaking the Chains’, held in 2007 to commemorate the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. Other activities included three years of broadcasting on a community radio station and dozens of lectures and debates. Only five years after opening, a news release in November 2007 announced that the BECM would ‘move its core operations to London’, the Board of Trustees having decided ‘to relocate the institute to secure its long-term future, and to reach a larger international audience’. The museum's galleries closed in November 2008, though with preparations underway for an exhibition on the British mandate in Palestine that will open in London and tour the Middle East (museum website). The histories of the Commonwealth Institute and the Empire Museum have yet to be written, but the difficulties they encountered, the closure of the Commonwealth Institute and the effective closure of the BECM at its Bristol site all suggest the challenges inherent in presenting empire and its legacy to contemporary, postcolonial audiences. In recent years, increasing numbers of exhibitions on colonial themes have nevertheless appeared in British museums, and one further initiative has set up an entire museum with a direct colonial connection: the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool. The museum began life, in 1994, as the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery in the Merseyside Maritime Museum, and developed into a fullscale institution, located in Albert Dock, opened like the Bristol exhibition to coincide with the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. Three sections treat life in western Africa, enslavement and the middle passage, and the legacies of slavery (www.liverpoolmuseums.org). The situation in the Netherlands and Belgium is somewhat different from that in Britain and France: the old institutions remain open, though with new briefs, exhibition policies and perspectives, after weathering the transitions from the colonial to the postcolonial period. The Tropenmuseum, following a period in which colonialism had been largely erased from its displays, reintroduced Dutch imperialism, intentionally moving away from the tiers-mondiste approach of the 1970s and a coldly object-based display in an effort to show the lives of the colonised and the

colonisers. At the opening of the new galleries, the curator acknowledged that the museum's previous focus, in line with government policy and the mandate of the Tropical Institute of which it is a part, had been development cooperation overseas. The speech continued: The Tropenmuseum today is presenting a new profile. It is a profile that will bring pleasure to old people in Amsterdam who even today persist in talking about the Colonial Museum and one that hopefully will also appeal to young people. It is a profile that places art and culture from South-East Asia and Oceania in a critical historical context for the public.

The multicultural nature of contemporary Dutch society was specifically mentioned, with admission that an ‘image of an original monocultural Netherlands … fails to acknowledge the colonial experience as an influence in Dutch culture and reduces colonialism to a merely political history that since 1949 has belonged to the past’. The ‘Oostwarts’ (‘Eastward Bound! Art, Culture and Colonialism’) galleries opened in 2003, a year after the 400th anniversary of the VOC. The name is taken from the colonial novelist Louis Couperus, and the galleries put on show some two thousand objects concerning Southeast Asia, Oceania and Dutch colonialism. An evocation of European wonder about the East Indies introduces the exhibition with a painting of a pastoral East and a dynamic West, a cabinet of curiosities containing objects belonging to Georg Rumphius (1627–1702), showcases of Chinese porcelain and Japanese armour, a ‘timber cabinet’ of tropical wood samples. Vitrines with spices, medical treatises and recipes emphasise the primordial role of the spice trade with the East. This leads to a display on the VOC: For 350 years profit was the main reason why the Dutch kept a firm grip on the East Indies. It involved the VOC in war, slavery, exploitation and control over the Indonesian population. At the same time, those who came to the East Indies became attached to the culture, natural environment and peoples of Indonesia.

There follows a section on ‘Colonial Wars’ which, the explanatory panel states, cost ‘hundreds of thousands of lives’; both European and East Indian weaponry give an idea of warfare. The second room of the ‘Oostwarts!’ exhibition moves from the early modern period to the beginning of the twentieth century, incarnated in seven figures from the Dutch and Indonesian colonial past – one is a character from a novel (an Indonesian who worked in the Dutch colonial

administration), the remainder real people, including a governor-general, a housewife, an artist, an Indonesian teacher (the founder of a school for girls, shown reading nationalist Indonesian literature), a planter and a maid. (The mise en scène is based on a 1938 photograph of an earlier exhibition using models grouped around an empty throne, each meant to symbolise an ethnic group in the Dutch Queen's realm.) The mannequins are largely realistic but, in a novel treatment, at least one part of each body (a knee, a hand, an ear) is made of transparent glass in order to avoid, curators say, a Madame Tussaud's approach; objects surrounding the figures are genuine. On the walls throughout the display hang paintings, photos, masks, maps, film posters and advertisements for shipping companies. Indonesian nationalism is highlighted with videos and mementos of the independence leaders. The third room returns to the theme of colonial culture and shows many items from colonial exhibitions of the Dutch East Indies. Health, education and transport are covered, as are both local religions in Southeast Asia and missionary activities, complete with the reconstruction of the study of a Dutch priest in New Guinea. The Dutch colony in New Guinea receives pride of place here with artefacts from the Melanesian region and displays on colonial anthropology. The Tropenmuseum's exhibits are impressive, striking a balance between art and history, personalised with biographies of individuals, and considerable reflection on the practice of colonial collecting. The treatment of the mannequins, and the rehabilitation of old diorama-style presentations, points to a variety of museographical strategies. There is an attempt to underline cultural transmission – the arrival of the Dutch in the East Indies in 1596 balanced by a visit of an Indonesian delegation to Holland, the sword of General Van Heutz (notorious conqueror of Aceh) next to the kriss of rebels. More attention is given to women than in many exhibitions. Though not avoiding the dark side of colonialism (using words such as ‘repression’), the exhibition, with respectful acknowledgement of Dutch lives in the East, is unlikely to offend old East Indian hands. Explanatory panels successfully avoid post-modernist jargon. Some topics are treated briefly – colonial ideology, the end of the VOC, métissage, repatriation of settlers and Eurasians – but the Tropenmuseum's ‘Oostwarts!’ galleries provide the most thorough and thoughtful displays on colonialism that the present writer has seen in any museum.10

In Belgium the Africa Museum held a centenary exhibition in 1997 on the colonial exhibition that had given birth to the museum. Displays traced the history of the Tervuren site, then presented the 1897 exhibition with a chronicle of its preparation, a discussion of the works on show (and the ‘African villages’), and a review of the history of the museum (Wynants 1997). In 2005, the Africa Museum held a major retrospective on the Belgian Congo, the first such exhibition since the colony gained independence. The exhibition and catalogue offered a broad overview of Belgium's colonial experience, and articles in the catalogue treated such sensitive topics as violence in colonial history and the controversy about the role of Leopold II in the scramble for Africa; other themes included men and women in Africa, business involvement in the colony, the development of Stanleyville (Kinshasa), transport, images of Africa in Belgian art and literature, the experiences of particular colonials, the historiography of Belgian colonialism and a number of other themes (Vellut 2005). The exhibition proved both popular and controversial, leading to a number of heated discussions in the press and online.11 The debates showed how opinions on colonialism remain divided and how museums play a central role in discussions about colonialism and its legacy. The Africa Museum is at present in the process of a major renovation of the building and redesign of its exhibitions. In a history gallery developed after the 2005 exhibition and – an important point – in cooperation with representatives of African associations in Belgium, new display panels visible in 2008 include images of Belgian achievements at the building of schools, hospitals and infrastructures, but also ones of mutilations and executions of African labourers and other examples of the misdeeds of colonialists. The Africa Museum holds the papers and many belongings of Henry Morton Stanley (acquired by the King Baudoin Foundation), a collaborator with King Leopold in the conquest of his African empire, and new showcases highlight the life and career of Stanley, but also reflect on how he has been viewed in literature, cinema and history. Other galleries are devoted to African ethnography, the archaeology and prehistory of central Africa, the region's agricultural and forest economy, and the natural history of sub-Saharan Africa (partly illustrated by zoological dioramas created for the museum when it opened). The memorial gallery continues to recall Belgian colonialism, though visitors are told: ‘Here colonial history is regarded from a purely Belgian point of view. Thus, on the gallery's walls,

only the names of the Belgians who died on Congolese soil are commemorated. There is no reference to Congolese dead’ (www.africanmuseum.be). The restructuring of the Africa Museum – no doubt taking advantage of the precedents from the very different transformations of the old museums in London, Paris and Amsterdam – will allow the Brussels institution, one of the most popular in Belgium, potentially to provide a very culturally and historiographically sensitive portrayal of colonialism in keeping with the objectives of the curators whom I consulted. The new displays will be on show in a museum whose focus in on the natural history and ethnography of previously colonised countries in the context of a building constructed with a colonialist purpose, as is the case in the Tropenmuseum. In Paris, colonialism does not play a large part in the current permanent exhibitions at the Quai Branly, yet remains omnipresent in the décor, and integrally part of any presentation of the history of migration, at the Porte Dorée. In Britain, colonialism is also ever present in museums, though except for the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool (and, according to plans, in the relocated BECM), in none is it the primary subject. However, in all of these sites, and other museums as well, the colonial past is no longer a subject that can be avoided or erased, and any perceived attempts to do so are liable to be met with criticism from curators, historians and representatives of communities of the colonised and their descendants. New displays, in turn, will evolve – ‘permanent’ exhibitions are now designed with an intended lifespan of about a decade – in line with changing museum policies, public expectations and the capacities of collections.

Old museums, new histories The biographies of the Imperial Institute, the Musée colonial, the Tropenmuseum and the Africa Museum encompass decades of change in the history of collecting, exhibiting and studying the countries displayed within their showcases. Created late in the nineteenth century or early in the twentieth – rather tardily in the longue durée of colonial expansion, but contemporaneous to many other new museums in Europe – their mission was to encourage colonialism. By showing the objects and telling the stories of empire, they aimed to edify the public and encourage the colonials. Their grandiose buildings complemented the other majestic civic

and national edifices among which they stood as proof of progress and prosperity, of the European ability to master the world, to bring its fruits home, and to send out its men and women to the corners of the globe. Promoters erected imperialism to the status of a national grand projet, where noble causes mixed with the hope of profit, commerce and civilisation complemented each other, and exotic countries both attracted and frightened. Not surprisingly, memoirs of colonial settlers and administrators sometimes recollect how authors found inspiration for their careers in colonial exhibitions and in the museums where empire remained on show. The life-span of these institutions as the centres of colonial propaganda (in all senses of the word) proved short. Each of the museums, however, had an afterlife following the death of empire. Developers could not demolish these heritage sites – the British were able to pull down almost all of the Imperial Institute in the 1950s and 1960s, but would have been unlikely to get away doing so several decades later – and the collections amassed over generations remained. Curators often found limits to how much they could tamper with exhibition spaces, décors and vitrines. (In the Tervuren museum, even the exhibition cases are covered by heritage protection.) With empire gone, the old colonial museums became something of an embarrassment and an anachronism. The British conceived a new Commonwealth Institute, though it was handicapped from birth by changing international conditions and limited support for the Commonwealth itself. The French and the Dutch tried to hide colonialism – closing rooms, mothballing paintings, revising labels, erasing the now offensive sentiments about the civilising mission, trying to embrace postcolonial art and politics. Only the Belgians soldiered on, though leaving aside some of the most ardently colonialist displays and rhetoric. Each of the institutions searched for a new mission in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The Commonwealth Institute proclaimed the great family of independent nations, flags flying at precisely equal height outside an avantgarde building to prove the point that the old ties still bound, though in modernised relationships. The French adopted an art historical, aestheticising and partly anthropological approach in the revamped Musée des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie – the Musée permanent des colonies had proved to be not so permanent, and the continental shift in the name tells

the tale. The Dutch, in the 1970s and 1980s, emphasised Third World development, international cooperation and contemporary issues. The Belgians, like the others, moved away from a focus almost solely on their own, now former colonies. Gradually colonialism reappeared in Europe, its return linked to new political contexts, the interests of old colonials and the young activists issuing from migrant groups, fascination with exoticism and orientalism, the ‘cultural turn’ in history and renewed academic interest in colonialism. There has come, gradually, the acknowledgement of Western European countries as multi-cultural societies where conduits of migration and cultural change had been opened through imperial connections. Debates have reopened about the conduct of both colonisers and colonised and the scars that colonial wounds have left. By the late 1990s, museums began to address colonial topics, curators renovated dusty exhibits, and promoters dreamed of new museums. Then museum directors, and their political masters, decided to revamp museums (in Brussels and Amsterdam), to close them (the MAAO and Commonwealth Institute), and to create new institutions (the Quai Branly and CNHI, the aborted Marseille colonial museum, the BECM and the International Slavery Museum). The Africa Museum mounted a retrospective on Belgian colonialism in the Congo as a lead-up to its renovation, the Tropenmuseum created its ‘Eastwards!’ galleries, while the CNHI held as one of its inaugural shows an exhibition on the 1931 Exposition Coloniale and the Quai Branly opened with the special exhibition on European views of the ‘primitive world’. Renewed interest in colonialism inspired such shows, but the perhaps necessarily contested debates on the colonial record and on the repercussions of colonialism made the task of exhibiting empire in a postcolonial world formidable. In the case of the Mémorial national de l'outre-mer, it became impossible, and France continues to prove something of an exception, as well, in the way that colonialism still remains an absent topic in the permanent exhibitions of the Quai Branly. Curators face many considerations, in addition to problems of space, funding and the limitations of collections. They need to satisfy a varied and demanding public ranging from scholars to casual visitors, those with vested interests in the objects on display and other museum-goers. They must obey their political masters, who have always seen museums as a

medium for advancing national causes and particular interests. How should the colonial past be represented? And how should the artefacts of colonialism be displayed? How can objects be contextualised to show adequately the extraordinarily complex histories involved – colonialism and decolonisation, the metamorphosis of ‘traditional’ to ‘modernist’ societies (both in Europe and in the colonised world), the ways in which particular objects were used and viewed at home and abroad? How much should be said in self-reflection about collecting and exhibiting? Should objects be repatriated and under what conditions? What groups – academics, excolonials, descendants of the colonised – ought to have a say in museum policy? How can museum directors address all these questions without blowing out budgets and presenting displays so dauntingly wordy and scholastic that they will bore visitors senseless? Such questions are faced by all who work in museums (and by scholars who work on them), but they carry an especially heavy weight in the case of ex-colonial museums, whose collections and whose very buildings evoke, for various visitors, pride or pain, nostalgia or anger, great achievements or heinous crimes, and do so in the midst of societies struggling with contemporary issues of migration, cultural pluralism, the vagaries of international politics and often raw sensibilities.12 The sense of wonder that one sees in the faces of museum visitors is nevertheless evident – delight in the animals and plants of natural history collections, fascination with cultural practices of cultures far away in time and place, admiration at the skills of painters, sculptors and the creators of the objects of everyday life, bemusement at the pompous renditions of colonial heroes. Perhaps one of the legacies of the colonial world – with all the caveats that could be added to the point – is a sense of curiosity about the wider world instilled by the old colonial museums, a desire for discovery to which the postcolonial museums – with the various critiques that can be advanced – are trying to attend. The tasks for the inheritors of the colonial museums are to awaken and satisfy the curiosity about the present-day world but without denying the colonial conditions and complex history behind the marvels on display.

Acknowledgements

This paper forms part of an ongoing research project on the monuments, museums and history of colonialism. I would like to acknowledge with gratitude a grant from the Dutch Academy of Sciences and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia that allowed me to make a research trip to the Netherlands, to Columbia University for a Fellowship at the Institute for Scholars in Paris, and to the curators of the Palais de la Porte Dorée in Paris, the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Africa Museum in Tervuren for their kindness in answering questions and showing me through their collections. I would also like to thank the Director of the BCEM, Gareth Griffiths, for discussing the museum and its future prospects with me in London in December 2008.

Notes 1.

Among other works, see Aldrich (2005), Heyden and Zeller (2002), Vanvugt (1998) and Henneberg (2004).

2.

Among a growing literature, see Coombes (1994), Barringer and Flynn (1998), Penny (2002) and Kriegel (2007). There are a number of books on exhibitions of colonialism in various forms and venues, including Bloembergen (2006) and Mathur (2007).

3.

Space is lacking here even to begin an inventory, much less to discuss the history of the many institutions concerned. Just for London, it is possible to mention the countless works in the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum, the images of colonial figures in the National Portrait Gallery, the Orientalist paintings in the National Gallery and Sir John Soane's Museum, the ethnographical objects in the Horniman Museum, the displays on colonialism in the National Maritime Museum and many others.

4.

An essential collection is Taffin (2000).

5.

There were of course a number of colonial museums elsewhere as well (Labanca 1992).

6.

Colonial institutes, which often housed museums, libraries, training academies, associations and other colonial activities, proliferated in Europe (Morando 2007).

7.

Website of the Commonwealth Education Trust (n.d.).

8.

I have reviewed the exhibition on ‘1931, les étrangers au temps de l'Exposition coloniale’ (Aldrich 2008).

9.

Copy of a speech, titled ‘Multiculturalism and colonial culture’, presented at the opening of the galleries, kindly provided by the Tropenmuseum.

10. This description has inevitably left out many details of the exhibition, and a full consideration of the colonial heritage in the Tropenmuseum would also need coverage of the ethnographic galleries and other aspects of the museum life. My description is based on a two-week fellowship at the museum in 2003, and it is possible that some displays have changed since that time. 11. For instance, an exchange between Hochschild and Vellut, the commissioner of the exhibition and a historian of the Congo, that took place in the pages of the New York Review of Books (6

October 2005 and 12 January 2006). 12. Such concerns are not limited to Europe and have been discussed in recent years in such places as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada. More recently, the National Museum of Australia in Canberra was charged by the former Liberal (conservative) government with refusing to adhere to a settler-oriented narrative (McIntyre and Wehner 2001).

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Lebovics, H., 1992. True France: the wars over cultural identity, 1900– 1945. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lebovics, H., 2004. Bringing the empire back home: France in the global age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Le Fur, Y., ed., 2006. D'un regard l'autre: Histoire des regards européens sur l'Afrique, l'Amérique et l'Oceanie. Paris: Musée du Quai Branly. Legêne, S., 2000. Identité nationale et ‘cultures autres’: le musee colonial comme monde à part aux Pays-Bas. In: D. Taffin, ed. Du Musée colonial au musée des cultures du monde. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 87–102. Mack, J., 1999. Curatorial integration within the British Museum. Cahiers de l'Ecole nationale du patrimoine, 5, 281–288. MacKenzie, J.M., 1986. The Imperial Institute. In: J.M. McKenzie, ed. Propaganda and empire: the manipulation of British public opinion, 1880–1960. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 121–146. Mathur, S., 2007. India by design: colonial history and cultural display. Berkeley: University of California Press. McIntyre, D. and Wehner, K., eds., 2001. National museums: negotiating histories. Canberra: National Museum of Australia. Morando, L., 2007. Les Instituts coloniaux et l'Afrique, 1893–1940: ambitions nationales, réussites locales. Paris: Karthala. Morton, P.A., 2000. Hybrid modernities: architecture and representation at the 1931 Colonial Exposition, Paris. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Murphy, M., 2007. Un Palais pour une cité: du Musée des colonies à la Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux. Penny, H.G., 2002. Objects of culture: ethnology and ethnographic museums in imperial Germany. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Price, S., 2007. Paris primitive: Jacques Chirac's museum on the Quai Branly. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Réunion des musées nationaux, 1990. De Jade et de nacre: Patrimoine artistique kanak. Paris: Reunion des musées nationaux. Sheppard, F.H.W., ed., 1975. Imperial Institute. In: Survey of London, vol. 38: South Kensington museums area. London: English Heritage, 220– 227. Available at: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/source.aspx? pubid=364 (accessed 12 December 2008). Taffin, D., ed., 2000. Du Musée colonial au musée des cultures du monde. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose. Thomas, D., 2008. The Quai Branly museum: political transition, memory and globalisation in contemporary France. French Cultural Studies, 19 (2), 141–157. Thompson, A., 2005. The empire strikes back: the impact of imperialism on Britain from the mid-nineteenth century. London: Pearson Longman. Vanvugt, E., 1998. De maagd en de soldaat: Koloniale monumenten in Amsterdam en elders. Amsterdam: Mets. Vellut, J.-L., ed., 2005. La Mémoire du Congo: Le temps colonial. Gand: Musée royal de l'Afrique centrale/Editions Snoeck. Viatte, G., ed., 2002. Le Palais des colonies: Histoire du Musée des arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux. Woudsma, J., 1990. The Royal Tropical Institute: an Amsterdam landmark. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers. Wynants, M., 1997. Des Ducs de Brabant aux villages congolais: Tervuren et l'Exposition Coloniale 1897. Tervuren: Musée royal de l'Afrique centrale.

Negotiating a national memory: the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum Corinna McLeod Department of English, Grand Valley State University, Allendale, USA The British Empire & Commonwealth Museum is an attempt to grapple with Britain's history of imperialism and colonialism. The contents of the museum seek to address both the feeling of pride toward empire and the honest acknowledgement of empire's brutality. Expressing these two sides of Britain's imperialism at the same time makes the museum a site of contested identity. This article examines the ways in which the ambiguity of the museum is a reflection of the ambiguity of Britain's national identity and discusses how the museum's move from Bristol to London may increase the potential for a more reflective dialogue about Britain's history.

The British Empire & Commonwealth Museum, located in Bristol, England, is an ideal example of a space in which a nation can be seen to be actively negotiating its historicized identity. The museum attempts to confront Britain's role in the transatlantic slave trade, to critique the rampant cultural destruction brought about by imperialism, and at the same time, to commemorate and celebrate empire. In this way, the museum expresses a metacultural ambivalence to Britain's past. This ambiguous historicizing of the past is indicative of the museum's function as mediator for a society experiencing a cultural shift as it tries to discern and define its ever changing view of history. Thus, as a vehicle of knowledge production, the museum functions to mitigate the claims to ‘Britishness’ by both white descendants and non-white descendents of — and first generation immigrants from — its current and past empire. The plurality inherent in multicultural Britain requires the museum to re-form the nation's history. As Peter Jones (1992) has noted, ‘[m]useums necessarily decontextualize and then recontextualize their contents, thereby radically altering the matrices through which meaning may be projected, discerned, constructed’ (p. 911).

This simultaneous decontextualization and recontextualization of the past also necessarily operates in conjunction with the memory and understanding of the public who views its exhibits. In this article, I address the marginality of The British Empire & Commonwealth Museum, and discuss how its transitional status is reflected in its exhibits, its archives, and in its location. The museum contains what can be described as the fragments of empire, and its own position on the margins of public regard becomes essential in studying its contents and theorizing its future as an exhibitor of what can be seen as the detritus of empire, especially at this particular moment in history as the museum negotiates its move from the periphery (Bristol) to the center of the British metropole (the capital London), where it will inevitably garner more national and international attention. The museum will very likely become increasingly remarkable in its formative role within multicultural Britain, for after all, its contents critique those industrial mechanisms that made possible London's British Museum and Imperial War Museum. Museums exist not just to preserve the past, but as indicated by Jones, their contents represent and help reconstruct a past. The rendering of an object as an item in the museum, its categorization and carefully taxonomized place, reflects in many ways the contemporary society that values it. Hannah Arendt (1993 [1968]) described the process of engagement with the construction of a society's authentic awareness through ‘historicity’. Others such as Hegel 1956 [1837] have unpacked the notion of history within the frame of individual and societal development. In turn, Michel Foucault (in The order of things, 1994 [1971]) also engaged with the epistemology of history, and his arguments are applicable to the rationale that informs the construction of a museum. Accordingly, the encounter with objects and the process of classifying, labeling, displaying and then valuing the objects within their frame as spectacles for the contemporary viewer act to introduce the complexity of the museum as not just a site of knowledge production, but also as a site of awareness production. Here, it is useful to invoke Benedict Anderson's book Imagined communities (1987) as a reiteration that the ‘imagined’ nation is foundational in the construction of the actual nation. Thus as the museum adopts a reflective self-awareness, it exceeds its capacity as a storage facility of artifacts to become a site of memory and memorializing — both

concepts represent constructivist enterprises and are conducive to the formation of a public national identity. The British Empire & Commonwealth Museum was formed in the mid 1990s, after some 30 years of planning, and opened its doors in 2002. Designed as the only museum purposefully created to examine the multiple perspectives of Britain's empire, it was housed, appropriately, in I.K. Brunel's railway passenger terminus1. The building was another one of Britain's firsts: as the first building designed for railway passengers in the world, let alone in England, it is also an engineering phenomenon that speaks to Britain's determination to use the railway to advance its empire both internally and throughout the world. This marvel of engineering — in close proximity to one of Bristol's other historical claims to fame, namely the suspension bridge also designed by Brunel — thus paradoxically became the site chosen to critique Britain's cultural memory (one can't help but establish parallels with France's Eiffel Tower, a design built specifically for the Universal Exposition of 1889, the celebration of technological progress, imperial expansion, and the centennial of the Republic).2 Bristol's role as host to this museum is deliberate, but also ironic. The former Port of Bristol was where John Cabot began his journey that led to his ‘discovery’ of Newfoundland in the fifteenth century. Later, during the early eighteenth century, Bristol was a bustling port in the slave trade, the landing site that funneled in the wealth from the Triangular trade. As a central port, the wealth of slave merchants contributed to Bristol's flourishing development until the latter part of the eighteenth century when Bristol merchants saw more and more of their trade and commerce heading up to the more industrialized Liverpool with its anti-abolition merchants and greater infrastructure3. Bristol still labored on, though its glory days as a port trailed behind Liverpool and, of course, London. Today, Bristol is remembered for Cabot and its role in the slave trade, but is better known for being the center of Britain's aerospace. In 2008 it was designated a ‘Centre of Culture’ and has several arts-centered public works in development.4 Even as Bristol is riding out the ebb and flow of its success as a modern city, it faces a waning historical importance, and it was this city that was the locus for a museum dedicated to the memory of empire.

The Imperial War Museum, The British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum are all located in London. Why then is the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum located outside of London? London naturally represents the center, the metropole of the Commonwealth, whereas a structure in Bristol merely belongs to the miscellany of Britain's imperial past. There is an interesting moment of tension that emerges as one considers the two cities: Bristol represents one of the discarded elements of empire — setting aside its recent revival, historically, Bristol used to be a major player in empire, and now, like the museum itself, represents the history of what was. But unlike Bristol, Britain — through the figurehead of London — remains as a key component of current discourse of the questions and manifestations of empire. Bristol went from being the edge of empire in terms of its launching point to the edge of empire in terms of its periphery. London has been recentered — while always having been at the center and enjoying a prominence even as its centrality is reemphasized through its museums, the locus of its imperial memory. There is a sense that Bristol comes to serve as a metaphorical substitute for a British national identity of Britain whereas London symbolizes a more specifically imperial identity. Like the city itself, the museum houses relics that are not as highly valued as those in the center, London. For example, the Elgin Marbles and the Egyptian spoils, both housed in London's British Museum, seem to be regarded as more archeologically and nationally significant for Britain than the actual accruals found in the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum. Thus it appears that Britain's greatness continues to be celebrated and understood in terms of what it has taken from other countries, territories and histories in affirmation of its imperialism, rather than through a nationalist agenda organized around what it has actually produced on its own. What struck me most in my role as a visitor (and as a subjective outsider) to the museum was the question of how the museum, and Britain, would engage with its identity. The exhibits in the museum address the slogan ‘Empire and Us’. The problem of course is that the ‘Us’ concerns a predominantly white, British audience. The recent exhibit, ‘Breaking the Chains’, commemorating the 1807 Abolition of the British Transatlantic Slave Trade was a highly promising exhibit. A significant portion of the museum was dedicated to telling the story of transatlantic slavery and, according to the museum's website ‘the means by which this brutal transportation was brought to an end’.5 The difficulty lies in the attempt to

counter the fact that Britain engaged in hundreds of years of slave trade with the final statement emphasizing the abolition of Britain's slave trade. Despite the frank manner in which slavery and the slave trade were confronted on the occasion of commemoration of the 200-year anniversary of the Act that brought Britain's official role in the transatlantic slave trade to a closure, the question remains as to the degree to which Britain is effectively engaging with its more general role and participation in empire. How, for example, does the museum write the memory of Britain's imperial past? The celebration of the end of the transatlantic slave trade serves to acknowledge Britain's participation in the brutal commerce but also to enforce the idea of Britain as a liberator. In a similar fashion, Britain's empire can be recontextualized as a more humanitarian enterprise than the brutal regime of, for instance, the Belgians. Additionally, this commemoration de-emphasizes and even obfuscates the broader historical reality whereby the end to the slave trade during the nineteenth century coincided with the increase in momentum of colonization to the benefit of a growing imperial identity. When I visited the museum, the ambivalence within the museum, between its drive to acknowledge the atrocities of empire, while also hosting a jingoistic celebration of Britain's glory days was apparent. For example, the gift shop offers books and school materials on the slave trade, and sells canvas bags with imprints from ‘Steel Brothers & Co. LTD’, a British steel company that was also involved in the rice trade. The picture stamped on the canvas bag is typically Orientalist, featuring three men riding on an elephant. Conscientiously, the museum prospectus underscores that diversity is important in the materials offered and to the types of stories told; items for sale in its gift shop therefore display the diversity inherent in the museum's mission, a diversity that is not exclusively racial, religious, ethnic or defined by one's place of birth, but also associated with diverse of interpretations of empire. Significantly, the museum seeks to include plurality of perspective: Since so far material has been collected and interviews have been conducted within this country, the lives have inevitably been mostly those of people going from Britain to work overseas, as government employees, teachers, business people, or spouses. People living in Britain whose families are of Commonwealth origin have however, also offered valuable material and more is being collected. (Duffy 2004, p. 3)

The continued reference to colonialism through the moniker ‘people of commonwealth origin’ still reminds one of imperialism even as it complicates the situation by pointing out Britain is not alone in believing the Commonwealth to be a legitimate and even privileged organization. But in terms of the use that is made of the term ‘Commonwealth’ within the context of the museum, the fact remains that the collections which include material from states that have been independent from Britain for some 40 or 50 years or more, does not factor neatly into defining their relevance within a description of the museum. The exhibits themselves contribute to this ambiguous network of relations: exhibits displayed children's empirethemed board games, and then others depicted colonial scenes reflecting the dehumanization of colonial subjects. Thus, both the exhibits and the gift shop (where visitors can purchase mementos of their ‘Empire and Us’ experience), alongside the very conception of the museum itself, reveal a number of problematic issues. A review of the museum's prospectus is particularly enlightening since the majority of items donated to various collections in the museum originated in Britain (Duffy 2004; British Empire & Commonwealth Museum 1999). As the museum endeavors to achieve balance and struggles to increase its financing and its holdings, the actual process itself is heavily influenced by its sources but also by the objects themselves that are obtained predominantly from white British contributors. To illustrate this important phenomenon, I have included a description from the section of the prospectus that addresses the contents of the book collection. The museum holds a growing library of books, including those that been sent to the museum from the dissolved Commonwealth Institute:6 Item 37 The Island Queen by R M Ballantyne JAMES NISBET and CO London 1885 or [ ] dethroned by fire and water — a tale of the southern hemisphere [ ] Shipwrecked and adrift for days, cast upon a coral reef of a south sea island, young girl in the party ‘appointed’ queen [.] Emigrant ship wrecked on the same reef, [e]ncounters with savages and a volcano which sinks the island but they escape on a ship back to England [.]

While only one example of course, it is nevertheless representative. For those familiar with the imperial literature of Britain, it is not surprising that many of the descriptions of the holdings summarize tales of shipwrecks, cannibals, and comparisons to England.

Besides its library, the museum archives also include extensive holdings ranging from private donations to footage contributed from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Of particular interest to this discussion and context, I draw attention to the write up for Trotter: Trotter, 2001/090/- Charles Trotter was a commercial photographer based in Nairobi during the 1950s. The collection contains approximately 40,000 monochrome negatives representing the range of assignments undertaken by Mr. Trotter. Approximately 1,500 of the negatives have been made into loose prints. The photographs capture important historical events as seen through the eyes of a professional photographer. The photographs cover East Africa (Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in particular) and include royal visits and safaris, government visits, the Mau Mau Emergency, the Kikuyu, sporting events, agricultural shows, visiting film stars, landscapes and wildlife reserves.

Here, the ‘historical events’ range from royal visits to Africa to pictures of wildlife; buried within the description is the brief mention of the ‘Mau Mau Emergency’ and ‘the Kikuyu’. My use of this description is less about the materials than the written entry itself. The prospectus groups together the contents of the museum, and in this process of classification of peoples and political processes are only briefly alluded to, mere components (objects?) of the empire's larger list of ephemera. Other materials are worth considering and provide useful insights: Brayne, 2003/194/- ‘includes the donor's mother's scrapbooks of India (1920s–1940s)’ (p. 14); and Kendall, 2001/299/- ‘Papers relating to the colonial experience of the donor and his father … Kendall was in various posts … shifting to the judicial side of things after his marriage in 1910’ (p. 23); and from Clough, 2000/008/- ‘A collection of hunting logbooks, illustrated with photographs, which record hunting trips in East India in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The logbooks are completed chronologically, season by season. For each hunting season the book lists, in the form of a tally, the animals and birds which were killed’ (p. 38). What is remarkable in the selections included above is both the intimacy of the materials — scrapbooks and hunting logs — but also the intimacy of the descriptions. During my visit to the museum, staff informed me that much of the descriptions of collections and summaries of books were written by volunteers, many of whom had themselves served in some capacity or another abroad in the empire. We know that museums are changing; in ‘Whose museums’, Robert Coles (1992) discusses the importance of creating a museum that will attract younger generations, and others have

argued for the importance of supervised school trips (Hodges 1978; King 1992). Critics continue to question the function of museums and the ways in which collections are arranged (Hooper-Greenhill 1992), as well as the very nature of exhibiting (MacDonald 1998). One can witness a transition from the emphasis on the public record to the more personal account being validated as a historical document. Daniel Snowman (2004) addresses the complexities of heritage and he evokes the ‘awfulness of heritage’ and the ‘heritage industry’ as it developed in postThatcher Britain (former British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990) when ‘the very physicality of the past [was] under threat’ (p. 21). Snowman calls for an awareness of ‘a new public’ formed by immigrants and other marginalized segments of the community (p. 24). In defining Heritage, he writes: ‘[A] broader definition of Heritage has come to incorporate a more diverse view of the legacy of the past: not just ancestral estates and great art but individual, anecdotal connections to the past’ (p. 24). In part, the shifting cultural identity of Britain, and historical and sociological recognition of multicultural Britain has encouraged this more inclusive notion of heritage, whereby ‘[t]hose charged with deciding which building, artifact, beach or dialect to help save also have to consider tourist interest, job opportunities and a greatly broadened definition of historical significance …’ (pp. 27–28). This reminder of the multiple components of a museum's fabric — public draw, financing, etc. — directly correlate with the museum's recent announcement that it will relocate to London. Beyond pragmatic financial considerations (the need for improved funding, increasing attendance, and enhanced possibilities for access through comprehensive public transport), the move to London might very well foster dialogue on the subject of empire. Clearly, greater participation (via the proximity and availability) from populations in Britain who continue to be regarded and often treated as post-colonial subalterns will occur. The new location amidst other, higher profile museums, a more heterogeneous demography and large-scale tourism will surely create a context for debates on the legacy of empire, for explorations of the horrors of empire, and for competing ideologies to be debated. This museum has the potential, then, to offer a space in which the nation can negotiate its historicity. However, while the museum itself may very well benefit from this move and be able to maximize its cultural and social potential, one cannot help but be reminded of Bristol's earlier historical experience when it was eclipsed

during the Industrial Revolution by Liverpool's capacity to lure commercial activities away from Southwest England. Thus, we find ourselves returning full circle from the discussion of heritage to the earlier use of historicity and museums as vehicles of knowledge production. The British Empire & Commonwealth Museum closed its main exhibits in preparation for the museum's move in October 2008. The symbolism of the original space in Bristol, connected as it was with Brunel's passenger terminus and with the city's former trading glory during the early years of empire formation, has therefore been traded for a position in the imperial epicenter. This move from the periphery to the metropole bring to mind Samuel Selvon and other Windrush7 generation author — but what does this mean for the future of the museum itself? With its move to London, one wonders whether the museum loses its reflective capacity as it hovers on the edge of empire and becomes, in the famous phrasing of Edward Said, ‘more English than the English?’ Or, for that matter, more ‘British than the British Museum?’ After all, as Kate Fox (social anthropologist and author) has pointed out in the popular Watching the English (2004), the English are not fond of extremes. Relocating the museum to the metropole might relieve it of its literal and figurative fringe behavior. Once the museum becomes a more mainstream ‘attraction’, it may receive the coveted Lottery funding it was originally denied. The British Empire Museum had hardly had an auspicious start in Bristol. Unwelcomed by the Bristol Board of Tourism and resented for charging admission (because it did not receive lottery funding), the museum does not appear to be missed in Bristol (Bristol Evening Post 2007). The possibilities for the museum rest in the hope that upon opening its doors in London it will receive more foot traffic. Like all major metropolitan centers, London is as much a representation of the United Kingdom as it is a manifestation of globalization itself. Diverse audiences with varied experiences of/with empire and colonialism stand to subject the new museum to a kind of scrutiny that will lend additional vigor to existing critiques, while also infusing them with interesting comparative perspectives.8 These factors are of course compounded by the fact that London is also a major destination of both global migration and tourism, and many British citizens of course have roots in areas of the world that were formerly colonized by Britain. A museum committed to acknowledging and exploring the multiplicity of

those narratives, to highlighting the constitutive nature of those histories, might well be an endeavor worth supporting. As a vehicle for knowledge production, the museum functions as the mediator between the colonizer's history of a white British Empire and the influx of immigrants from its former and current dominions. We can see how the museum exists as a sort of device whereby the ‘Empire responds to the Empire Writes Back’.9 Rather than a conversation, this is another example in which the text of empire is produced for the consumption of the metropole because the move to London is a consequence of the sense that the museum cannot thrive without being located in the epicenter of empire's memory. Thus, any consideration of the future of the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum must take into account the manner in which the museum seeks to interrogate, dissolve, and thus inevitably rebuild and reconstruct a history of inclusion. In a New York Times interview, the Museum Director Gareth Griffiths clarified this position: As far as this institution is concerned, it is enough that we don't step back from the most uncomfortable periods of our national history and don't hide and duck the realities of history … We're here as an institution that is collecting a history that was forgotten and was disappearing and, in the future, as a forum for presenting this history and encouraging debate … (cited in Riding 2003)

However, a central dilemma remains unresolved. Empire was designed around exclusion; how then can one celebrate the glory of empire while at the same time acknowledging that its success was premised on the successful exploitation of peoples and resources? The United States has recently had to deal with a similar crisis of identity, given that the presidential campaign of Senator, now President Barack Obama, made issues such as slavery, racial segregation, and lingering civil rights problems inescapable. Museums such as the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, California, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center located in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee housed in the converted Lorraine Motel where Dr Martin Luther King, Jr was assassinated, are indicative of the concerned efforts that have been made in the United States to face the difficult chapters in American national history. This is the kind of self-reflection that

the Museum of Empire & Commonwealth has the opportunity to cultivate, and its programming could yield productive exchanges on the complexity of British diasporic communities and the shifting parameters of memory. In the years to come, it will be interesting to monitor these debates. Griffiths also claimed in the aforementioned New York Times interview that the British Empire was only touched upon in a cursory way in schools and that ‘The British Empire is now a black hole in history, and few dare look into its depths’. As The British Empire & Commonwealth Museum begins this new journey, one is left to wonder whether Britain will have the courage to venture into this odyssey or instead prefer to adhere to the safety of imperial amnesia. Clearly, the success of the museum upon its reopening in London will certainly be a test of Britain's ability to accept a newly configured national identity and embrace alternative historical memories.

Acknowledgements I would like to express my sincere appreciation to the staff of the British Empire & Commonwealth Museum for their help during my visit, and for their admirable drive to create a museum in the face of great difficulties. I would also like to thank my colleagues Bertrand Bickersteth, D.L. Davies and Lois Tyson for their insightful comments and suggestions, and Emily Garcia for her invaluable help in finding sources.

Notes 1.

For more on the decision of the museum's residency in Bristol and the resulting occupation of Brunel's terminus, see Thomson (2002) and Bristol Evening Post (2007).

2.

See for example, Loyrette (2002).

3.

Kenneth Morgan discusses the role Bristol played in international trade with the West Indies and how Bristol's position as a dominant port was affected by different commercial decisions (1989, 1993).

4.

One of these projects is a new Museum of Bristol (scheduled to open in 2011) to be located at Princes Wharf; this would replace the recently closed Bristol Industrial Museum. It is interesting to note (at the time of this writing) that despite the Museum of Bristol's planned emphasis on Bristol's maritime history, no description on the museum's nascent website, on the leaflet describing the museum and calling for contributions, or even Bristol City Council's website mentions Bristol's role in the slave trade, though publications on the Bristol Industrial Museum do allude to a ‘Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery’ gallery. This conspicuous absence speaks to the Bristol Evening Post article cited earlier, which suggested a general reluctance on behalf of Bristol's city council to engage with Bristol's history with regard to the slave trade. An editorial

in The Guardian newspaper (2003) even calls for Bristol to own its ‘bloody past’ through a Museum of Slavery. 5.

The British Empire & Commonwealth Museum webpage, http://www.empiremuseum.co.uk/exhibitions/st2007.htm (accessed 14 November 2008).

6.

The fact that the museum is the beneficiary of the dissolved Commonwealth Institute has been the subject of an article by Donald Hencke (2002), for whom this move is indicative of Britain's lack of commitment to multiculturalism; of particular relevance in the article is the view that the library (that held significant holdings) was ‘dumped’ on the Museum of Empire, an already understaffed and underfunded institution with no means to further disseminate the materials in the collection.

7.

The Empire Windrush was a passenger ship traveling from Jamaica to Britain. When it docked in Tilbury in 1948 it marked the first significant migration from the Caribbean to Britain (Stein 2004).

8.

Niall Ferguson has written about the phenomenon of ‘Anglobalisation’ (2004) as a way of circumscribing some of these complex global realignments.

9.

The Museum Director, Gareth Griffiths, should not be confused with the author of The empire writes back (Ashcroft et al., 1989).

References Anderson, B., 1987. Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso. Arendt, H., 1993 [1968]. Between past and future: eight exercises in political thought. New York: Penguin Books. Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H., 1989. The empire writes back. New York: Routledge. Bristol Evening Post, 2007. Passage of time, 4 December, p. 34. British Empire & Commonwealth Museum, 1999. Voices and echoes: research paper no 5: a catalogue of oral history holdings of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. Bristol: British Commonwealth & Empire Museum. Coles, R., 1992. Whose museums? American Art, 6 (1), 6–11. Duffy, J., 2004. A prospectus of the archival collections held at the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum. Bristol: The British Empire & Commonwealth Museum. Ferguson, N., 2004. Empire: the rise and demise of the British world order. New York: Basic Books.

Foucault, M., 1994 [1971]. The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Vintage. Fox, K., 2004. Watching the English: the hidden rules of English behaviour. London: Hodder & Stoughton. The Guardian, 2003. Museum of slavery, 25 February, p. 20. Hegel, G., 1956 [1837]. Philosophy of history, trans. J. Sibree. New York: Dover. Hencke, D., 2002. ‘Asset stripping’ of cultural treasure. The Guardian, 22 November. Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2002/nov/22/highereducation.artsandhuma nities (accessed 14 November 2008). Hodges, D.J., 1978. Museums, anthropology, and minorities: in search of a new relevance for old artifacts. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 9 (2), 148–157. Hooper-Greenhill, E., 1992. Museums and the shaping of knowledge. New York: Routledge. Jones, P., 1992. Museums and the meanings of their contents. New Literary History, 23 (4), 911–921. King, E.W., 1992. Using museums for more effective teaching of ethnic relations. Teaching Sociology, 20 (2), 114–120. Loyrette, H., 1992. La Tour Eiffel. In: P. Nora, ed., Les lieux de mémoire: de l'archive à l'emblème. Paris: Gallimard, 475–503. MacDonald, S., ed., 1998. The politics of display: Museums, science, culture. New York: Routledge. Morgan, K., 1989. Shipping patterns and the Atlantic trade of Bristol, 1749–1770. The William and Mary Quarterly, 46 (3), 506–538. Morgan, K., 1993. Bristol West India merchants in the eighteenth century. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society., Sixth Series 3, 185–208. Museum of Bristol. Bristol City Council, n.d. Available at: http://www.bristol.gov.uk/ccm/content/Leisure-Culture/MuseumsGalleries/museum-of-bristol.en (accessed 14 November 2008).

Museum of Bristol Leaflet. Museum of Bristol, n.d. Latest News. Bristol City Council. Available at: http://www.bristol.gov.uk/ccm/content/Leisure-Culture/MuseumsGalleries/museum-of-bristol-latest-news.en (accessed 14 November 2008). Riding, A., 2003. Displaying an empire for posterity. New York Times, 4 January. Available at: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html? res=9504EFD71E3FF937A35752C0A9659C8B63 (accessed 14 November 2008). Snowman, D., 2004. On the heritage trail. History Today, 54 (9), 20–28. Stein, M., 2004. Black British literature: novels of transformation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Thomson, C., 2002. Trail of the unexpected: step into Britain's secret history at the new Empire Museum in Bristol. The Independent, 2 November, p. 12.

Finding a home in Hackney? Reimagining narratives of slavery through a multicultural community museum space Zoe Norridge New College, Oxford University, Oxford, UK This article examines Hackney Museum's exhibition Abolition '07 and asks how the multicultural nature of this London borough affected attempts to memorialise the abolition of the slave trade – a trade which has had a direct impact on so many of the local residents. Analysing the exhibition materials and referring to the creative writing produced by young visitors, Hackney Council encouraged an ‘ethics of empathy’ to enable a collective response to tragedy and horror, pride in the borough's abolitionist history and a shared ownership of the past. Such an approach is not unproblematic. Drawing on the work of historians, identification theorists and postcolonial critics, I suggest that imagining the pain of enslaved people falls within wider discursive frameworks which may encourage voyeuristic reading practices and an appropriative approach to alterity. However, despite significant limitations, I ultimately maintain that Abolition '07's encouragement of identifications across time, space and race is an effective strategy for reinserting the human into these stories of the past. One of the most striking images of the Middle Passage is the tight-packing of the slave ships, an illustration often used in history textbooks and anthologies on the African American experience. This image is no doubt familiar, even hackneyed. (Diedrich et al. 1999, p. 6) Poets Adisa and Baden Prince took children from Hackney schools on a journey from Africa to the Caribbean […] like Olaudah Equiano before them … (Hewitt et al. 2007)

As Diedrich et al. pointed out 10 years ago in their edited volume Black imagination and the middle passage, representations of the slave trade fall between history and fiction (1999, p. 5). Whilst there is an economic, social and political context for the European trade in enslaved Africans which can to a certain extent be mapped through historical records, accounts of those who suffered and died on the slave ships and in the plantations are limited, for the most part lost, and retrievable only through the imagination. Museums commemorating the 1807 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act are faced with a body of literature and imagery, presented and represented

across centuries, to different audiences and purposes, which in the aforementioned editors' words has become ‘familiar, even hackneyed’ (p. 6).1 And yet there is also a sense of absent voices which, impossible as they are to pin down, offer endless potential for new exploration. Curators of slavery exhibitions must negotiate this territory between what has been already said and what can never be said. In the United Kingdom such a cultural heritage of historical fictions sits uncomfortably alongside a certain collective cultural amnesia surrounding slavery and its ongoing implications. In contrast to the hypervisibility of the trade in United States, until recently slavery was under-commemorated and unacknowledged within the former colonial seat. A year before Black imagination was published, the managing director of UK Heritage Projects rejected the possibility of creating a ‘Museum of Slavery’ as ‘unacceptable to the British public’ (Bernier and Newman 2008, p. 135). However, despite this precedence of reticence, in the last 10 years the number of heritage sites memorialising the slave trade has increased exponentially and the bicentennial was marked by nearly every major British museum, with special events and exhibitions staged in London, Swansea, Hull, Birmingham, Liverpool, Bristol and Newcastle upon Tyne amongst others (p. 135). This article will examine how a community museum in Hackney negotiated tensions between history and fiction, between visible and easily obscured narratives, between cultural amnesia and imaginative empathy. As the second epigraph suggests, children were one of the key audiences for this exhibition and the creative writing produced by school pupils during a range of poetry workshops at the museum will provide much of my material for reflection. These children were invited to participate in a metaphorical journey between Africa and the Caribbean, to imagine themselves into the testimonial gap that is the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century middle passage. Despite the claim of the editors of the resulting collection of poetry that ‘like Olaudah Equiano before them the children were taken from the slave forts in Ghana, through the “door of no return”’, this education exercise is nothing like what was actually experienced by enslaved people. However, the gesture of imaginative identification remains intriguing and this paper will aim to explore what it means to encourage such gestures of empathy at the multicultural community level.

Hackney Museum publicity explains that Abolition '07, which ran from March to November 2007, was devised to ‘commemorate the bicentenary of abolition and to explore the impact of enslavement on the borough's communities’ (Hackney Council 2007, p. 6). These communities are extremely diverse with over a quarter of residents of the northeast London borough describing themselves as Black British, African or Caribbean. Hackney is also home to a large Orthodox Jewish population (8% – Stamford Hill is the largest Charedi community outside of New York and Israel) and only 44.1 percent of the borough's residents describe themselves as White British compared with 88.8 percent of the general population (Hackney Council 2006). The council website explains that: Historically Hackney is a place where migrant communities arrived as transitory residents, then stayed and settled. That process continues today. The Afro-Caribbean community developed fully from the 1950s, but there has been a Black presence in Hackney since at least 1630. Similarly, people from the Indian subcontinent came to Hackney in numbers only after the Second World War, but Asian nurses of British children visiting Britain with their employers, had been staying in Hackney since 1900. (Hackney Council website 2008)

The curators of Abolition '07 were acutely aware of the diversity of their audience and of the direct relevance and sensitivity of the topic of slavery and by extension colonialism to the borough's inhabitants. Hackney, being one of around 650 Local Authority Museums out of a total of approximately 2500 museums across the UK (Museum Association website 2008), was able to focus specifically on the importance of the heritage of slavery for a known population of local residents, as opposed to the transient groups of visitors and tourists that flow through national heritage sites such as the British Museum. Hackney residents are at the heart of Abolition '07 in terms of both spatial positioning and narrative. The museum itself is located near Hackney Town Hall in a striking modern building which also houses the Hackney Technology and Learning Centre. The permanent sections of the museum describe the history of the borough and its peoples, with special exhibitions mounted in a relatively small room to the right hand side of the entrance. In developing the exhibition, curators drew on principles of community participation which have become the touchstone of UK local government, involving leaders from black communities across the borough in the design of displays and activities. Visitors entering the space in 2007 were immediately confronted with commentary from a specially

commissioned film Hear my voice, played on loop in the exhibition foyer. The film, directed by Kwaku Mensah, includes interviews with a range of local figures (including Toyin Agbetu, Sophia Bâ, Shango Baku, Rev. Joyce Daley, Godfried Dongkor and Joshua Folkes amongst others) discussing what the slave trade means to them. These interviews reveal themes that continue throughout the exhibition including: the direct impact of events on the borough, ‘We live with the African diaspora and the Caribbean here and now in Hackney’; the ownership of Abolition by black people Abolition was not an act of parliament, it was us fighting for our freedom’; the impossibility of ever understanding events of the past ‘I can never know because I only know snippets of it’; and the ongoing legacies of inequality ‘We see its effects in what goes on in Hackney today, on our estates’. Turning away from this opening film, the visitor then enters a seemingly conventional looking exhibition space made up of written information and exhibition cases. Hackney curators constructed a series of panels within this square-shaped exhibition hall in order to create a room inside a room, a corridor that visitors must walk around in a spiral following the chronological development of the slave trade through a range of exhibits before reaching an enclosed space in the centre where artwork, poetry and stories written by local school children are displayed. The text heavy panels that line the corridor walls before the visitor reaches the central community area initially appear to be rather predictable, grouped under titles such as ‘Triangular Trade’, ‘Oppression’ and ‘Resistance’. However, on closer examination, the panels are seen to foreground the history of Abolition through the voices of Hackney residents, encouraging visitors to identify with both former slaves and abolitionists. As the Hackney council literature accompanying Black History Month in 2007 explained, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries ‘Hackney was a hotbed for radical thinking and home to strong anti-slavery support’ (Hackney Council 2007, p. 6). Focusing in particular on the borough's non-conformist theological colleges and the role of local abolitionists (including Joseph Woods Sr and Samuel Hoare Jr) links are also made to Olaudah Equiano whose descendent Joanna Vassa (1795– 1857) is buried in the local Abney Park Cemetery. Aware of the hunger of local residents to hear black voices talking about their own experiences, the Abolition '07 exhibition included extensive

quotations from texts written by formerly enslaved Africans, emphasising the individuality and subjectivity of the peoples the practice of slave trading attempted to dehumanise and homogenise. Often these comments are overtly moral, as is the case with Equiano's statement: ‘But is not the slave trade entirely at war with the heart of man?’ At other times they describe the violence of the trade with the immediacy of the first person: The horrors I soon saw and felt cannot be well described; I saw many of my miserable countrymen chained two and two, some hand-cuffed, and some with their hands tied behind … when a vessel arrived to conduct us away to the ship, it was a most horrible scene; there was nothing to be heard but rattling of chains, smacking of whips, and the groans and cries of our fellow-men. Some would not stir from the ground, when they were lashed and beat in the most horrible manner. (Ottobah Cugoano quotation from Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery displayed in Hackney Museum)

These extracts are clearly written in the style of an eye-witness account with repeated first-person pronouns, assertions of group identity (my miserable countrymen, our fellow-men) and sensory information about the experience of enslavement (Cugoano paints particularly vivid soundscapes). Whilst visitors might reasonably assume that such narratives give us direct insight into the experiences of being enslaved, there is a growing body of literature which points out that the reality is rather more complex. Barnor Hesse, in an essay on postcolonial memory, argues that slave narratives were commercially and politically determined to the extent that they became generic, commenting: Within the terms of abolitionism, the populist critique of slavery depended on the production and circulation of slave narratives consumed by a white constituency of readers. Slave narratives were packaged and sold to a mesmerized white audience as voyeuristic windows on bleak but distant, abject and horrific experiences. (Hesse 2002, p. 146)

Arguably then, slave narratives form an early example of sensationalist stories about suffering black subjects, communicated to a white audience with the purpose of inciting empathy to precipitate change (these rhetorical devices are not entirely dissimilar to those employed by some international development NGOs in the UK and elsewhere today). As Hesse goes on to point out, the distributors of slave narratives were in the business of ‘moral suasion’ rather than ‘political meditation on the meaning of racial slavery in Western culture’ (2002, p. 146). That literature is tailored for particular audiences and is determined by marketing strategies is not in itself an

unusual or particularly shocking concept. However, what is rather more problematic in the case of this exhibition is that such narratives are presented as mimetic windows on the past without thorough examination of the ways in which they were produced and consumed. This unease is then further complicated when we consider how the past consumption of such stories implicates our reading practices in the present. Marcus Wood, in his book Slavery, empathy and pornography, makes a convincing and deeply provocative argument, suggesting that it is no accident that the rise in abolition literatures coincided with the growth of ‘Evangelism as a movement of social and moral reform’, ‘pornography as an organised leisure industry’ and a prevailing mood of ‘sensibility and sentiment’ (2002, p. 12). In fact, he argues that the relationship between white consumers and suffering blacks is fundamentally one of voyeurism and appropriation: the English have a long history reconfiguring the pain of others in terms of their own endurance and even in early accounts of the slave trade there is a tendency towards a ‘self-reflexive dynamics of suffering’ (p. 3): In the imaginations of Laurence Sterne, Wordsworth, Blake or Captain John Stedman, it is possible simultaneously to suffer and to inflict the violence which causes the suffering. Such a seemingly impossible duality is achieved by setting up parallel fantasies in which the role of victim and victimizer are both played out by the same narrational persona. (2002, p. 13)

Such gestures result in ‘feeling for the slave within the promiscuous emotional dynamics of sentimental empathy’ (p. 13). Wood's thesis is that in thinking and writing about the suffering slave, the abolitionist and their audience enjoy the emotional intensity of identification, unconsciously fondling the wound and taking pleasure in feeling for another's pain. Wood concludes that ‘the dirtiest thing the Western imagination ever did, and it does it compulsively still, is to believe in the aesthetically healing powers of empathetic fiction’ (p. 36). I disagree with some of the arguments in Slavery, empathy and pornography, in particular with Wood's use of the work of South African author J.M. Coetzee as evidence for the impossibility of empathetic witnessing (p. 36) and with his suggestion that Clarkson takes a degree of sadomasochistic delight in the discovery of torture equipment in a Liverpool chandlery (p. 414). However, the idea that pain can be appropriated and used as entertainment remains vitally important for our

understanding of contemporary commemorations of slavery. Museums, after all, are spaces which ‘enable people to explore collections for inspiration, learning and enjoyment’ (Museum Association website 2008). Visitors to exhibitions commemorating the abolition of slavery, as with visitors to the slave forts along the coast of West Africa, do experience a form of pleasure alongside the sadness of commemoration, an uncomfortable sense of gratification in their mourning. This uneasy relationship between pain and pleasure, between identification and appropriation, is negotiated in particularly intriguing terms through education projects for children. To recapitulate, whilst the outlying ‘corridor’ of the Abolition '07 exhibition space was filled with panels detailing the historical chronology of the slave trade, foregrounding local abolitionists and quoting extensively from slave narratives, the central area of the room was dedicated to community interaction and displayed the work of local school children who had responded creatively to the topic. This community space extends the themes of empathy and slave agency in extraordinary ways through the workshops the museum ran with children from schools across the borough of Hackney. Through experiential learning, visiting groups of schoolchildren were encouraged to imagine what it was like to be forced out of home and sent on a terrifying journey. In the darkened museum space, the children were tied together and lead around the external exhibition corridor listening to stories told by performance poets Adisa and Baden Prince. As Adisa explains: The sessions involve re-enacting capture, the middle passage and plantation life. We use roleplay to bring to life the horrors of the trade. We also look at freedom fighters and the role they played in bringing liberation to their people […] I am the poetic narrator and use my voice to paint the picture and create the atmosphere for the story to unfold…. (Adisa in Black History Month, Hackney Council 2007, p. 8)

Over 2000 children aged 7-11 attended poetry sessions at the exhibition between March and November 2007. After hearing Adisa and Baden Prince's stories of slavery, the children were invited to create artwork and poetry in response to their museum visit. These creative responses have been displayed in the museum and published in an edited collection entitled And still I rise: Hackney pupils and poets speak out about enslavement (2007). The poems are unusually moving and many are extraordinary, particularly because of the varied usages of the first person. The following five extracts will give a sense of the mood of their response.

I was feeling scared smelling the sweat of all Those unknown people. I heard lots of people screaming for help but Instead of help they Lashed us with whips. I live in a world of terror. (Adam, Southwold JM&I Primary School) I taste death I smell blood I touch pain I see torture (Faysal Mohamed, Gayhurst Primary School) It was like I was a pregnant person and I felt like my baby would die in my body to the foul smell of waste. It felt like my conscience was telling me to stay alive and believe in myself. It felt like my mother was also on the ship with me, clutching my hand and telling me not to give up but I lost her and found out that she had thrown herself off the side of the boat in the early hours of her 50th birthday. (Selei Smalling, Gayhurst Primary School) I live in a world where birds fly with fear, where people are enslaved. (Elif Nur Ozkul, Northwold Primary School) I can hear people crying for help, praying in their hearts. I thought that I was going to die if I did not get out of there and claim back my whole identity. (Zainab, Southwold JM&I Primary School)

These poems stress the somatic experiences of slavery, frightening smells and sounds alongside painful sensations. The children articulate a lack of hope, an all-pervasive sense of entrapment and despair where the usual parameters of existence – that people have the capacity to help, that mothers can offer protection – are no more. The diversity of these groups of pupils is apparent in the names of the five children whose poems are quoted above. Yet they all assume an enslaved ‘I’. To examine the politics of this firstperson pronoun identification, I will turn to Diana Fuss and Sam Durrant whose work on social justice and identity will highlight some of the complexities of the gesture. In the introduction to Identification papers, Fuss asserts that identification ‘invokes phantoms’ (1995, p. 1). Drawing on the work of

Freud, she suggests that we use identification to fill the void left by a lost love-object. Consequently, ‘to be open to an identification is to be open to a death encounter, open to the very possibility of communing with the dead’ (p. 1). Such an assertion resonates with issues at the heart of the memorialisation of slavery, where the object of loss is not only those enslaved people who are no longer alive, but entire cultural histories, ancestral identities and a belief in the sacred nature of human dignity. The idea of communing with the dead in an attempt to recover absent voices from the past recurs throughout creative literature's responses to slavery, the most famous of these being found in Toni Morrison's Beloved. In this novel Morrison imagines the possible return of the dead and coins the term ‘rememory’ to describe what Geoffrey Hartman refers to as the recovery of ‘the very possibility of memory itself (2004, p. 423). The Hackney schoolchildren who write slave narratives from the first person ‘I’ are perhaps too young to be haunted by the impossibility of memory. Yet their poems show a willingness to identify with the stories of others across the boundaries of time, space and race. Is the children's gesture of identification also marked by some form of loss or is the ease with which they speak from/for the dead an indication of happy integrity? In psychoanalytic terms childhood is of course fundamentally marked by both loss and lack (Lacan 1999, pp. 1–7). Diaspora writers have also spoken about a certain ‘inheritance of loss’ – the sense that the traumas of the past are passed down through generations (Desai 2006). Do these schoolchildren from this borough – one of the most diverse within the UK – experience a form of inherited loss and feel the lack of a collective past? How are their notions of history affected by understandings of their own parents' past and their families' experiences of a previous place? School is arguably one of the prime sites for the development of a child's sense of heritage and cultural identity. In asking young people to identify with narratives of slavery, are Adisa and Baden Prince opening up new opportunities for children to participate in the formation of alternative collective histories? My purpose in posing these questions is not so much to answer them (which would in any case involve long and detailed qualitative research) but instead to suggest that the ways in which children interact with postcolonial memory disturb many of the assumptions we maintain as adults about collective guilt and constructed identities. Sam Durrant has argued

convincingly that the principal task of postcolonial narrative is ‘to engender a consciousness of the unjust foundations of the present and to open up the possibility of a just future’ (2004, p. 1). As such, narratives of slavery are as much to do with how we want to refigure our lives now as with accurate reconstructions of the past. Interestingly, none of the children's poems published as a result of the Hackney poetry workshops are written from the perspective of the present and consequently they give limited insight into how the children themselves feel about this act of rememory. However, in the last pages of And still I rise we do find poems by adult poets offering more of a self-reflexive commentary. The titles alone are telling: ‘I am the gatekeeper’ (Adisa), ‘Still I rise’ (Maya Angelou), ‘Diaspora’ (Baden Prince), ‘Hear me now’ (Cheryl Bowen) and ‘My Instrument my pen’ (Adisa). These final poems offer a temporal grounding in the present which is absent from the remainder of the volume, placing the interface between memory and ongoing experience at the end point of the collection. In Postcolonial narrative and the work of mourning, Durrant explores the commemoration of colonial traumas and the boundaries between mourning, which, following Freud, he reads as ‘the healthy process of remembering in order to forget’ and melancholia, defined as ‘an unhealthy process of remembering that seems to have no end other than the perpetuation of the process of remembering itself (2004, p. 9). The poetry written by Hackney schoolchildren in response to Abolition '07 appears to be melancholic in that it is based upon an identification with no obvious resolution other than the gradual effacement of the memory through time. The Hackney poets on the other hand, at first seem to be mourning in the sense that they speak from the present with self-reflection about their own place in the world, but on closer examination emerge as equally melancholic in the sense that their current identities are also determined by an ongoing and endless identification with the past. Adisa claims to be the gatekeeper between the past and the present whilst Maya Angelou asserts: ‘I am the dream and hope of the slave’ (Hewitt et al. 2007, p. 45). Relating the psychoanalytic concepts of mourning and melancholia to currents in contemporary thinking, Durrant suggests this sense of being caught between the importance of the past in the present and the desire to change the future, is symptomatic of the postcolonial condition:

Psychoanalysis, with its commitment to the well-being of the subject, encourages us to exorcise our ghosts, to come to terms with loss and move on. Deconstruction, with its commitment to the other, to that which ‘unhinges’ the subject, urges us to learn to live with ghosts. Postcolonial narrative, which addresses the individual reader both in his or her singularity and as a member of wider communities, is caught between these two commitments: its transformation of the past into a narrative is simultaneously an attempt to summon the dead and to lay them to rest. (2004, p. 9)

As such, it is perhaps not surprising that cultural explorations of legacies of colonialism are founded upon identifications, which, as I explored with reference to Fuss, are bound up with a willingness to encounter the dead. Homi Bhabha, drawing on Morrison's description of her fiction as ‘the fully realised presence of a haunting’, confirms such a suspicion, arguing that ‘the critic must attempt to fully realise, and take responsibility for the unspoken, unrepresented pasts that haunt the historical present’ (1994, p. 12). For the children participating in creative writing workshops the identification with lost voices is then symptomatic of the ongoing condition of postcolonial melancholia. This condition becomes problematic precisely because of the inheritance of unequal power relations that are circumscribed in the term itself. Ato Quayson and David Goldberg have observed that whilst postcolonial theory desires to ‘speak to the Western paradigm of knowledge in the voice of otherness’ (2002, p. xii), it is simultaneously trapped in a relationship with a past it would rather deconstruct. As such it lays claim for ‘an object for academic study which it is obliged simultaneously to disavow’ (p. xiii). Mark Sanders has elaborated on this concept in the South African context arguing that ‘when opposition takes the form of demarcation from something, it cannot, it follows, be untouched by that to which it opposes itself. Opposition takes its first steps from a footing of complicity’ (2002, p. 9). Given that the ways in which slavery and colonialism continue to shape our world today were persistently underacknowledged in the exhibit, one may assume that the Hackney Museum curators were not aware of this context of complicity. Whilst the exhibition encouraged positive identifications with local abolitionists and former slave residents in the borough, it did little to explore the more complex ways in which Hackney residents profited from the slave trade and remain, even today, implicit in these economic transactions. In addition, the museum managers failed to question the ways in which identification with slave

narratives could be read as an enduringly colonial approach to alterity. Let us return to Fuss to explore this further. Reflecting on the dynamics of identity, Fuss posits that ‘identification is the detour through the other that defines the self’ (1995, p. 2). In certain situations this detour is appropriative and unethical, setting up a dialectic of self and other that is based on domination and denial of infinite otherness, as is often the case in colonial discourse (p. 142). In all cases, it poses the question of how we can establish ethical relationships with other people based on the premise that it is their alterity which makes them both distinct and incomprehensible. In other words: ‘How can the other be brought into the domain of the knowable without annihilating the other as other -as precisely that which cannot be known?’ (p. 4). In Peau noire, masques blancs (‘Black skin, white masks’) Fanon argues that it is precisely this sense of inexplicable alterity which the colonial project attempts to suppress through objectifying the black person, positing non-white people as racial others dependent on a central white signifier for their identity, and excluding the black subject from the dynamics of self formation (1952). This reminder of the enduring colonialism present in the postcolonial resonates with some of the viewing and creative practices that were manifest at the Hackney Museum. By encouraging visitors to Abolition '07 to identify with slave narratives, did the curators set the scene for yet another appropriation of black stories, for the consumption of black histories and their reintegration within a fundamentally white chronology? In suggesting that children can feel their way into the slave experience, did Adisa and Baden Prince ignore the idea that we will never be able to imagine the trauma of enslavement, that this process, experienced by individuals from across Africa in diverse ways, cannot be collapsed into one ‘story of the slave’.2 It is perhaps hard to imagine a Holocaust museum inviting young visitors to make a similar leap of identification and empathy – who would ask children to write poems about what it is like to live and die in a concentration camp? Holocaust studies have an established theoretical tradition of stressing the lost witness (Levi 1987), the impossibility of knowledge of the extreme states of human suffering (Agamben 1999) and a need for cautious respect for the alterity of the other (Lévinas 1969). The horror with which false testimonies about

traumatic experiences is greeted suggests that there is something sacred about survivorship whose appropriation we find aversive in fiction. In assuming an enslaved poetic ‘I’, then do the Hackney schoolchildren both participate in a colonial gesture which confirms the slave's existence only in relation to the Western setting of a museum, and effect an appropriation which denies the ungraspable individuality and horror of the enslaved condition? The answer to both charges in this case is likely to be affirmative and yet such a framing cannot provide us with a complete picture of what this exhibition was attempting to achieve. Identification is premised on projection into another's space, to write in another's voice is to appropriate their identity, and to talk with an authoritative ‘I’ is to deny the impossibility of knowing. But the refusal or unwillingness to do so is potentially equally horrifying. If the visitor to an exhibition is asked to bear witness to the suffering of enslaved peoples without any form of identification then does this not also in related yet subtly different ways deny the humanity of those who suffer? Not to imagine what it would feel like to experience a certain pain is to suggest that the person in pain is not a person like ‘us’. This indeed is the fundamental basis of the colonial project. Marcus Wood has pointed out that slavery was made possible through a ‘racially encoded psychic reflex’ which allowed white traders and owners to assume that black people responded to pain differently. Wood writes: ‘how can a white audience get beyond the acculturated sense that they are looking at a skin that appears different from their own, and which consequently must be assumed to respond to pain differently?’ (2000, p. 281). The question is problematic on several grounds: firstly, because it assumes a monolithic white audience and secondly because it assumes the privileging of skin colour as an essential marker of difference. However, the key point, that European violence towards African peoples was made possible by the supposition that they didn't share the same human response to suffering, remains. It is this racial divide in suffering, presupposed by colonialism, that is destabilised by the forms of identification with slave narratives and imagined slaves, that the Hackney Museum encourages. This ‘ethics of empathy’ is experienced in different ways by the various visitors to the exhibition space. The local resident who arrives alone and wonders into Abolition '07 unaccompanied by performance poets

establishes a specular relationship to the material on display. Although they are encouraged to feel through the extensive quotations from slave narratives, the relationship is predominantly visual. As Sontag argued in Regarding the pain of others: The exhibition in photographs of cruelties inflicted on those with darker complexions in exotic countries continues [the tradition of human zoos], oblivious to the considerations that deter such displays of our own victims of violence; for the other, even when not an enemy, is regarded only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees. (2003, p. 65)

Following Sontag, in looking at images of enslaved people being whipped in chains or in gazing at the thumb screws and shackles designed for effecting submission we maintain a distance between self and other, a distance which is comforting in that it denies the relevance to self. In this case the ambulatory visitor would fail fully to identify through the visual encounter and the lack of identification would be re-read as distance and indifference. In contrast, the schoolchildren visiting Abolition '07 are invited to identify with enslaved Africans through their own experiences. In being tied together and lead through the exhibition in the dark, the poets hope to create a somatically grounded sense of fear, a bodily response to stories of suffering which is evident in the resulting poems' stress on sounds, smells and taste. I believe that the ethical potential of this exhibition lies in the foundation of children's experiences in the experiential rather than the purely specular. Barnor Hesse has remarked that ‘through a historically positioned racialized embodiment, the black subject remembers slavery through trauma and the white subject remembers it through guilt’ (2002, p. 164). Where the Hackney museum diverges from this approach is by inviting schoolchildren from a wide range of backgrounds to share a collective rememory of trauma. This ‘colour-blind’ remembering subverts the mechanisms of racial difference which made slavery possible in the first place. Ironically however, it is also this very gesture of identification which, as I have discussed above, denies the alterity of the racial other. In this article I have argued that Hackney's Abolition '07 was unique amongst the commemorative events of 2007 because of the direct involvement of its visitors. Working with a known audience, the curators deliberately foregrounded the relevance of the slave trade for the borough's residents in terms of individual identity and origin and drew on the

narratives of historical and contemporary figures from the diverse communities in the area. I have also sought to highlight the complex identity politics present in any such exhibition which negotiates, as Hackney does, themes of lost narratives, ongoing historical trauma, racial difference and postcolonial identification. I have suggested that the empathetic imaginative response to slavery which the museum encouraged amongst schoolchildren is necessarily flawed in terms of discourses of self and other. The response is however as ethical as is possible within the postcolonial framing, a framing which inevitably contains traces of the power dynamics of the colonial past. Elements which could have been further developed included acknowledgement of our varying responsibilities for the exploitation of the past, assertion of the diversity of different slave experiences, an admission of the impossibility of ever truly accessing traumatic colonial memories, as well as an assessment of the postcolonial economic and social dissymmetries associated with these historical antecedents. In briefly contrasting the encounters of schoolchildren with those of the casual caller, the objective has been to underscore the multiple levels and fundamentally different ways in which the exhibition was experienced by visitors. Céleste-Marie Bernier, in an article about Godfried Donkor's ‘Financial Times’ installation at the exhibition (which I have not mentioned here because it has been discussed elsewhere) argues that Donkor contests the Hackney Museum's ‘didactic commemoration of slavery’ through an ‘experimental montage’ (2008, p. 40). What is intriguing is that Bernier doesn't talk about the Hear my voice film played in the museum foyer, nor does she engage with the creative work produced by local schoolchildren. Her experience of the exhibition is of a space that merely reiterates wellknown narratives, leaning on predictable yet problematic objects. Whilst Bernier may not have been alone in this impression, for the children who participated in poetry sessions, which encouraged them to identify with and make creative empathetic gestures towards enslaved people, the memories and indeed rememories of the Abolition '07 space are rather different. These children engage in precisely the form of ‘repeated engagement’ which Donkor seems to advocate (2008, p. 203). Geoffrey Hartman, in an article entitled ‘Public memory and its discontents’ argues that ‘there is a link between epistemology and morality,

between how we get to know what we know (through various, including electronic, media) and the moral life we aspire to lead’ (2004, p. 418). Current exhibitions affect how we view our present and future, influencing our sense of responsibility for the past and our ongoing commitment to change. Marcus Wood has explored how Doreen Lawrence, mother of Stephen Lawrence (a black British teenager stabbed to death in 1993), mentions slavery in her account of the manner in which white police officers left Stephen to bleed to death. He suggests it demonstrates a ‘complete divide over relative human values’ (2002, p. 19). In a borough where gun crime is on the rise and there are ongoing tensions between the (increasingly diverse) police force and alienated young people, the importance of a community space which encourages cross-racial identification and reflection on the legacies of racial relativism cannot be denied (London Against Gun and Knife Crime 2008). Problematic as the commemoration of slavery always is, the Hackney Museum's Abolition '07 exhibition is a valiant attempt to open up dialogue and reinsert humanity into the discourse of local history.

Acknowledgements This article was originally presented as a paper comparing the Hackney Museum's ‘ethics of empathy’ with the Musée Royale de l'Afrique Centrale's ‘ethics of responsibility’ at the Society for Francophone Postcolonial Studies Annual Conference, November 2007. I would like to thank the staff at the Hackney Museum for their helpful responses to my enquiries.

Notes 1.

The play on words is intended: hackney is a breed of harness horse, the meaning of hackneyed as ‘commonplace, banal and stereotyped’ stemming from an allusion to a weakened hire horse: a living means of transport and source of work that is ultimately disposable.

2.

Although the poetry written by Hackney schoolchildren does involve specific details, when examined as a collection the work has many generic similarities.

References

Agamben, G., 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz, trans. D. Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books. Bernier, C.-M., 2008. ‘Speculation and the imagination’: history storytelling and the body in Godfried Donkor's ‘Financial Times’ (2007). Slavery and Abolition, 29 (2), 203–217. Bernier, C.-M. and Newman, J., 2008. Public art, artefacts and Atlantic slavery: introduction. Slavery and Abolition, 29 (2), 135–150. Bhabha, H.K., 1994. The location of culture. London: Routledge. Desai, K., 2006. The inheritance of loss. London: Penguin Books. Diedrich, M., Gates, H.L. and Pedersen, C., eds., 1999. Black imagination and the middle passage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Durrant, S., 2004. Postcolonial narrative and the work of mourning. Albany: SUNY Press. Fanon, F., 1952. Peau noire masques blancs. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Fuss, D., 1995. Identification papers. London: Routledge. Hackney Council, 2006. Hackney Borough profile. London: Hackney Council. Hackney Council, 2007. Black History Month in Hackney. London: Hackney Design, Communications & Print. Hackney Council website. 2008. Available at: http://www.hackney.gov.uk/hackney-the-place-diversity.htm (accessed 17 November 2008). Hartman, G., 2004. Public memory and its discontents. In: The Geoffrey Hartman reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hesse, B., 2002. Forgotten like a bad dream: Atlantic slavery and the ethics of postcolonial memory. In: A. Quayson and D.T Goldberg, eds. Relocating postcolonialism. Oxford: Blackwell. Hewitt, M., Vance, M. and Winch, E., 2007. And still I rise: Hackney poets pupils and poets speak out about enslavement. London: The Learning Trust. Lacan, J., 1999 (1966). Écrits, trans. A. Sheridan. London: Routledge.

Levi, P., 1987 (1958). If this is a man, trans. S. Woolf. London: Abacus Books. Lévinas, E., 1969 (1961). Totality and infinity, trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. London Against Gun and Knife Crime website, 2008. Available at: www.london.gov.uk/gangs/projects/hackney/index.jsp (accessed 17 November 2008). Mensah, K. (dir), 2007. Hear my voice. London: Hackney Museum. Museum Association, 2008. Available at: www.museumassociation.org/faq (accessed 17 November 2008). Quayson, A. and Goldberg, D.T, 2002. Relocating postcolonialism. Oxford: Blackwell. Sanders, M., 2002. Complicities: the intellectual and apartheid. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sontag, S., 2003. Regarding the pain of others. London: Hamish Hamilton. Wood, M., 2000. Blind memory: visual representations of slavery in England and America 1780–1865. New York: Routledge. Wood, M., 2002. Slavery, empathy and pornography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Museum practices and the Belgian colonial past: questioning the memories of an ambivalent metropole Véronique Bragard and Stéphanie Planche Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium This article questions the traces left by colonialism on Belgium's museums. Adopting a comparative approach to specific museographic representations of Belgium's colonial past, we examine the images they convey of this period. Museums directly concerned with Belgian colonisation are analysed (the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, the Musée Africain de Namur, and the Musée Belvue). This discussion is framed within the context of past exhibitions, but also by a consideration of more recent temporary exhibitions which express the need for Belgium to confront its colonial legacy in more complex and creative terms. The task of confronting the past and of assessing the role which colonialism played in glorifying the Belgian nation reveals the uniqueness of the ‘postcolonial’ Belgian context in which this problematic history has been debated within a broader national identity crisis that has put into question the very future of the country itself.

Mesdames et Messieurs, Dames en Heren, depuis la Basilique du Sacré-Coeur aux dômes de malachite […], Senoras y Senores, jusqu'au Musée d'Afrique aux murs de caoutchouc et tours de véritable ivoire, avec des étangs d'un diamant de la plus belle eau pour la promenade des enfants, en passant, Ladies and Gentlemen, sous les arcades en or massif du Cinquantenaire surmontées de leur quadrige d'uranium […], tout retourne, Dames und Herren, Oui, tout retourne au magma des terreurs premières, au chaos d'avant le monde, aux sortilèges et maléfices de la brousse. (J.-L. Lippert, Mamiwata, 1994)

As the above quotation by Belgian writer J.-L. Lippert indicates, the ‘tangible traces, […] durable imprint, [and] deep marks’ (Chevallier 2007, p. 360) left by Belgium's colonial past permeate the former metropole's very heart. Whether it is the Cinquantenaire Arcades or the Tervuren Avenue, the landscape of Brussels is engraved with memories from the colonial era. Yet, these are memories Belgium does not feel at peace with; the relics of a past whose recollection is now tinged with unease. To some, they are still reminiscent of those ‘ready-made images’ (Roegiers 2003, p. 91) cultivated

by children's books, advertisements and propaganda: the heroic narratives of intrepid adventurers, the countless accomplishments of Belgian colonial agents, or the renowned generosity of King Leopold II, who had blessed his country with a colony 80 times bigger than its own territory.1 For others, however, these mythical images have recently been disputed by darker memories relating to plunders, crimes, injustices, slavery, chopped hands, ‘red rubber’, and a ‘genocidal’ (Hochschild 1998) ‘king with blood on his beard' (Demoulin 2000, p. 15). Once celebrated as a symbol of prestige, colonial memories now convey a sense of liability, or even guilt towards the past. Shame has replaced pride, leaving Belgium at a loss as to how to come to terms with this awkward legacy. What follows is not an exhaustive catalogue of the traces left by colonialism on Belgium's architectural landscape, or even in the former metropole's museums, as such traces are practically to be found everywhere (Aldrich 2005). This article consists primarily of reflections by two Belgian scholars outside the field of museology, but who are nevertheless concerned with their country's colonial memory. Adopting a comparative approach to specific museographic representations of Belgium's colonial past, we examine the images they convey of this period.2 In the first section, we analyse permanent museum exhibitions3 directly concerned with Belgian colonisation: (1) the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren, which was first designed as a colonial propaganda tool by King Leopold II; (2) the less prominent Musée Africain de Namur, a local statesupported amateur initiative by former colonials; and (3) the Musée Belvue, which presents itself as ‘the only museum that reveals the history of Belgium’ (Belvue Museum 2008b) and provides a ‘countermemory’ to more conservative views on colonisation. Following, we examine recent temporary exhibitions which depart from the more fossilised depictions of this period, and express a need for Belgium to confront its colonial legacy in more complex and creative terms. Marked by great ambivalence, these museographic practices will then be enlightened against the background of the various ‘memory war(s)’ (Stora 2007; Blanchard and Veyrat-Masson 2008) at work in the appraisal of Belgium's colonial past. As some Congolese voices (Ndaywel 2008) have insisted the colonial question is chiefly a ‘Belgo-Belgian issue’ rather remote from the Congolese's present concerns, Belgian ‘museumifications’

of colonialism must indeed be placed within the larger context of Belgium's problematic national memory. In the final section of this article, we therefore interrogate the manner in which the colonial debate characteristic of any former metropole is in Belgium interwoven with a pre-existing Belgo-Belgian conflict on the country's national identity and very being.4 Within this framework, we show how the former metropole's museums in fact appear as the battleground of a double ‘memory war’, which highly complicates their recollection of the colonial past.

Permanent museum exhibitions: between imperial nostalgia and ‘Leopold's ghosts’ The RMCA, in Tervuren, which was first devised to promote Leopold II's colonial enterprise, best exemplifies Belgium's ambiguous relation to its colonial past. Contrary to other former metropoles’ museums such as Bristol's British Empire & Commonwealth Museum, for instance, which explores how the empire was built, expanded and who benefited from it, the RMCA is a museum of ethnography that claims to be a museum for Central Africa. Having ‘resisted the passing of time and the transformation of (some) mentalities’ (Rahier 2003, p. 65), it displays fossilised representations inherited from the propaganda of the colonial era, and directly plunges the visitor, as a recent tourist guide (Kirchberger and Montauti 2003, p. 251) advertises, into the universe of-the now much contested – Tintin in the Congo. From stuffed crocodiles to colonial helmets, the RMCA continues to depict Africa as an exotic continent to be civilised by adventurous settlers. With a gallery ‘In Memoriam’ of Belgium's colonial heroes, and an entrance dome adorned with statues in praise of colonisation, it perpetuates a glorious vision of colonial times in which past and present African peoples are dehumanised, as ‘museum goers marvel […] at “primitive” art while taking little notice of the descendants of its creators living in their midst; […]’ (Aldrich 2005, p. 8). Renovation projects for the museum have admittedly been in the air for many years, but implementation has constantly been delayed. Adding to the difficulty of conciliating the heterogenic sections (zoology, history, natural sciences, anthropology, among others) currently composing the museum is the fact that its artefacts are housed in the very building commissioned by

Leopold II to symbolise the grandeur of his colonial scheme. In other words, the museum's structure is itself a ‘site of contestation’ and thus an object of analysis. And yet, as anthropologist Bambi Ceuppens remarks ‘this museum is also the only monument to Belgian colonial history left in this country so if we dismantle the museum there is a very great danger that we also eradicate the public memory of that colonial heritage’ (Ceuppens, cited in Okuefuna 2007). In 2002 a few planks were installed to better inform museum goers and ‘show the way the colonial situation might have affected the display of facts and objects’ (Roger 2008, p. 89). These boards nevertheless remain hardly visible and lack clear narrative confrontation. More fossilising still is the local Musée Africain de Namur. Housed in a former military casern and run by ex-colonials, it consists mostly of private donations. Karel Arnaut, in his in-depth analysis of the contexts and ethnography of the museum, highlights how the objects exhibited are ‘invested with memories conceived as personal knowledge/experience’ shared by a group of a ‘disappearing species of colonial agents’, themselves ‘resisting – with considerable resilience – a widely observed process of forgetting colonials and colonial history’ (2001, pp. 4–5). With rooms named after some of Leopold II's devotees and filled with dusty bric-a-brac, the museum offers school visits that emphasise the feeling of marginalisation experienced by ex-colonials, and conveys an anachronistic image of Africa. If the museum's approach interrogates the often homogenised view of all colonials being witting agents of exploitation, it is its flagrant omission of the colonial violence that is most startling. In many respects, the Musée de Namur echoes Jean-Loup Amselle's words when he discusses the opening of the Musée Quai Branly in Paris, which he characterises as a ‘primitivist mise en scène of alterity’ (Amselle 2008, p. 251), in that it concentrates on presenting African cultures while avoiding a critical confrontation with the abuses involved in the colonial process. Completely different in style, is the Belvue Museum,5 which was formerly dedicated to the Belgian Dynasty, and was entirely refurbished on Belgium's 175th anniversary in 2005 to provide the Belgian public and foreign visitors with the only ‘Museum of Belgian history’ (Belvue Museum 2008a). Managed by the King Baudouin Foundation, it presents itself as ‘emphatically educational, questioning and critical’ (Belvue Museum 2008a); and indeed, its staging of the colonial past is surprisingly

blunt and accusatory for an institution related to the royal family. If the space devoted to colonisation is on the whole rather limited, the museum nevertheless deals quite extensively with Leopold II's enterprise in the Congo, and, consequently, with the Congo Free State (C.F.S.).6 Within this framework, the way in which King Leopold II is presented sharply contrasts with the way other Belgian monarchs are depicted: far from flattering, his portrayal insists on the king being ‘weak’, ‘embittered' and ‘secluded', so much so that ‘when the king dies in 1909, there is hardly any mourning’. As to King Leopold II's African territories, ‘the exploitation of rubber and the ivory trade go hand in hand with the abuses of the local population’, which finally forces him to ‘hand over Congo to Belgium in 1908’. Exotic adventures and glorious achievements thus give way to the darkest colonial memories, as the myth of the ‘genocidal’ king replaces that of a visionary and heroic Leopold II. Following this logic, the documents on display comprise pictures of ‘chopped hands’, a short film entitled ‘Congo Free State plc: Exploitation of a country and a people’, and a 1904 American newspaper article exposing the ‘Infamous Cruelties by Means of which King Leopold Derived his Enormous Revenue from the Congo Rubber Lands’. It must be noted, however, that Belgium is implicitly cleared from any responsibility in these abuses, as the exhibit insists on the fact that King Leopold II governed the Congo ‘autonomously and completely independent of the Belgian state’. Apart from a panel dealing with Congo's independence, the colonial past is hardly evoked in the rest of the museum, thereby reducing it to ‘Leopold's Ghosts’.7 One last piece does however deserve special mention: a propaganda poster entitled ‘De Vlamingen aan de Negers van den Congo’ (The Flemings to the Congo Negroes). Presented in a section devoted to the rise of the Flemish Movement, and dating from 1885, this wide poster ‘compares’, according to the caption, ‘discrimination of the Flemings in Belgium with the treatment of native peoples in the Congo’. Hailing the Congolese as ‘zwarte broeders’ (black brothers), it assimilates the subjugation suffered by the Congo populations in Africa with that suffered by the Flemings at home, and designates the Walloons as their common oppressor. In a very meaningful way, then, this poster testifies to the communitarian aspect with which Belgian colonisation has been tinged from the beginning.

Temporary exhibitions and the confrontation of colonial memories Curated by the RMCA, the 2005 temporary exhibition ‘Memory of the Congo: the colonial era’ was a first step on the part of Belgium towards a reassessment of its museographic treatment of colonisation. The exhibit aimed to – and did – ‘awaken interest in an unknown history’ (Vellut 2005, p. 3) and capture Congolese memories of colonial times. Although abuses tended to be marginalised, it used photographs, testimonies, figures, postcards and other mediums to attempt to write ‘a shared history’ (Vellut 2005, p. 3). The exhibit's defensive position reflects the ambiguous stance of Belgium's official discourse, but can also be read as a response to Hochschild's highly controversial 1998 book, whose subtitle was first translated into French as ‘Un holocauste oublié’ (‘A forgotten holocaust’). As Roger has maintained, the exhibit was mainly ‘a history and not memory work’ (2008, p. 91): in many respects, it was indeed closer to a historical demonstration in defence against external accusations rather than a real confrontation with colonial abuses. Daring to some, far too chilling for others, the exhibition of 2005 called for ‘Belgium [to] confront its heart of darkness’ (Wrong 2005) and for the RMCA to open its doors to postcolonial debate. Following this exhibition, temporary changes were introduced into the museum's galleries: two (easily avoidable) rooms devoted to ‘the colonial era’ have been added on the margins of the permanent display, adjacent to the ‘In Memoriam’ Hall. If these additional rooms remain out-of-step with the rest of the museum, new renovation projects suggest future changes, which should be visible to visitors in 2013 at the earliest. Even more groundbreaking is the ‘Black Paris – Black Brussels’ temporary exhibit,8 first presented in Germany and then adapted for the Musée d'Ixelles (Brussels)9 in April 2008. It offered on the one hand a retrospective of Europe's African cultural heritage from colonial times to the present, and on the other hand, a selection of contemporary graphic works created by African artists residing in Brussels or artists having particular connections with Africa. Underscoring the influence of Africa on Western societies, this exhibit in fact reversed the traditional thesis that Europe brought culture to Africa. By showing, for instance, the influence of

African art on modernist artists or African rhythms on Belgian jazz music, it highlighted how the African diaspora deeply affected Europe through cross-cultural exchanges. In this way, ‘Black Paris – Black Brussels’ opens up the colonial debate on contemporary issues of métissage, which have long been relegated to the margins or to a uni-directional relationship. Amongst the creative works on display, Cheri Samba's ‘Praise for the ancient creators’ (2000), a painting that features tribal carvings exposed in front of a large self-portrait at his desk, interrogates museum practices that have plundered African art objects and deprived them of their cultural currency. While it pays homage to the artists of yesterday, it ‘ponders the usurpation of Negro art by Parisian Avant-Garde and raises the question of posthumous appreciation and the indemnification of African artists’ (Wendl et al. 2008, p. 28). Other artists’ creative works, such as Aime Mpane's indictment of recolonisations in his ‘Bach to the Congo’ (2008), pay tribute to the victims of the colonial system. As for Aime Ntakiyica's grotesque pictures of aman in folkloric Tyrolean clothes, they question the ethnological approach that has permeated representations of African peoples. More generally, many of the creative perspectives which were developed in this exhibit connected the history of the black diaspora with contemporary issues of migration, discrimination and new urbanities. ‘Black Paris – Black Brussels’ consequently moved beyond the stereotyped approaches examined earlier in this article, and allowed one to recognise what Dominic Thomas has called in his analysis Black France (which clearly resonates with the exhibit's title) the ‘là-bas ici – the there here’ (Thomas 2007, p. 35). In foregrounding issues of métissage, it constitutes an alternative expression of colonial memory and materialises James Clifford's idea of museums as ‘contact zones’, that is, of museums’ structures becoming ‘an ongoing historical, political, moral relationship – a power-charged set of exchanges, of push and pull’ (Clifford 1997, p. 192). With ‘Black Paris – Black Brussels’, exhibits accordingly become places where groups and memories are brought together, and where new meanings can be produced rather than given. Despite such alternative projects, however, Belgian museums seem to remain torn between two somewhat polarised visions of the colonial past. The overall impression emerging from this overview of museographic practices is indeed one of great ambivalence, which leads us to consider

Belgian museums as ‘memory battlegrounds’, and to address the stakes of the ‘memory wars’ at work within their realm.

Museums and ‘memory wars’ Invariably, what is ultimately at play in the ‘museumification’ of a nation's past is first and foremost the nation itself. As one of the ‘ways in which memories […] are built, preserved and displayed' (Aldrich 2005, p. 6), museums do not so much recount the story of what a nation once was, as its recollection of what it was, and its conception of what it subsequently is – or wants to be – today. In telling what a community is willing to remember, and silencing what it is willing to forget, such ‘lieux de mémoire’ (memory sites, Nora 1985) then also act as repositories of the community's identity: through their staging of the national past, they concurrently stage the nation's present. This blending of the past into the present, of national memory with national identity, is at the heart of Belgium's current museographic treatment of colonisation. If the former metropole's museums are hesitant about how to handle the country's colonial legacy, it is precisely because of the echoes which the past reverberates into the present, and because any narrative of the colonial past touches on the nation's already problematic memory, and on its even more problematic identity. As Sandrine Lemaire remarks in the French context, ‘the past and the present, colonial time and post-colonial time are intricately connected and superimposed, and this is exactly what hinders the “normalisation” of this past’ (2005, p. 59). In this respect, the sense of loss displayed by Belgium's museums only reflects – and even magnifies – the broader loss at which Belgium finds itself in settling its colonial past, as any reassessment of this past lies at the crossroads of a double ‘memory war’: (1) a war between past and present myths, between international accusations and national pride, between the former victims and the former perpetrators, but also (2) a Belgo-Belgian war on the nation's very existence. While former metropoles have long celebrated their colonial past in glorious and praiseworthy terms, they are now compelled to reconsider it in a much more denunciatory or accusatory way. Such calls to reassess colonialism confront any former metropole with some kind of ‘colonial

dispute’ (Coquio 2008, p. 13): ‘in recasting parts of a heroic national history as exploitative and criminal’ (Barkan 2000, p. 323), they lead the former colonial power to discard some of its national myths and ‘founding epics’ (Bancel 2006, p. 92), to recall forgotten aspects of the past, and to reexamine the roles it played in this past. In particular, whereas former metropoles long considered and depicted themselves as a ‘savior’ vis-à-vis the former colonies, reevaluations of the colonial era tend to make them shift from this once valorising role to a much less comfortable one, that of former ‘aggressors’ or ‘perpetrators’ (Rosoux forthcoming; Rosoux and Planche forthcoming). In a context where claims for recognition, reparation or restitution multiply on the international scene, the version of the colonial past which a former metropole is willing to tell then becomes an eminently political matter: recognising one's role as a former aggressor or perpetrator not only deeply modifies the nation's view on its past and of itself, it also dramatically changes its present relation to the former colonies by creating a sense of responsibility and liability towards them. Belgium has been particularly shaken by such calls to reconsider its role towards the Congo. While it had long prided itself on saving its former colony from its ‘heart of darkness’, ‘poor little Belgium’, a repeated victim of others’ aggressions itself, has over time appeared as a perpetrator in its own right. Because such a shift in position considerably alters its relationship to the Congo, the former metropole has been reticent to acknowledge it in its official telling of the past (Rosoux and Planche forthcoming), and, consequently, in its museums. The ambivalence displayed by museums therefore reflects the ambivalence with which Belgium approaches its colonial legacy as a whole: hesitating to recognise its own role as a former aggressor and to bestow a status of former victim on the ex-colony, because of the consequences this would bear on the present. Jean-Louis Déotte suggests that such matters of acknowledgment and apology are in fact as central to contemporary history museums as to any contemporary narrative of the past (Déotte 2005): what is indeed at stake in Belgium's museographic staging of the colonial past is also the ‘naming’ of this past (Coquio 2008, p. 13), the acknowledgement of the past's victims, and the role and subsequent responsibility Belgium is willing to assume towards this past. In many ways, then, the colonial stories museums show and tell find themselves entangled in sensitive questions of political liabilities, hereby illustrating that ‘the ethics of history are both

inseparable from and irreconcilable with the politics of history’ (Rosello 2008). Long forgotten aspects of the colonial past may accordingly appear as a ‘risk for the national cohesion’ (Smouts 2007, p. 27) of the former metropole, as they both question ‘who we were’ and ‘who we are’. For Belgium, however, the colonial past resurfaces in a context where the definition of ‘who we are’ is already problematic, and national cohesion is already precarious. In other words, the ‘colonial dispute’ is superposed on another dispute: namely a Belgo-Belgian dispute between the francophones and the Flemings, between the two main communities’ conflicting memories, and between separatist and unitarian views on the country's existence. In this context, reappraisals of the colonial past take on a new meaning, as colonialism is often perceived as a mainly francophone bequest, or as Leopold II's alleged abuses are invoked by extremist parties to attack royalty (Vandersmissen 2007) and denied or excused by those willing to preserve what stands as one of the few surviving symbols of the country's unity. What is at stake here is not only the settlement of an embarrassing colonial legacy: it is also a pre-existing national conflict on the country's values, identity and legitimacy as a unified entity. Once more, the recounting of the past takes on a political tone, which further encumbers the conflicting demands faced by former metropoles in traditional colonial debates, and creates new reasons for ‘adopt[ing], twist[ing] or deny[ing]’ (Fabre 2000, p. 21) Belgium's colonial legacy. Thus, in addition to being torn between nostalgia and shame, Belgium's colonial memory concurrently needs to integrate into a national memory which is itself torn apart. As Belgian colonial memories become enmeshed in competing national memories, they consequently find themselves at the centre of a double ‘memory war’, which further complicates the elaboration of a ‘sharable’ (Cherki, cited in Rosoux forthcoming) narrative of the past, and even questions whether such a narrative can still emerge (Rosoux forthcoming). Against this background, it finally appears that it is not only with its colonial memory that Belgium is at a loss: it is first and foremost with its national memory as a whole, and with itself. Hence the ‘memory maze’ (Rosoux forthcoming) in which museums are thrown when they try to recall colonialism: their staging of the colonial past is either suspended in time, or torn between times, waiting for Belgium's coming to terms with a

‘pacified' (Brice 2008) colonial memory. As long as this coming to terms does not take place, Belgian museums are likely to remain memory battlegrounds, which will leave room for ambivalence between ‘guilt and superiority’ (Rosoux forthcoming), between international accusations and national self-defence, between shame and pride, and between unified and fragmented recollections of the past. Belgian museums' staging of the colonial past does not only question the former metropole's already problematic national memory and identity. It also appears as a challenge for museums’ identity themselves. As ‘commemoration sites’, contemporary history museums are indeed part of the numerous ‘lieux de mémoires designed to serve, cement and legitimise a nation's identity. One therefore expects them to enhance the nation's selfimage at home, while they also act as the nation's showcase to foreign visitors. In a way, they are inevitably designed to display a praising and unifying image of the nation's past. What happens, then, when the nation is forced to re-examine a past which is no longer praiseworthy? And what happens when the nation is no longer sure that it wants to remain a nation? Making a burdensome past presentable to oneself and to the world, or recollecting the competing memories of a country whose very existence is being contested, does this not finally call into question museums’ traditional nature and purpose? In many ways, museums' contemporary narratives of the colonial past find themselves interwoven in the postmodern politics of memory. The problem of museums' engagement with postcolonial issues appears to be complicated by the postmodern emphasis on the ‘real’ being inextricable from any constructed discourse. As the real has become a site of contestation that is multifaceted and can mostly be accessed via narrativisation, history as an official coherent representation of the past, but also memory itself (both individual and collective), have become sites of contention. Most twentieth- and twenty-first-century events, many of which are characterised by trauma and their presence in the living memory of present generations, are faced with the complex process of reconstruction in a postmodern age that is concerned with thinking about how knowledge is constructed. Accordingly, it seems that museums will in the future need to pull out from ‘memory wars’ and renounce the idea of one uniform version of the past prevailing over the others, to confront conflicting memories, and

offer them a place to co-exist. More generally, they will need to become ‘contact zones’ in a broader sense: they will have to establish dialogues among cultures, but also between memory and history, between official institutionalised history and counter-discourses, between constructed narratives and spaces where viewers can create new meanings for themselves. Admittedly, this article has probably not avoided the trap of a BelgoBelgian debate, especially at a time when the Congo experiences repeated acts of conflict and horror. As John Torpey cautions, we must certainly not forget that if ‘“coming to terms with the past” may be a contribution to making a better future, […] it may also distract from that goal’ (Torpey 2006, p. 166). Yet, as long as past misunderstandings and silences weigh on the present, as in the case of Congo-Belgian relations,10 addressing the past – and the representations of this past – will remain a way of partaking in the construction of a more ‘pacified’ future.

Notes 1.

Although Belgium also administrated Rwanda and Burundi from 1919 to 1962, these were not ‘Belgian colonies’ in the strict sense of the word, but rather mandated territories. Belgium's colonial past therefore mainly refers to the colonisation of the Congo, even if Belgian rule in Rwanda and Burundi is often assimilated to it. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are our own.

2.

We do not undertake to retrace the history and politicisation of these different exhibits, nor do we mean to rewrite the history of Belgian colonisation. Our focus is specifically on present ‘museumifications’ (Aldrich 2005, p. 15) of Belgium's colonial past, which we use as a snapshot of the country's current state of colonial memory.

3.

There are very few museums in Belgium that are explicitly devoted to the history of Belgian colonisation, or even to the history of Belgium as a whole – an indication, maybe, of the country's general timidity in commemorating its national past.

4.

It must be noted that Blanchard et al. (2006) and Coquio (2008) make a similar diagnosis for the French case. However, the French and Belgian internal debates differ totally in their stakes, context and nature: contrary to Belgium, the very existence of the French State is not being questioned.

5.

Ironically enough, the building in which the museum is housed is itself rooted in Belgium's colonial past: according to the museum's internet site, this former hotel was indeed purchased by King Leopold II with the benefits he derived from his Congo Crown Foundation in 1905, and was later used as a temporary accommodation for Belgian refugees who had been forced to flee the ex-colony in the days following Congo's independence (Belvue Museum 2008c).

6.

The Congo Free State (C.F.S.) refers to King Leopold II's rule of the Congo from 1885 to 1908. In 1908, the Congo was transferred to Belgium and became the ‘Belgian Congo’.

7.

Most emblematic of this vision is the recent example of the ‘promenade coloniale dans Bruxelles’ (colonial walks through Brussels) organised by the Collectif Mémoires Coloniales to question Belgium's colonial past via architecture tours of Brussels, and encourage the acknowledgement of colonial crimes. In this case, Brussels becomes an open-air museum that accusingly revisits King Leopold II's colonial enterprise and alleged abuses.

8.

Curators: Kerstin Pinther, Sigrid Horsch-Albert and Hanna Kiefer; Idea and concept: Tobias Wendl und Bettina von Lintig (German ethnologists) and Martine Boucher for the Belgian context.

9.

The museum is situated next to Matongé, which is considered as the heart of the Congolese community living in Belgium.

10. Among multiple other examples, see Joseph Kabila's interview to C Braeckman, ‘Kabila aux Belges: “Le rapport maîtres-esclaves, c'est fini”, Le Soir (24 April 2008).

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Displaying colonial artifacts in Paris at the Musée Permanent des Colonies to Musée du Quai Branly Fassil Demissie Department of Public Policy, DePaul University, Chicago, USA The vast cultural artifacts plundered from Africa, Asia, the Pacific region, and the Americas – regions in which France once had colonies, have been distributed among various museums in Paris. For the past seven decades, much of these artifacts from the colonies were at various museums including the Musée Permanent des Colonies (whose name has changed several times) until President Chirac officially inaugurated the new Musée du Quai Branly. The architecture of the Musée Permanent des Colonies and Musée du Quai Branly are reminders of France's relation to its colonial past and postcolonial present.

The colonial museum: Musée Permanent des Colonies I always concern myself […] to see that ranks and hierarchies are preserved and respected, that people and things stay in their ancient places, that the natural leaders command and others obey them. (Maréchal Lyautey, 1927)

On 5 November 1928 the French President Gaston Doumergue laid the first stone for the future home of the Musée Permanent des Colonies (MPC)1 on a rectangular piece of land belonging to the École d'Arboriculture et d' Horiculture adjacent to Porte d'Honner in eastern part of the city. Located at the main entrance to the Exposition, the museum, with its large facade, impressive bas-reliefs, and stately colonnade was one of the first and last buildings built in homage to France's imperial endeavors. Significantly smaller than other colonial museums, the building measures 88 meters long, 64 meters wide and 19 meters high with a volume of approximately 5000 square meters (Goissaud 1930, p. 748). Overtly classical in orientation, the building was designed by Albert Laprade who relied on Greco-Roman architecture as a source of inspiration, representing a revival of classicism

that emerged in French architecture during the post-First World War period (Figure 1). The design of the building, decoration and collections celebrated the history of empire, its ideology, and remains to this day as a permanent shrine to empire, its mission and heroes. As art historian Patricia Morton has suggested, the MPC was conceived, on the model of the Tervueren Museum in Brussels, the Colonial Institute in Amsterdam, and the Imperial Institute of London to showcase France's alleged mission civilisatrice (Morton 2006, p. 281). Two and half years later and after many construction delays, President Doumergue along with local dignitaries and representatives from other European

Figure 1. Former Musée des Colonies. Note: Unless specified otherwise all photographs in this article are by the author.

colonial powers and the United States officially opened the much-anticipated Exposition Coloniale Internationale on 6 May 1931 which attracted close to 32 million visitors before it closed on 15 November 1931 in Bois de Vincennes in the eastern part of Paris.2 The expression of the museum's monumental colonial message began with the building itself, an immense structure encased in a ‘cement tapestry’ of sculpted bas-relief that extends 100 meters long and 13 meters high with a depth of 17 centimeters designed by Alfred Janniot (Figure 2) who was the winner in 1931 of the Prix de Roma and a renowned Art Deco sculptor (Goissaud 1930, p. 751). With the help of two other sculptors, Gabriel Forestier and Charles Barberis, Janniot completed the bas-relief in time for the opening of the Exposition Coloniale Internationale, which at the time were considered the largest in the world (Figure 3). The bas-relief, much like the Exposition itself, brought different and disparate elements that constitute the empire by representing an idealized colonial environment and promoted a colonial memory that eviscerated the violent and brutal nature of French colonialism. Indeed, the imperial ideology that permeated the Exposition was also deeply etched in the architecture of the MPC and dramatized by composition of the bas-relief.3 The most distinguishing and important feature of the bas-relief is the way decorative arts were deployed to represent colonial subjects and empire (Figures 4–6). The bas-relief is arranged and represents each of France's colonies into ethnic groups, with flora and fauna, as well as important natural resources. Two hundred and fifty figures of men, women and animals are arranged to represent the idealized colonial life with the main door as its center (Figure 3). On the left side of the main entrance, are images of the African colonies and to the right the colonies of ‘Indochina’. The

Figure 2. Poster of Alfred Janniot working with an African model. images are arranged in a highly stylized manner and distinguished by different ‘racial’ typographies. Just above the main entrance, the figure of Abundance is enthroned next to the figures of Peace, Liberty and the Sun. The materials plundered from the colonies ‘converge with the sailing ships, the freighters, the transatlantic ships toward the central door, surrounded by

Marseilles, Bordeaux, Saint Nazaire, Le Havre, Bourget, and surmounted by figures of abundance and peace’ (Morton 2006, p. 293).

Figure 3. Main entrance to the museum. Representing the colonial subjects in their environment constitutes a large portion of the bas-relief. In addition, colonial subjects were identified by the activities in which they were involved: agricultural, artisanal or mining work, happily offering both their labor and products to France. The crude violence and brutality of the work environment under which these colonial workers toiled was carefully removed to give a sanitized view of idealized life in colonies. A careful reading of the bas-relief also suggests that the muscular and athletic bodies of the men (Figures 5 and 7) are suitable for the

required manual labor and these men seem very happy to engage in these tasks. The semi-nude African women (Figure 4) are depicted in overtly sexualized postures engaged some type of traditional chores. In this image of empire, the bas-relief reinforces French cultural stereotypes and provides an idealized representation of life in the colonies. Removed from the bas-relief are tales of domination and exploitation which characterize French colonial rule. Most striking is the complete harmony in which these people and wild animals (elephants, panthers, lions, gazelles, crocodiles, etc.) inhabit a perfectly domesticated colonial world ordered and sorted by Janniot for the French public consumption. The basrelief also reinforce and codify the idea of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean as savage and wild places with natural bounty that need to be domesticated for the benefit of France. Throughout the entire bas-relief, ‘primitivism’, ‘savagery’ and the ‘Other’ were implicitly inscribed to underscore what visitors have been reading in the guide: Our protection, you must understand, delivered millions of men, women and children from the nightmare of slavery and death. Do not forget that before we came, on the African continent, the stronger dominated the weaker, a woman was but a beast and

Figure 4. Depicting life in the colonies. a child counted for little. Thus, we found the vestiges of an old civilization with outdated beliefs … how much work we have accomplished. (cited in Evans 2000, p. 19)

On the lateral façade of MPC are also inscribed the names of famous men who participated in establishing the French colonial empire. This inscription highlights the figures throughout French colonial history that are also the

main characters of the narrative on display inside the museum. At a time when public imagination of empire was in deep crisis, inscription of colonial military officers' name on the bas-relief was intended to instill and inspire confidence about the durability of the French colonial empire to a wary public. The interior of the museum was divided into four floors: the basement, ground floor, mezzanine and second floor. On the ground floor was the Salle des Fétes, a large hall decorated with sumptuous frescos glorifying the empire. It is in this hall that the Exposition Coloniale International officially opened on 6 May 1931 with invited dignitaries attending. Among the dignitaries who assembled for this colonial extravaganza, Prince Lanza di Scalea, the Minister of Colonies of Fascist Italy, summed up the enthusiasm of those gathered for this occasion. He noted with great satisfaction how the ‘Homeric Odyssey of the white race, which, having how reached every corner of the world, has transformed, or is in the process of transforming, barbaric continents into civilized regions’ (Lebovics 1992, p. 64). His sentiments were

Figure 5. Young African women collecting cocoa. loudly echoed by other French dignitaries who spoke before and after him about the significance of the Exposition to ‘La Grande France’ and the importance of the colonies to France. The main hall on the ground floor also had two offices or salons on either side: the salon of Maréchal Lyautey (Figure 8) and the salon of Minister des Colonies, Paul Reynaud.

The massive bas-relief in which colonial subjects were represented as primitive and yet valuable to France is also reproduced in the work of Pierre Ducos de la Halille's fresco titled ‘France offering the Dove of Peace to the Five Continents’, measuring 8 meters by 10 meters which adorned the walls inside the museum (Figure 9). The central figure of France, represented by a woman, offers a peace dove to the five continents. The main fresco and other paintings in the hall as well as the bas-relief were aimed at the French whose interest and support was critical if the empire was to continue. The paintings inside the Salle des Fétes are devoted to showcase the benefits of French colonialism in emancipating Africans from their ‘savage’ customs and converting them to Christianity (Figure 12) or the value of colonial medicine

Figure 6. African men working on plantations. (Figure 13) and exploration (Figure 14). The implicit message in that the colonies were not only ‘savage’ and ‘backward’ but also needed the guidance of civilized France. Allegorical figures of Peace, Justice, Science, Art, Commerce, Industry, Work are juxtaposed with native populations and the fruit of their labor is reflected in mines, plantations and factories. The

allegorical figure of equality is missing from the hall. What was being communicated by the frescos inside MPC was the notion that development of the colonies was only possible under the guidance and tutelage of France. The birth of the MPC coincided with political, economic and social crisis in France and the empire. Born in the dual context of imperial celebration and the birth of the colonial crisis, the MPC's mission and message became increasingly outdated and detached from the realities of decolonization. Despite the attempt to change its name and pedagogical function, the museum failed to address the events that challenged its existence and was unable to transcend the material and ideological limits imposed by empire. Plagued by financial problems and poor management, over the years, the museum deteriorated physically as well as in the quality and

Figure 7. ‘Indochinese’ colonial workers. quality of its collections. Its final demise came in January 2003 when the museum finally closed its doors to the public and its collections were relocated to the new Musée du Quai Branly (MQB) in the western section of Paris.4 Although the collection of artifacts has moved to a new museum, the building that housed the MPC decorated by Janniot's monumental figures

displaying Les Apports èconomiques des colonies á La France has been renamed as the new Citè Nationale de L‘Histoire de L'Immigration.5

Reframing the ‘primitive’: Musée du Quai Branly In our opinion, the Musée du Quai Branly is built on a deep and painful paradox since almost the totality of the Africans, Amerindians, the Australian Aborigines whose talents and creativity are being celebrated, will never cross the doorstep of the museum … It is true that measures have been taken to ensure that we can consult the archives via Internet. Thus our works of art have a right of residence at a place where we are forbidden to stay.6 (Aminata Traoré, former Minister for Culture, Mali) France wishes to pay a rightful homage to peoples to whom, throughout the ages, history has all too often done violence. Peoples injured and exterminated by the greed and brutality of conquerors. Peoples humiliated and scorned, denied even their own history. Peoples still now often marginalized, weakened, endangered by the inexorable

Figure 8. Maréchal Lyautey's office at the museum.

advance of modernity … Far removed from the stereotypes of the savage or primitive, the museum seeks to communicate the eminent value of these different cultures …7 (Jacques Chirac, President of the French Republic, 20 June 2006)

Figure 9. Pierre Ducos de la Halille's fresco ‘Dove of Peace to the Five Continents’.

Figure 10. Colonial medicine. Seventy-five years after the closing of the MPC on 15 November 1931, President Jacques Chirac officially opened the new Musée du Quai Branly in the western part of Paris on 20 June 2006 to house ‘primitive art’ and the colonial memory it represents. The invited dignitaries, artists, scholars, art dealers and politicians for this auspicious

Figure 11. Excavation in the colonies.

Figure 12. Missionaries at work in Africa. Parisian occasion included Kofi Annan, General Secretary of the United Nations, Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan activist Rigoberta Menchu, Alexander Downer, the Australian Foreign Minister, Abdou Diouf, the Secretary General of the International Organizations for Francophone and Chief Laukalbi from Vanuatu as well as Elaine Toledo, wife of the newly elected President of Peru and M. Paul Okalik, Premier Minister, Canadian territory of Nunavut. President Chirac welcomed the invited guests to the ‘new institution dedicated to other cultures’ which offers ‘an incomparable aesthetic experience’. He stressed the need to ‘imagine a special place that does justice to the infinite diversity of cultures, a place that presents another way of looking at the genius of the peoples of civilizations of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas’ (Chirac 2006). He emphasized the need for: … respect and recognition [and a rejection of] … ethnocentrism, that unacceptable, unreasonable pretence by the West to be the sole bearer of human destiny [and argued for the need for an special obligation toward] … peoples who have been brutalized and scorned, of whom it was even denied that they had a history; peoples often still

Figure 13. © Service photographique de la Présidence de la République. Official photograph of foreign dignitaries at the opening of the museum (Chief Laukabi of Vanatu is not included in the photo). marginalized, enfeebled, threatened by the inexorable advance of modernity; people who nonetheless want recognition and a restoration of their dignity. (Chirac, 2006)

In the world driven by globalization and the threat of increasingly homogeneity, Chirac noted that MQB would, ‘promote, against the confrontation of identities and the logics of confinement and the ghetto, the need for decompartmentalization, opening and mutual comprehension’. Indeed, as Chirac argued, the MQB ‘celebrates the luxuriant, fascinating, and splendid variety of man's work’ (Chirac, 2006). The answer to this question is based on a claim that the architecture of the MQB as well as the museum's stated practice of an aesthetic appreciation of individual objects rather than the specificity of different societies would provide a ‘new view

of these cultures and civilizations by privileging respect and sharing’ (Chirac, 2006). James Clifford has suggested that ‘such gestures of postcolonial regrets and recognition are welcome … [However] they do little, in themselves to change ongoing material structures of inequality’ (Clifford 2007, p. 18). Indeed, Chirac's inaugural speech never mentioned France's violent colonial legacy or the harsh treatment of post-colonial immigrants in the suburban ghettos of Paris. Thus, the President of the French Republic swept away France's long colonial history without even mentioning once the term colonial. The idea for an architecture housing ‘primitive art’ from the colonies came to a height when a number of Universal and Colonial Expositions held in France many of which were held on the Champ-de-Mars below the Eiffel Tower and spread along the Seine where the MQB is now located (Expositions Universellers of 1867, 1878, 1889 and 1900).Throughout the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, architecture was elevated as ‘art par excellence’; it replaced painting as a medium of representing other people and cultures. Since architecture claimed to be both

Figure 14. © Service photographique de la Présidence de la République. President Jacques Chirac and Chief Laukabi. autonomous and ‘total art’, its claim to authenticity became extravagant and reinscribed the colonial subject within the framework of these Universal and Colonial Expositions. Nowhere is this idea more clearly demonstrated than in MQB today in Paris. The MQB was designed by Jean Nouvel,8 one of France's most prominent architects (Figures 12–16). The architectural principles of the museum were stated by the architect in the following way: This is a museum build around a collection. Where everything serves to draw out the emotions at plan with the primary object, where everything is done to shield it from light while capturing that rare sunbeam, so necessary for the vibrancy of a spiritual presence. It is a place marked by symbols of forest and river, and the obsessions of death and oblivion. It is a sanctuary for works conceived in Australia or in America that are scorned and censured today. It is a haunted place, wherein dwell and converse the ancestral spirits of those whose discovered the human condition

and invented gods and beliefs. It is a strange, unique place, poetic and disturbing. (Cited in Clifford 2007, p. 4)

The steel and glass design of the museum interrupts the neighboring streets of 19th-century Haussmann apartments. Perched on 10-m-high (33 feet) curved supporting pillars randomly arranged or totem poles (Nouvel 2000, p. 27) rather like a grounded spaceship (Figure 18), the museum is set back from the road and separated by a 12-m-high transparent glass fence held in place by a network of steel which provides a shield for the building from busy street traffic and noise along the Quai. The museum is composed of a cluster of four buildings linked by passages and walkways nestled in a manufactured ‘wilderness’ garden to give visitors the

Figure 15. Musée du Quai Branly seen from the Eiffel Tower. impression of a jungle-like setting. Each building is distinctively different, providing an immediate relief from visual monotony as visitors find their way to the irregular building which houses the museum's permanent collection which spans four continents, originating in Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, reflecting France's colonial past. These cultural objects came from diverse sources within France: 236,509 objects were from the ethnology wing of Musée de l'Homme (an anthropological museum established in 1938); 22,740 objects from the MPC, which opened in 1931,

and 8000 objects were acquisitions from the museum as well as a very small number come from the collections of the Musée Guimet, which houses Asian art. The rest were private donations or loans. Of this vast collection approximately 3600 pieces are now on display in the MQB's permanent collection, divided into geographical areas. The front of the building is punctuated by brightly colored ‘boxes’ that Nouvel calls ‘micro-architectures’ whose colors are said to have been inspired by those of the collections housed within (Figure 19). As visitors approach the main museum

Figure 16. A view of Eiffel Tower from MQB. building, a ramp painted in stark white meanders with video and slides installation designed by writer and film maker Trinh T. Minh-ha and artist Paul Bourdier. The ramp leads visitors to the main exhibition hall through a dark tunnel and a passageway lined by tall brown leather walls. Here the

museum's space is arranged in a clockwise circle between geographic regions starting with Oceania, Asia, Africa and the Americas. On his visit to the MQB, historian Herman Lebovics noted that: tunnels usually end in blessed light. On emerging from this one, we were plunged into the yet darker world of the exhibition plateau. Music with a strong drum beat was playing faintly. I heard it almost subliminally. I did not recognize it, but was the kind I associate with Tarzan movies. The music and ‘primitive’ objects vaguely visible from the distance in the obscurity of the hall made me think – and, as I read in the reviews afterward, made others think – of Joseph Conrad's story of African savagery. (Lebovics 2006, p. 97)

One of Nouvel's main arguments has been the claim that the design of the MQB will stimulate and nurture the interaction between viewers and objects in order to intensify the emotional tenor of the experience. He notes that: everything is done to stimulate the blossoming of emotions aroused by the primary object, […] everything is done to protect it from light and to capture that rare ray of sun needed to set vibration in motion, to speak of a feeling of spirituality. It is a place marked by symbols of forests and rivers, by obsession with death and oblivion … (Nouvel 2000, p. 27)

A New York Times critic, Michael Kimmelman, noted the similarity between the museum exhibition space and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness: If the Marx Brothers designed a museum for dark people, they might have come (up?) with the permanent-collection galleries: devised as a spooky jungle, red and black and

Figure 17. Main entrance to MQB. murky … Think about the museum as a kind ghetto of the ‘other’ … an enormous rambling, crepuscular cavern that tries to evoke a journey into the jungle, downriver, where suddenly scary masks or totem poles loom out of the darkness and everything is meant to ne foreign and exotic … The only thing missing are people throwing spears at you … The atmosphere is like a discothèque at 10 am. (Price 2007, p. 150)

Figure 18. Garden area in the museum.

Figure 19. Thirty boxes of various sizes along the building façade of the MQB. Anthropologist Sally Price has observed that visitors have told her that the museum was indeed ‘cringingly, even insultingly condescending’ (Price 2007, p. 151): Many historians feel France has not come to terms with the real history of its colonial era. The idea of a jungle or forest surrounding the museum, a place where you will discover the ‘dark continent’ is a problem. It's as if these other continents are still savage, exuberant, dangerous and primitive. There are all the old clichés that still abound in France. (Price 2007, p. 151)

Much like other French institutions whose histories are closely linked to the history colonialism, the MQB's ‘intention’ of undertaking ‘this museological project masquerade[ing] as the rehabilitation of “distant civilizations” and or the redefinition of “first/primitive” art; what is happening is a reassessment of the way France sees itself and others’ (Amato 2006, p. 62). Anthropologist and former research director at MQB Maurice Godelier has acknowledged that: … to represent others, to interpret their mode of life through thought is also, at the same time, to expose yourself in front of others and to find yourself immediately responsible for what you think of others and what you say to yourself. The museum that is being inaugurated at the dawn of the new millennium must bring its visitors the elements of a critical view on other civilizations … and on the historical processes that have brought [the West] to dominate during the centuries. (cited in Amato 2006, p. 62)

As the first decade of the new millennium comes to close, the central contradiction that characterizes the MQB is its inextricable link to the history of French colonialism. While France has reluctantly accepted the decolonization process for its colonies, it has yet to decolonize its own

history and the history of its museums. MQB continues the legacy of MPC as the repository for objects which hold the memory of France's colonial past and its post-colonial present.

Notes 1.

Although the name of the museum has changed over the past seven decades, I have kept the original name throughout the article.

2.

The only colonial power absent from this colonial extravaganza was Britain, although invited to the Colonial Exposition, had staged its own imperial extravaganza in 1924–1925.

3.

The museum has gone through a few name changes – reflecting the changed relationships between France and its colonies. During the Colonial Exposition the museum was called the Musée Permanent des Colonies. After the Exhibition, the museum closed and reopened in 1932, as the Musée Permanent des Colonies et de la France Exterièure. In 1935, the museum changed its name once again to Musée de la France d'Outre-Mer, which it would keep until 1960. From 1939 to 1960 the museum was under the direction of the Ministére de Colonies. The looming end of the colonial period led to a change in direction for the museum, and it was placed under the Ministére des Affaires Culturelles and was renamed as the Musée National des Arts Africains et Oceaniens. The museum finally closed its doors in 2003 and its collection moved to new museum Musée du Quai Branly. The building which housed the old Musée Permanent des Colonies became the Citè Nationale de L'Histoire de L'Immigration without any collection in 2008.

4.

The museum took 10 years to complete and has created a lot of controversy among French anthropologists and museum curators from its inception when President Jacques Chirac appointed a commission to study the possibility of creating a museum of arts premiers or ‘fine arts’. The debates has also shifted the name of the museum commonly referred a museum of ‘primitive art’ in the press. Before the official opening of the museum, it was referred to as ‘Museum of Civilization and Fine Arts’; ‘Museum of Man, Arts and Civilization’; ‘Museum of Arts and Civilization’ and finally ‘Musée du Quai Branly’.

5.

The idea for a resource center for the history of immigration was put by a group of historians and activists who created an Association for a Museum of Immigration in 1992. See http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/.

6.

Traoré, Aminata, Nouveau millénaire, Défis libertaires. Available at: http://www.museumsecurity.org/?p=20 (accessed 13 April 2009).

7.

Chirac, Jacques, President of the Republic of France, at the opening of the Musée Quai Branly, 20 June 2006.

8.

Jean Nouvel is known for his use of glass, light and space around buildings and the belief in some level of transformative potential of buildings. He previously designed the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris where he took elements of Middle Eastern architecture – most notably mashrabiya latticework windows and incorporated them in the ultra-modern steel and glass building. Nouvel is also known for his work on major Parisian cultural landmarks such as MQB and the Foundation Cartier. In 2008, Nouvel was awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize for his work on more than 200 projects around the world. Some of the notable buildings include Torres Agbar (Barcelona); Gutheir Theater (Minneapolis); Copenhagen Concert Hall (under construction) and the Courthouse in Nantes as well as the planned The Louvre Abu Dhabi. For details on Nouvel's architectural work, see http://www.jeannouvel.com/.

References Amato, S., 2006. Quai Branly museum: representing France after empire. Race and Class, 47 (4), 46–65. Chirac, J., 2006. President of the Republic of France, at the opening of the Musée Quai Branly, 20 June. Available at: http://www.ambafranceuk.org/Speech-by-M-Jacques-Chirac,7357.html (accessed 10 April 2009). Clifford, J., 2007. Quai Branly in process. October, 120, 3–23. Evans, M., 2000. Projecting a Greater France. History Today, 50 (2), 19–25. Goissaud, A. 1930. A l'exposition colonial: le Palais de colonies. Le Construction Moderne: revue hebdomadarie d'architecture, No. 48, 31 August. Lebovics, H., 1992. True France: the wars over cultural identity, 1900– 1955. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lebovics, H., 2006. The Musée de Quai Branly: Art? Artifact? Spectacle! French Politics and Society, 24 (3), 96–110. Nouvel, J. 2000. Presence-absence or selective dematerialization. In: Musée du Quai Branly. Paris: Musée du Quai Branly. Morton, P., 2006. Hybrid modernities. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Price, S., 2007. Primitive Paris: Jacques Chirac's Museum on the Quai Branly. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

‘Le Musée d'Art au Hasard’: responses of Black Paris to French museum culture Bennetta Jules-Rosettea and Erica Fontanab aDepartment

of Sociology, UCSD, La Jolla, USA; bDepartment of Anthropology, UCSD, La Jolla, USA

During the colonial period, Black Paris began to respond to French museum culture. From the 1930s to the 1970s, Joséphine Baker maintained a close association with French museum culture. Other voices from Black Paris surfaced surrounding the Pésence Africaine journal in 1947 and the turbulent debates of the 1950s. In the 1980s, the rediscovery of contemporary and popular arts led to a virtual explosion in French gallery and museum spaces. From the Centre Georges Pompidou to the Musée Dapper, new environments arose for the display of African art. Globalization and commercialization cordoned the gap between ‘authentic’ collectibles and contemporary pieces in museums and galleries. Museums reflect symbolic conflicts between the metropole and the excolonies and between the center of Paris and the peripheral banlieues. Drawing on case studies from three historical periods, this article examines the influence of new forms of aesthetic display and artistic diffusion. It also explores the roles of cultural brokers and gallery connections in developing a new audience for African art. This audience provides a response to statesponsored initiatives such as the Musée du Quai Branly and serves as a point of departure for reflecting on the future of African-oriented museum culture in France. The curator in France starts from what he has, the object, puts it on display and then tries to provide the visitor with as much information as he can. The American or Anglo-Saxon curator will start from the story – what he wants to tell you. For instance, slavery; a leg iron for slaves will be displayed…. I have the personal impression that the French are obsessed by the purity and authenticity of the object. (Stéphane Martin, Director, Musée du Quai Branly 2006)

Introduction Over the past decade, the role of museums of African art in France has increasingly come under scrutiny. Museums occupy a contested terrain in which they reflect political culture and ideologies in both direct and oblique ways. Pierre Bourdieu argues that the display of a work of art, or a museum piece, depends upon the relationship between the ‘level of emission’ for

presenting and describing artistic and museum displays and the ‘level of reception’ (1993, p. 225). The level of emission of a piece is lowered by the codification of culturally recognizable ‘cotextual’ and contextual information, which simultaneously raises the level of reception, based on the model and the information provided.1 In other words, the extra information tells the viewer what to expect and offers guidelines for response. On the other side of this equation is the character of the museum collection on display, including its form and its contents. There is a continuity between the collection as a series of objects, or a semiotic paradigm, and the ‘reciprocal integration of the object with the person who is collecting it’ (Baudrillard 1994b, p. 12).2 Moreover, an articulation also exists between the collection and the institution at which it is stored and displayed. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1964, p. 115) describes this articulation as the relationship between the ‘mode of exchange’ for ethnographic artifacts and art objects and the vocabulary of these exchanges as they interface with cultural narratives. A code of exchange emerges, supporting and facilitating the use and interpretation of objects for specific cultural, political, or aesthetic purposes. This article examines the circulation and display of collections of African art in French cultural spaces over three historical periods with an eye toward interrogating the relationship between old institutional forms and new political representations as well as the popular responses to them.

Theories of collecting and display: actual and virtual dichotomies During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, African art moved from displays in personal curiosity cabinets based on idiosyncratic themes to public expositions and colonial fairs fueled by ideologies of exoticism. Pieces selected for personal collections were chosen based on sentiment, geography, and individual choices or travels. Often they were displayed haphazardly as relics without any indication of the provenance of these objects. Nonetheless, these curiosity cabinets were sites of memory reconstruction in which cultural ideologies intersected with personal remembrances. This ‘personalization’ of collecting re-emerges during the

twentieth century in modern and postmodern public museum spaces in France. As many ethnographic objects and curio memorabilia surface with more singularity, they may become candidates for reclassification as art objects. According to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ‘The many become one by virtue of the collection process itself’ (1998, p. 25). An object that is viewed as rare becomes iconic, singular, and culturally or economically valued. There are, however, several complexities involved in this process. One part of this process is what phenomenologist Edmund Husserl has described as ‘neutrality modification’ in which the actual and virtual framing of an object transforms its meaning (1962, pp. 287–289).3 Through neutralization, a Dogon mask may be transformed from a secret and sacred ritual object into an ethnographic museum artifact, and from a museum artifact into a rare work of art circulating in the contemporary market. As Bourdieu has suggested in his model of emission and reception, this transformation relies on the cultural understandings of the audiences and the burgeoning markets for cultural objects in diverse social and economic contexts. A semiotic gap appears between ethnographically labeled objects and art objects in terms of their ‘contingency’, or the possibilities for multiple definitions of objects based on their origins and conditions of collection (Sartre 1966, pp. 128–130; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998, pp. 25–26).4 It is indeed this contingency of the object that explodes the art/ethnography binary opposition, rendering it artificial and vacuously ideological at best, or useless at worst. Yet, this opposition continues to ignite cultural criticism of museum ideologies and strategies of display as well as individual and institutional projects of collection. Contemporary African and AfricanAmerican artists such as Cheri Samba, in his painting Hommage aux anciens créateurs (1995), and Fred Wilson, in his installation piece Picasso/Who Rules? (1991), have used the dichotomies of colonialist collecting as a basis for creating new art forms in which African objects are viewed as being held ‘hostage’ by ideologies of collecting and by the museums that display them.5 This contemporary criticism harks back to the colonial ethos and projects of collecting iconic curios and memorabilia based on idiosyncratic themes.

Colonial and postcolonial narratives and strategies of art and artifact collection contain three significant parts, or movements.6 The first narrative stage is contact and conquest. From the perspective of displays and museums, this narrative phase is represented by the colonial expositions, which include public displays of Africans and their artifacts. The second phase is domination, acquisition, and accumulation. In terms of the history of museums, these cultural narratives are represented by the colonial museums established during the 1930s, including the Musée Permanent des Colonies (later the Musée national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie) and the newly reorganized Musée de l'Homme at Trocadéro. Although, in a certain sense, these two museums and related projects may be considered ‘modernist’, they continue to bear the marks of colonialist expansion, tempered by the humanistic ideology of uplift, or the French mission civilisatrice. The third cultural narrative that we shall address is that of the implosion and saturation of culture. This cultural narrative is represented by postmodern museums such as the Centre Georges Pompidou (Beaubourg), in a special way by the Musée Dapper and its display of traditional and contemporary African arts, and most recently by the Musée du Quai Branly. These three museum projects are very different in character and scope. Nevertheless, they will be addressed holistically in terms of museum discourses and their contributions to the politics of representation of museum culture. The Institut du Monde Arabe, established during the 1980s following a prospectus by Président Valéry Giscard d'Estaing and an urban renewal project by architect Jean Nouvel, warrants a separate review and discussion that is beyond the scope of this paper.7 All in all, these museum discourses do not represent a linear progression or evolution over time, but instead, alternative discourses, remnants and elements of which continue to be at play during the contemporary period and to feed into the complex interrelationship of political discourses, museology (and museum ideology), and the politics of cultural representation.

Spectacular colonialism: Africans and their artifacts on display in France

What social and cultural processes make ethnographic objects, and by implication their creators, contingent?8 In order to answer this question, we must return to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial expositions. These displays and expositions now stand as sites of memory construction for a contested colonial past, but they are also methodological examples of the transformation of ideologies into exhibits through calculated performative and presentational strategies. These strategies are grounded in mythologies that tie the historical present to the past. Because the relationship between art and artifact is also both synchronic and diachronic in this way, the dichotomy of ethnology and art falls apart as a method but persists as a myth. Spectacular colonialism, in which the origins, byproducts, and justifications of the colonial enterprise are displayed as spectacles, has its roots in the changing world views of early modernism (Mannheim 1952, p. 73).9 These world views encompass important scientific and technological changes as well as the cultural and political attitudes that accompany and derive from them. While a detailed examination of these developments extends beyond the scope of this discussion, this analysis will focus on key changes and shifts in world views and the technological apparati that relate to the content and style of museum displays. Although the ‘iconography of savagery and indolence’ (Strother 1999, pp. 12–14) among ‘exotic’ people has deep roots, the convergence of this iconography with new developments in science and technology becomes increasingly evident during the nineteenth century. The tragic experiments of naturalist Georges Cuvier with Saartjie Baartman, the Khoikhoi (Hottentot) Venus transported from Cape Colony and London to Cuvier's Paris laboratory in 1814, are often referenced as an extreme case of scientific exploitation (Strother 1999, pp. 32–33).10 Scientific experimentation intertwined with popular curiosity about humans transformed into specimens, such as Baartman and the pygmy Ota Benga, circulated between the worlds of science and entertainment. However, representations and uses of human specimens as artifacts during the colonial period were not consistent and evolved from an ideology of conflict and confrontation prior to and immediately following the 1885 Berlin Pact to one of peacemaking and uplift during the first two decades of the twentieth century (Delaporte 1985, p. 5).

The Jardin d'Acclimatation (Paris Zoo) opened in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in 1859. Strongly supported by Senator Pierre Paul Broca, also head of the Paris Anthropological Society, the zoo was considered to be both a scientific experiment and a popular touristic and entertainment attraction (Schneider 1982, p. 126). Broca and his followers, who vehemently contested Darwin's view of the origin of species, believed that Africans represented a separate subspecies of homo sapiens and that they could legitimately be displayed in the Jardin. By 1877, one year before the official opening of the first anthropological museum at Trocadéro, 14 Africans, labeled as Nubians from Somalia and Sudan, were already on display at the Jardin. As a result, public zoo attendance and profits soared. This convergence of science and popular culture was fueled by public curiosity and a belief in the scientific truth of the displays. A series of colonial expositions was held in France as early as 1855 and continued through 1937 (Delaporte 1985, pp. 5–10). Following the Franco– Prussian War, the machinery of a new military-industrial complex flooded France. These new technologies were appropriated and used for displays in colonial expositions. The Universal Colonial Expositions had close ties to the museum world and were often timed to coincide with the founding or opening of new museums, such as the Musée de Trocadéro (1878), the Musée Permanent des Colonies (1931), and the reorganized Musée de l'Homme at Trocadéro (1937). Nevertheless, it is important to recognize, as cultural critic Peter Bloom (2008, pp. 125–127) points out, that these expositions promoted different stages, versions, and themes of colonial expansion. Facing the Champs-de-Mars, the Palais de Trocadero was built in 18 months for the Universal Exposition of 1878. The Eiffel Tower was constructed 11 years later for the 1889 exposition. In 1937, the Palais became the home of France's enlarged museum of man and the site for the development of a new brand of humanistic anthropology. The earlier expositions praised colonial victories and expansionism while the later expositions, especially the 1931 and 1937 exhibitions, attempted to justify the humanitarian benefits of colonial harmony for a greater imperial France – all of France and its colonies and territories (la plus grande France). In both cases, however, the ‘trophies’ of colonial expansionism were on

display and were used to reinforce popular support of the colonial enterprise (Amrouche 1988, p. 45). Paralleling the colonial expositions was the rise of a new type of popular museum, the Musée Grévin, or wax museum. Originally based on the collaboration between Parisian entrepreneur and newspaper publisher Arthur Meyer and neorealist sculptor and caricaturist Alfred Grévin, the wax museum opened its doors in Montmartre on 5 June 1882 and remains the oldest existing popular (and populist) museum in France (Schwartz 1998, pp. 80–81). Deploying a wax casting technology developed by Philippe Curtius over a century earlier, the Musée Grévin presented dioramas of historical and contemporary events in a journalistic manner and promoted a new type of exoticized voyeurism. Every attempt was made to preserve the historical settings and display the characters in a realistic fashion. Emerging developments in photography, and later in film, including Edison's early kinetoscope and the film inventions and experiments of the Lumière brothers, became technological resources for the Grévin displays. The famous Journal Lumineux at the Musée Grévin predated cinema and featured dioramas and panoramas highlighted by flashing lights to create the appearance of motion (Schwartz 1998, pp. 182– 183). Among the most popular highlights at the early Musée Grévin, colonial displays included an illuminated diorama of Antananarivo, Madagascar, and a diorama depicting gruesome sacrificial rituals in Dahomey. The Dahomean human sacrifice tableau at the Musée Grévin was installed immediately following the 1892 and 1893 French colonial wars in Dahomey. Dahomeans danced and were on display in the Jardin d'Acclimatation and at the 1893 exhibition in the Champs-de-Mars (Schneider 1982, p. 136; Schwartz 1998, pp. 136–137). The 1893 French Dahomean exhibit was reproduced during that year for the Chicago World's Fair by the same troupe of dancers. Between 1889 and 1895, the exploitation of Africans and other colonized populations through World's Fairs, wax representations, and ‘Barnumesque’ carnivals and circuses continued to grow worldwide. The politics of colonial representation flowed into both high museum culture and popular culture in these displays. This zeitgeist of human display cannot be removed from its association with the early colonial museum, although, as time wore on, the scientific and

anthropological communities began to view these displays with a jaundiced eye. A major break with the older colonial paradigm of confrontation and conquest occurred with the 1931 Universal Colonial Exposition in Paris.11 Joséphine Baker had been nominated as Queen of the Colonies for this exposition, but was forced to renounce the title because she had never been a French colonial subject and was not yet a French citizen (Borshuk 2003, pp. 48–49; Jules-Rosette 2007, p. 62). Nevertheless, Baker exploited the colonial mystique in her films Sirène des tropiques (1927) and Princesse Tam-Tam (1935). In her 1931 revue Paris qui remue, she sang ‘J'ai deux amours’, ‘La Petite Tonkinoise’, and other numbers exoticizing colonial subjects, once again linking the world of entertainment to the performative and discursive universe of colonial museum display. But by this time not only Baker, but other African and Antillean performers and activists, began to develop their own responses to colonialist displays through protest and parody. These early responses must be addressed as part of the historical archive of Black Paris. Maréchal Louis Hubert Gonzalve Lyautey was chosen as the Governor General (Commissaire) of the Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris, opening on 6 May 1931. A famous colonial figure who had served in Indochina and North Africa, Lyautey sought to bring order and a message of humanitarianism to the exposition (Shashko 2004, p. 4–5; Bloom 2008, pp. 128–129). While a Senegalese village had been constructed on the Champs-de-Mars for the 1889 Universal Exposition and the (in)famous Dahomean village was built in 1893, Lyautey instead chose the Bois de Vincennes as his primary locus of operation (Hodeir 2002, pp. 233–234). By this time, some of the Africans who had been ‘on display’ at previous expositions had become experienced performers who handed down their trade secrets from one generation to the next. No longer naïve, they performed with both skill and a sense of irony.12 In turn, Lyautey carefully managed his stage sets and scenarios for maximum effect in order to salvage the image and the economic base of the colonial enterprise and proclaim its modernity. After much deliberation, Lyautey and his advisors chose the Bois de Vincennes as the main locus for the exposition as a way of upgrading the working–class quartiers of eastern Paris that surrounded the park and

bringing to them the same sense of Hausmannian order that he believed he had instilled in the medina of colonial Morocco. For Lyautey, the colonial enterprise represented the forward march of modernity, and outmoded forms of colonial imagery should be avoided in this spectacular festival intended to celebrate la plus grande France. Numerous new pavilions were constructed for the exposition along with one permanent edifice, the Musée Permanent des Colonies on the edge of the Bois de Vincennes. Indigenous performers appeared in model villages where they danced, sang, and worked on local crafts. Many of their artifacts, along with others acquired from colonial missions, were ultimately housed in the Musée Permanent des Colonies. The 1931 exposition was promoted as giving visitors a tour of the world, that is, of the French colonial empire, in one short day. Colonial commodities, such as coffee, sugar cane, and rubber, were advertised, and the unity and harmony of the colonies was emphasized. All of these efforts were not lost on exotic others and colonial subjects, including Joséphine Baker, who released a hit song at the time of the exposition titled ‘Voulezvous de la canne à sucre?’ (‘Would you like some sugar cane?’) that asked French colonizers whether they would like her to ‘sucer leur canne à sucre’ (‘lick their sugar cane’). Between May and October of 1931, more than 33,000,000 tickets were sold for the colonial exposition (Shashko 2004, p. 35). Supported by the French Communist Party, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, and the surrealists staged a counter-exposition, La Vérité sur les Colonies (‘The Truth about the Colonies’). The counter-exposition criticized colonial exploitation and touted the originality and aesthetic contributions of African art (Hodeir 2002, pp. 246–247; Shashko 2004, pp. 84–85). It even included an exhibit of European ‘fetishes’, including crosses and religious statues distributed by European missionaries, as a way of leveling the playing field between popular African and European art. African reformers, such as Tiemeko Garan Kouyaté of the Ligue de la Défense de la Race Nègre, Lamine Senghor, editor of La Voix des Nègres, and other African activists supported the surrealists in their efforts (Hodeir 2002, p. 247).13 This exposition initiated a pattern of counter–protest which reached its height in May 1968 and was to continue years later in France. These protests, which were both political and aesthetic, had complex repercussions on politics and museum culture. La Verité sur les Colonies

was not a popular success and had only 4426 attendees in contrast to the millions who attended the official colonial exposition (Hodeir 2002, p. 247). Nevertheless, it did stimulate museum reforms. The new permanent Musée des Colonies, constructed by Albert Laprade in a classical Art Deco style, would eventually host a variety of ideologically competing exhibits (Morton 1998, pp. 363–368). The initial exhibits contained not only objects from the colonial expositions but also those collected on various expeditions labeled in terms of the region of collection and minimally in terms of the utilitarian or ritual uses of each piece.

Modernist experiments: practice, performance, and change Albert Laprade was selected as the architect for the Musée Permanent des Colonies because he had built a new medina in Casablanca (Morton 1998, p. 363). But Laprade also claimed to have been influenced by Le Corbusier and modernist avantgarde architecture. At the same time that Laprade's project was under construction, plans were made for the Palais de Chaillot and the adjacent new Musée de l'Homme, which drew on monumental neoclassicism. Within this new edifice, another group of scholars and administrators intended to change the face of museum collection and anthropology in France. Marcel Mauss, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Paul Rivet formed the Institut d'Ethnologie in 1925. They devised a new anthropology focusing on the comparative study of cultures, behaviors, and ideas rather than on the anthropometric study of race and biology (Rivet and Rivière 1931, pp. 3–11). Although the new Musée de l'Homme did not actually open until 1937 after the Universal Colonial Exposition that year, the blueprints and ideas were already in place at the time of the 1931 exposition. Chosen as the director of the new museum, Rivet wanted to develop innovative ideas of curatorial collection and display. He appointed as his sous-directeur (deputy director) Georges-Henri Rivière, who was a collector of pre-Columbian art, a jazz aficionado, and a man about town. Rivière was well acquainted with the dioramas of the Musée Grévin, with the Parisian music hall scene, and with Black Paris of the late 1920s and early 1930s. He introduced space, light, and aesthetic composition into the

Musée de l'Homme while preserving the authenticity of the artifacts and providing the appropriate level of emission framed by labeling, archiving, researching, and collecting. Rivière's influence on the museum extended until the mid-1970s. Although some of Rivet and Rivière's dioramas appear outmoded today, they were avant-garde at the time. The Musée de l'Homme also provided a research base for professional anthropologists such as Marcel Griaule, his student Jean Rouch, and fellow traveler Michel Leiris, engaged in studying, photographing, and filming objects and their sites of origin. By the 1950s, these anthropological researchers began to engage with African writers, artists, and intellectuals in Paris via Alioune Diop's Présence Africaine journal, founded in 1947, and the related publishing house (Jules-Rosette 1998, pp. 33–42).14 The uneasy collaboration between French anthropology and Présence Africaine, nonetheless, paved the way for modernist museum innovations as the colonial period began to draw to a close after the Second World War. Debates on colonial liberation were held at the Palais de Chaillot, and scholars from all sides began to participate. Although the process of collecting was still rooted firmly in the vestiges of imperialism, the old models of colonial expansionism were criticized both inside and outside of the museum. Rivet and Rivière (1931, p. 7) contended that civilizations consist of complex cultural influences, borrowings, and fusions. Consequently, in the organization of the galleries of the Musée de l'Homme, there would be no pure races or civilizations but instead a window onto a series of these hybrid fusions emphasizing the distinctiveness of each variation, much like a jazz improvisation with different versions of a leitmotif. The rooms devoted to Africa, Oceania, Asia, and the Americas consisted of displays of living cultures brought together by contact and fusion, but separated by kernels of cultural uniqueness. The end result was Marcel Mauss's homme total, or the fusion of world cultures and civilizations across time and space (Clifford 1988, pp. 138–139). The atmosphere among the early anthropologists of the Institut d'Ethnologie was influenced by the ‘negrophilia’ of the late 1920s and early 1930s. The museum's audience extended far beyond its walls and encompassed a full-fledged popular exoticism that was based more on aesthetics and interpretive ethnography than it was on human biology.

Hence, the dichotomy between anthropology and art started to break down again, leading to the aestheticization of concepts such as ‘primitive mentality’, ‘life force’, and African ‘élan spirituel’. This breakdown inevitably led to an ideological collision and regrouping. If Africanist anthropologists could claim an African âme (soul) and aesthetics as their own, so too could the young African and Afro-Antillean students and intellectuals such as Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire. And so too could the surrealists, spurred on by anticolonialist political ideologies. Thus, epistemological conflicts in terms of world views did not issue from the distinctions between anthropology and art, or between exoticism and racial singularity. Everyone included in the cultural debates of the era claimed to own all of these categories. Instead, a newly emerging debate began to focus on the interpretation of these rubrics in the context of political engagement and liberation as the colonial enterprise began to crumble. Alioune Diop and Léopold Senghor conceived of l'art nègre as an essentialist expression of the soul and sentiment of African cultures. As the president of Senegal (1960–1980), Senghor devoted over a third of his national budget to making this vision a concrete social reality. But these plans were preceded in the 1950s and 1960s by numerous debates among African and Afro-Antillean intellectuals in Paris before the end of the colonial era. Criticizing Diop and Senghor as theorists of négritude, Frantz Fanon emphatically stated: ‘You will never make colonialism blush for shame by spreading out little-known cultural treasures under its eyes’ (1963, p. 223). Fanon was a proponent of the development of national cultures and ideologies, although his concrete plans for doing so never crystallized in the world of museum discourse. But Senghor's artistic museum plans in newly independent Senegal flourished and ultimately interfaced with the French and international cultural establishments. Postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha (1987, pp. 5–11) and Stuart Hall (1996, pp. 441–449) have pointed out the disastrous consequences of colonial imagery and the lingering effects that it continues to have on intercultural perceptions. By aestheticizing art, anthropology, and race while continuing to classify artifacts under scientific categories, anthropologists in France muted these categories and began to dilute the colonial heritage of the modernist museum. From Rivet and Rivière to

Rouch, the Musée de l'Homme continued its humanistic challenge to old colonialist paradigms leading to the cultural responses embodied in postmodern museums.

‘Le Musée d'Art au Hasard’: postmodern dreams Born of the social and political upheavals of May 1968, the Centre Georges Pompidou, designed by architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers as an open postmodern space, represents a watershed in French museum culture and appeared, for a while, to constitute a point of no return. Its architecture of pipes, tubes, and glass hurls museum-goers into the uncharted territory of contemporary art. Jean Baudrillard has analysed the implosive ‘Beaubourg effect’ (1994a, pp. 61–86) elicited by the stark contrasts between the architectural form and the contents of the museum, between its avant-garde populist ideology and what he perceived to be its sterile environmental austerity.15 According to Baudrillard, ‘Beaubourg is already an imperial compression – figure of a culture already crushed by its own weight – like moving automobiles suddenly frozen in a geometric solid’ (1994a, p. 63). He describes the pipes, tubes, and escalators as similar to the Charles de Gaulle (Roissy) airport, where one is propelled through ‘satellites’, but after this maze of tubes, ‘ends up completely flat in front of … traditional airplanes’ (Baudrillard 1994a, p. 62). As with the airport, more activity, of a different sort, takes place outside of this structure than inside of it. Nevertheless, in spite of these structural inconsistencies, the Beaubourg has become an important site for re-envisioning contemporary African art. The pathbreaking 1988–1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre, under the direction of Jean-Hubert Martin and André Magnin at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris, epitomized a transformation in the display and reception of African art. Works of European avant-gardists and ‘world’ artists were juxtaposed for their ‘magical’ qualities. The presence of contemporary African art in a major French museum space increased the symbolic and economic capital of the work. Within a year after the exhibition, new African museums and art galleries opened, and others were reinvigorated across the Parisian landscape – the Musée Dapper on rue Paul Valéry, Galérie New Black Arts on rue Hermel, Galérie Patras on rue Sainte-Anastase, and Galérie Est on

rue Keller (Jules-Rosette 2002, pp. 20–29).16 All of these locations became important iconic and touristic sites in Black Paris. Although the trend was short-lived (for example, the Galérie New Black Arts was closed by 1998), this moment of artistic effervescence marked a turning point in the interpretation and valuation of African art in France. As a byproduct of these developments, French contemporary artists such as Boltanski and Messager also received increased visibility (DeRoo 2006, p. 200). While the grands projets of President François Mitterand's socialist régime included the Louvre pyramid, a new national library, and an opera house at Bastille, considerable funding was also devoted to the Agence de Coopération Culturelle et Technique (ACCT), supporting artists from former French colonies and territories (DeRoo 2006, pp. 199–201). But how could the general population, what Baudrillard (1994a, pp. 68–69) terms the masses, be attracted to the new postmodern museums? In combination with the Fonds Régionaux d'Art Contemporain (FRAC), Mitterand and his Minister of Culture Jack Lang answered this question by promoting the decentralization of the arts through maisons de la culture, which gave local artists access to funding and venues for their productions (DeRoo 2006, p. 200). The Beaubourg may be viewed as a nodal pole in this axis of decentralization. In terms of the narrative program presented at the opening of this discussion, artistic decentralization and reform were, in part, an effort to redress some of the problems caused by colonial museums and their ideologies. The beginning of Jacques Chirac's administration consisted of the famous cohabitation, or shared governance with François Mitterand in 1986. During this period, an important cultural project was completed with the opening of the Musée d'Orsay devoted to nineteenth-century art. This museum involved the reconfiguration of a former nineteenth-century railway depot, and it displayed renowned masterpieces as well as salon art. The museum planners emphatically rejected the ‘Pompidou-Beaubourg’ model in favor of a ‘rehabilitation of academic art’ (Schneider 1998, p. 3). Although many debates surrounded the opening of this museum, with postmodern interior spaces and a neoclassical exterior, it constituted a breakthrough in artistic representations in France, and it would provide Chirac with a point of departure and a new portfolio for future projects in the arts.

Under Chirac's remaining administration, funding for the arts was severely cut, and ACCT was closed. As a result, numerous journals and creative projects with links to contemporary Africa were radically reconfigured or eliminated. In their place, Chirac embarked upon a new grand projet of arts premiers (first arts) inspired by his close association with art collector and entrepreneur Jacques Kerchache (Price 2007, pp. 36– 38).17 Starting by writing short articles about first arts and expanding his personal art collection, Chirac moved boldly to insert non-Western arts into the Pavillon des Sessions of the Louvre. Amid resistance and heated controversy among Louvre officials and other public commentators, Chirac then expanded his project to include the establishment of a new museum of first arts and proceeded to assemble a team of experts. A site was chosen near the Eiffel Tower at the Quai Branly, and award-winning architect Jean Nouvel, who had designed the Institut du Monde Arabe, was selected in 1999 to build the edifice (Lapierre 2001, pp. 105–115; Price 2007, pp. 112– 113). In many ways, Chirac's choice of Nouvel paralleled Lyautey's selection of Albert Laprade to construct the Musée des Colonies. Both architects were viewed as famous and avant-garde embodiments of the political representations of their respective eras. During the early stages of planning of the Musée du Quai Branly, the Centre Pompidou was viewed as a postmodern model for a multipurpose, media-driven museum and cultural conglomerate (Naumann 2006, p. 123; Price 2007, p. 113). However, as time wore on, the parallels between the two projects appeared to diminish. While the goal of the Beaubourg was to create a museum that reached out to the city, the Musée du Quai Branly was designed to be hidden from public view. To accomplish his goals, Chirac rapidly appointed and deployed a team of experts, including Germain Viatte, a curator from the Musée national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie (formerly the Musée Permanent des Colonies); Stéphane Martin, a graduate of the École Nationale de l'Administration (Énarque) and an expert manager; and Maurice Godelier, a senior and highly respected Africanist anthro-pologist from the Centre National de la Recherche (CNRS). Martin enthusiastically threw himself into his job, arguing that making a museum is like ‘making theater, not writing theory’ (Naumann 2006, pp. 118–119). The plan, however, was not without internal controversy. Herman Lebovics (2004, pp. 162–163) and Sally Price (2007, pp. 88–97) discuss the

intriguing details of Chirac's project and the areas of resistance from the museum community and the general public. The work of the Musée du Quai Branly team resulted in Jean Nouvel's iconoclastic edifice and a large garden of tropical plants, resembling a cross between a classical French garden and a simulated and controlled jungle. The interior of the museum was designed with dark lighting, mud walls, and long and extensive ramps. Over 300,000 art objects and artifacts were transferred from the Musée de l'Homme and the Musée national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie to the Quai Branly facility. With these materials in hand, the organizers projected the opening of the museum for 20 June 2006. The opening was a grand event featuring Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary-General, along with the Foreign Minister of Australia, the Secretary-General of the International Organization for Francophonie, and a host of museum officials, scholars, and artists from around the world. But hovering over this scene were the unfinished conceptual aspects of the project and the contingency of the objects being presented in the museum's permanent collection. When Bennetta Jules-Rosette first visited the museum in the company of a local Cameroonian friend to conduct research for this paper, he stated: ‘Eh bien, you want to go to the “musée d'art au hasard”? What's next on your agenda?’ His statement was a forecast of the experience. The term ‘au hasard’ can be translated as ‘haphazard’; but the word ‘hasard’ also carries with it the two connotations of fate, or chance, and of peril and ‘hazard’ in the English sense. All of these interpretations are applicable to the museum. Entering the large forest grounds of the museum, one moves around a series of mazeways. Clifford describes the appearance of the museum's exterior as ‘a capsized container ship … in dry dock’ (2007, p. 3). The place for purchasing tickets is outside, as it would be for a fair or a colonial exposition. Inside, a series of darkly lit stairways resembling the satellite tubes of Roissy airport lead to the standing exhibits. Mud walls increase the dark effect, which The New York Times journalist Michael Kimmelman has referred to as ‘a heart of darkness in the city of light’ (2006). Here, the element of ‘hasard’ enters the picture again as one enters into the galleries and moves abruptly from Africa, to the Americas, to Asia, and then to the Arctic. The effect is that of a whirlwind airplane voyage around the world with rapid and unannounced stopovers in refueling depots. The result is reminiscent of the tour du monde (world tour) in one day proposed in

Lyautey's publicity for the 1931 Colonial Exposition, but it is heightened by a sense of macabre darkness and unspoken mystery. In an interview with Tribal Arts magazine, museum director Stephane Martin explains that the project of the Musée du Quai Branly ‘will remind us that our own history is closely linked to that of the cultures that produce these works, cultures with which the Musée du Quai Branly rightly seeks to establish a more comprehensive and appropriate dialogue’ (2006, p. iv). Elaborating more on this discussion, Minister of Culture and Communication Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres further states that through educational outreach and international collaborations the museum ‘will contribute to the dialogue between cultures that is such a necessary aspect of our time’ (2006, p. v). Clifford notes that the museum promotes itself as a space where cultures dialogue: ‘Là où dialoguent les cultures’ (‘Where cultures enter into dialogue’), and later laconically remarks that ‘cultures don't converse’ (2007, p. 5) but people do. However, there is a dialogue of sorts, a postmodern Tower of Babel, to which we shall return later in the discussion of educational outreach. At this point, it is sufficient to remark that the Quai Branly has achieved a postmodern flattening of multiple discourses and a strategic occultation of their origins. Although the concept of arts premiers (first arts) is muted, ambiguous, and controversial, the museum's publicity literature concedes this point (Glorieux-Desouche 2006, p. 10).18 The concept resurrects ethnocentric images of the ‘exotic other’, albeit with an updated rhetoric that the museum's literature labels as ‘politically acceptable and correct’ (Anquetil 2006; Choay 2006, p. 5). Critics have addressed the emission level of the exhibits that provide uneven information on objects and questionable interpretations of sacred artifacts. Some of this criticism, in particular a series of 2006 interviews by journalist Gilles Anquetil with Africanist anthropologist and multicultural specialist Jean-Loup Amselle, suggests that the problem is rooted in an unresolved conflict between art and ethnology. But underlying this conflict are political issues of larger dimensions concerning historical preservation of ethnic cultures and heuristic models for the postmodern museum. Some press coverage reports that anthropologist Maurice Godelier left the museum because of the imbalance between anthropology and art in its plans. Further investigation, however, reveals that Godelier had other

concerns as well. According to Lebovics, ‘Godelier's project … was to tell the story of ex-colonial people and their struggles for liberty. He wished also to make the museum relevant to France's large immigrant population’ (2004, p. 155). To do so, Godelier planned a website to help children of African origin from the banlieues to access information about their cultures with the assistance of teachers and specialized computer data banks linked to the museum. But Godelier's plans never materialized. He departed from the museum staff, leaving many unanswered questions about the relationship of anthropology and art to French museum culture and politics (Choay 2006, pp. 8–9). Left out of this discussion is the question of financing for the Musée du Quai Branly from public sources, ticket sales, contributions, and the Friends of the Museum. Questions and controversies also arose over these issues.

Primal socialization: educating youth about arts premiers While many adults frequent the museum, large groups of museum-goers at Quai Branly consist of ethnically diverse primary school students. Some adults were present when Bennetta Jules-Rosette visited the museum for a special showing of the Crystal Skull, associated with Steven Spielberg's recently released Indiana Jones movie (2008). However, most of the visitors at the museum consisted of young students.19 In the museum's gift shop, a book entitled Comment parler des arts premiers aux enfants (How to talk about first arts with children) was on sale (Glorieux-Desouche 2006). After a brief discussion for teachers on the definition and importance of the first arts, the book continues with an explanation of how individual pieces are found, used, and preserved. The teachers observed in the museum appeared to follow the book closely. For example, in explaining a Lakota Sioux war bonnet to a group of fascinated youngsters, the teacher began with the question: ‘How do you suppose that they collected all of these feathers?’ Similar questions were posed in front of the African masks and examples of West African cowry shell currency. ‘Where do you think these cowries came from, and how were they attached to the masks?’ These questions erase the origins and meaning of the art objects in favor of utilitarian descriptions of their production. Many of the children squirmed uneasily as they tried to figure out how to collect African cowries and Sioux eagle

feathers for their upcoming art projects. The museum's practice of downplaying information about the objects and their contexts while focusing on entertainment and commercialism allows visitors to form their own impressions. This strategy, combined with the primitivism and exoticism evident in the museum's design, encourages the recycling and persistence of old stereotypes rather than advancing a genuine dialogue regarding the French political and cultural landscape.

Conclusions: reinventing tradition in postcolonial France The Musée du Quai Branly opened in 2006 amid heightening global crises and conflicts. The area around the museum was routinely patrolled by armed guards and militia intended to secure the safety of the Eiffel Tower while international tourists circulated through the site. An example of Baudrillard's description of cultural and political deterrence as a key factor in the organization of postmodern museums in France was confirmed. The structuring of Jean Nouvel's mur végétal to hide and protect the Quai Branly museum from the street is an integral part of the stage set. But what is the meaning of the diverse cultures presented inside? The postmodern dream includes an erasure of the past in order to create an idyllic future. According to Martin, ‘the French are obsessed by the purity and authenticity of the object’, while American or Anglo-Saxon curators focus on cultural narratives (Naumann 2006, p. 122). Martin denies that colonial claims, demands, and redemption are part of the final narrative contract for postmodern museums by asserting that appealing to particular ethnic or cultural museum constituencies is an Anglo-American strategy of problem solving. He also distances himself from the debate about colonial education (Naumann 2006, pp. 125–126). But to what extent can cultural and political narratives be divorced from contingent objects and museum displays? This question remains to be answered by the future of museums of African art and culture in France. Reinvented traditions recode the past for the future. The colonial museum recoded an idyllic African past for the glorification of an industrial and modernist present. The mediathéque of the Quai Branly museum contains an exhibit of the lost languages of the world. As the viewer clicks on the

exhibit, interviewees, excerpted from a variety of ethnographic films, fluently speak in their native tongues with partial and cryptic translations into French. This Tower of Babel is the ‘science fiction’ of the future of humanity in which languages and cultures are condensed into video clips of a rapid world tour that takes less than an hour.20 How and whether the fragments of these cultures will be preserved for or recognized by their descendants in a contemporary postcolonial world is an unresolved question. The postmodern dream appears to provide some closure on the last phase of the narrative program by erasing cultural differences in favor of exotic memories. But memories have a strange way of being transformed and resuscitated at unexpected moments. Perhaps this type of restructuring and rebirth is the only source of hope for the ‘musée d'art au hasard’.

Notes 1.

Bourdieu outlines what he describes as the ‘art code’ as a system (1993, pp. 223–225). He presents six conditions and procedures for the operation of the system. For the purposes of this discussion, the most important consideration is the level of emission of an artwork. Bourdieu states: ‘The only way of lowering the level of emission of a work is to provide, together with the work, the code according to which the work is coded … by the receiver…’ (1993, p. 225).

2.

Baudrillard (1994b, p. 12) uses the semiotic term ‘paradigmatic chain’ to label the collection, or series, in which objects are presented for museum display. The chain contains the semantic relationships that provide the meaning for the exhibit and the collection as a whole.

3.

Husserl (1962, p. 287) describes the ‘picture-object’. The objects in the picture acquire their meaning by virtue of the style and manner in which they are framed. Husserl terms this framing process the ‘neutralization’ of the object that is framed, or ‘neutrality modification’.

4.

According to Sartre (1966, p. 127), ‘contingency consists of the difference between ‘what … is and what it conceives’. The contingency of an ethnographic or an art object relies on its relationship to the context of origin. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998, p. 25) states: ‘Indeed, the litmus test of art seems to be whether an object can be stripped of contingency and still hold up’.

5.

Congolese artist Chéri Samba's 1995 painting Hommage aux anciens créateurs depicts Samba himself behind six African statuettes installed in a museum display in which he questions the transformed meanings of these objects. Steiner (2002, pp. 406–407) discusses Fred Wilson's 1991 installation Picasso/Who Rules? in which Wilson inserts an actual African mask into the painting along with a footstool allowing viewers to peer into the holes in the mask. Both of these pieces question the reinterpretation of African ritual objects as art. There are many other examples of similar iconic commentaries by contemporary African artists.

6.

These three narrative stages are based on the narrative program of Greimas (1987, pp. 90–93) in which subjects and objects are juxtaposed in terms of confrontation, domination, and the final attribution. In this discussion, the narrative program is applied to the colonial museum, the modernist museum, and the postmodern museum with respect to their approaches to the collection and display of objects.

7.

Hargreaves (2005, p. 94) describes the Institut du Monde Arabe as one of France's most visible locations for resources about the arts and cultures of the Arab world. He juxtaposes it with less visible resources for the study of Africa and the Caribbean.

8.

Here again, it is possible to return to Sartre's notion of contingency, viewed as ‘the horizon of possibility’ for interpreting the meaning of objects (1966, p. 129).

9.

Mannheim (1952, p. 73) states: ‘The crucial question is how the totality we call the spirit, Weltanschauung, of an epoch, can be distilled from the various objectifications of that epoch – and how we can give a theoretical account of it’. Within this discussion, we explore how particular forms of art, politics, and museum culture reflect the general ethos of the periods in which they emerge.

10. Strother (1999), pp. 29–40) provides a detailed account of the ideologies behind Georges Cuvier's experiment with Saartjie Baartman, the Hottentot Venus. The imagery associated with her in 1814 continued to influence popular culture decades later. 11. Both Africans and African-Americans were featured at the Universal Expositions of 1900 and 1925. W.E.B. Du Bois organized a famous exhibit for the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris (Hodeir 2002, p. 248). 12. Hodeir (2002, p. 244) points out that Africans who participated in the colonial expositions from 1889 forward were engaged on a contractual basis and received a weekly salary. They were also rehired and often developed ‘family businesses’ as exposition performers. 13. Lamine Senghor, an early Sénégalese activist and editor of La Voix des Nègres, along with Tiemeko Garan Kouyaté of La Ligue de la Défense de la Race Nègre represented voices of African dissent against the Universal Colonial Exposition of 1931 (Hodeir 2002, pp. 247–248; Edwards 2003, pp. 284–285). 14. Elsewhere, Jules-Rosette (1998, pp. 19–48) has written in more detail about the tension between French anthropologists and the founders and authors associated with the Présence Africaine publishing house as well as the editorial committee of the Présence Africaine journal. 15. Baudrillard (1994a, p. 62) contrasts the mobile exterior of the Beaubourg with a more rigid interior. He argues that the Beaubourg must learn to bend. Baudrillard (1994a, p. 69) concludes: ‘The success of the Beaubourg is no longer a mystery: the people go there for that, they throw themselves on this building whose fragility already breathes catastrophe, with the single goal of making it bend.’ See also MacCannell (1989, pp. 122–130) for a discussion of museums as touristic sites, semiotic signs, and historical markers. 16. In 2001, the Musée Dapper, headed by Christine Falgayrettes-Leveau, remodeled and expanded its exhibit space. Originally devoted purely to African art, the reorganized museum was reconfigured to include more contemporary pieces and diasporic art. The Musée Dapper has worked with the Musée du Quai Branly on special projects and exhibits (Jules-Rosette 2002, pp. 22–23). 17. French leaders and presidents have used grands projets and grands travaux as a way of denoting their uniqueness and cultural contributions. The Musée du Quai Branly, Chirac's grand projet, was preceded by his collaboration with François Mitterand in 1986 (Schneider 1998, pp. 2–4). 18. Glorieux-Desouche (2006) has prepared a guide to teach school children visiting the Musée du Quai Branly about the first arts. The first 49 pages of the guide describe ideas about art and theories of collecting. The remaining 129 pages contain suggestions for art projects based on the permanent collection.

19. Lebovics (2007, p. 14) describes the contemporary trend of linking French museum exhibits to the mass media. He offers as an example the Louvre's production of The Da Vinci Code maps and a tour to coincide with the opening of the movie. In May of 2008, the Musée du Quai Branly exhibited the Paris Crystal Skull to coincide with the opening of the Indiana Jones film. 20. The mediathèque and video exhibits of the Musée du Quai Branly are intentionally separated from the main permanent exhibits, which are intended to display only ‘authentic’ art (Naumann 2006, p. 125).

References Amrouche, P., 1988. Objects et collections d'art primitif: Réflexion sur les variations du goût, de 1890 à nos jours. Anthropologie de l'Art: Formes et Significations. Fascicule 1, Exposé 5. Anquetil, G., 2005. Africa, Africa. Le Nouvel Observateur, 25 August. Baudrillard, J., 1994a. Simulacra and simulation, trans. S. Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Baudrillard, J., 1994b. The system of collecting. In: J. Elsner and R. Cardinal, eds. The cultures of collecting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 7–24. Bhabha, H.K., 1987. Interrogating identity. ICA Documents, 6, 5–11. Bloom, P.J., 2008. French colonial documentary: mythologies of humanitarianism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Borshuk, M., 2003. Queen of the Colonial Exposition: Josephine Baker's Strategic Performance. In: K.L. Phillips, H.D. Pinson, L. Thomas and H. Wallinger, eds. Critical voicings of black liberation: resistance and representation in the Americas. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction, 47–65. Bourdieu, P., 1993. The field of production: essays on art and literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Choay, F., 2006. Branly: Un nouveau Luna Park est-il necessaire? Urbanisme, 350, 4–9. Clifford,J., 1988. The predicament of culture: twentieth-century ethnography, literature, and art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Clifford, J., 2007. Quai Branly in process. October, 120, 3–23.

Delaporte, G.G., 1985. L'Exposition Universelle de 1855 à Paris: Confrontations de cultures et prises de conscience. In: Autour de Jean Laude: Dialogue entre les cultures. Paris: Collectif pour l'Histoire de l'Art, 5–10. DeRoo, R.J., 2006. The museum establishment and contemporary art: the politics of artistic display in France after 1968. New York: Cambridge University Press. de Vabres, R.D., 2006. An essential role in the dissemination of knowledge. Tribal Arts, 41, v. Edwards, B.H., 2003. The practice of diaspora: literature, translation, and the rise of black internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fanon, F., 1963 [1961]. The wretched of the earth, trans. C. Farrington. New York: Grove Weidenfeld. Glorieux-Desouche, I., 2006. Comment parler des arts premiers aux enfants. Paris: Le Baron Perché. Greimas, A.J., 1987. On meaning: selected writings in semiotic theory, trans. P.J. Perron and F.H. Collins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hall, S., 1996. New ethnicities. In: David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds. Stuart Hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies. New York: Routledge, 441–449. Hargreaves, A.G., 2005. Black-Blanc-Beur: multi-coloured Paris. Journal of Romance Studies, 5 (3), 91–100. Hodeir, C., 2002. Decentering the gaze at French colonial exhibitions. In: P.S. Landau and D.D. Kaspin, eds. Images and empires: visuality in colonial and postcolonial Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 233–252. Husserl, E., 1962 [1913]. Ideas: general introduction to pure phenomenology, trans. W.R. Boyce Gibson. London: Collier Books. Jules-Rosette, B., 2007. Josephine Baker in art and life: the icon and the image. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Jules-Rosette, B., 2002. Musée Dapper: new directions for a postcolonial museum. African Arts, 35 (2), 20–29, 90–92. Jules-Rosette, B., 1998. Black Paris: the African writers' landscape. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kimmelman, M., 2006. A heart of darkness in the city of light. The New York Times, 2 July. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B., 1998. Destination culture: tourism, museums, and heritage. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lapierre, E., 2001. Jean Nouvel. AMC: Le Moniteur Architecture, Hors Série. Paris: Agence AJN. Lebovics, H., 2004. Bringing the empire back home. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lebovics, H., 2007. Echoes of the ‘primitive’ in France's move to postcoloniality: the Musée du Quai Branly. Globality Studies, 4, 1–17. MacCannell, D., 1989. The tourist: a new theory of the leisure class. New York: Schocken Books. Mannheim, K., 1952. Essays on the sociology of knowledge. P. Kecskemeti and K. Mannheim, eds. New York: Oxford University Press. Martin, S., 2006. A place for exchange and dialogue. Tribal Arts, 41, iv. Merleau-Ponty, M., 1964. Signs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Morton, P.A., 1998. National and colonial: the Musée des Colonies at the Colonial Exposition, Paris, 1931. The Art Bulletin, 80 (2), 357–377. Naumann, P., 2006. Making a museum: ‘it is making theater, not writing theory’: an interview with Stéphane Martin, Président-Directeur Général, Musée du quai Branly. Museum Anthropology, 29 (2), 127–188. Price, S., 2007. Paris primitive: Jacques Chirac's Museum on the Quai Branly. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rivet, P. and Rivière, G.-H., 1931. La réorganisation du musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro. Bulletin du Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, 1, 3–11.

Samba, C., 1995. Hommage aux anciens créateurs, acrylic painting on canvas. Collection of the Völkerkundemuseum der Universitat, Zurich. Sartre, J.-P., 1966 [1943]. Being and nothingness, trans. H.E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press. Schneider, A.K., 1998. Creating the Musée d'Orsay: the politics of culture in France University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Schneider, W.H., 1982. An empire for the masses: the French popular image of Africa, 1870–1900. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Schwartz, V.R., 1998. Spectacular realities: early mass culture in fin-desiècle Paris. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shashko, T.D., 2004. Exhibiting la plus grande France: the Exposition Coloniale Internationale de Paris and the Musée Permanent des Colonies, 1931–1959. PhD dissertation, Stanford University. Steiner, C.B., 2002. Art/anthropology/museums: revulsions and revolutions. In: J. MacClancy, ed. Exotic no more: anthropology on the front lines. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 399–417. Strother, Z.S., 1999. Display of the body Hottentot. In: B. Lindfors, ed. Africans on stage: studies in ethnological show business. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1–61. Wilson, F., 1991. Picasso/Who Rules?, installation at Metro Pictures Gallery, New York.

Will the Musée du Quai Branly show France the way to postcoloniality? Herman Lebovics Department of History, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, USA France has, arguably, struggled to negotiate its colonial history more than any other former colonial power. This article questions the declared purpose of the Quai Branly Museum to be France's first new museum of the twenty-first century, exploring its conceptualization, the complicated political and scholarly debates its opening triggered. The Quai Branly Museum wants to be a museum, but neither of purely art objects nor of social artifacts (most of which were collected by marine officers, missionaries, and anthropological expeditions during the colonial era). Architect Jean Nouvel has tried boldly to transcend that old disjunction, but his problematic architecture has much to reveal concerning the unconscious ways in which perceptions of non-Western cultures, which naturally informed the colonial expansionist enterprise, continue to inform contemporary debates on cultural and social diversity. The question remains as to whether the museum can evolve into an entity that will eventually foster more egalitarian and more culturally sophisticated aspects of the relationship between France and the formerly colonized.

Why are people who know something about the cultural objects on display so upset with the new Musée du Quai Branly? Imagine this: we visit a new museum called something like ‘The Museum of French Culture’, where, in a darkened space dotted with islands of dramatically-lit showcases we are shown the thirteenth-century statues of the benighted Synagoga and of the triumphant Ecclesia from the South Portal of the Strasbourg Cathedral, a well-made sword such as d'Artagnan might have worn, a group of old Burgundy bottles each shaped somewhat differently, a ceramic mustard pot in the shape of a toilet, Leonardo's ‘La Giaconde’, David's ‘Oath of the Horatii’, and one of Monet's paintings of his garden, of the Japanese bridge, perhaps (Lebovics 1999).1 Or, consider this: we are invited to see an exhibition of impressionist paintings called simply ‘France’. That is what the fuss is about. In the first instance, by appearing to be representative of aspects of French life, and presenting visual specimens out of social

context, outside of history, and, isolated, without nuanced aesthetic framing, we are being told these serve as faithful indices2 of the larger world announced at the entrance. And note, the most modern object is probably the mustard pot. There is perhaps nearly a century more of French life and art that remains untold. In the second example, we have the classic museological strategy of displaying art of a certain style or from a certain period to represent the timeless essence of a culture. Are these invidious comparisons? How, then, can we make a postcolonial museum? For that is the declared purpose of France's first new museum of the twenty-first century. Seeing the permanent exhibition of the Musée du Quai Branly (hereafter, MQB), does not give visitors a good sense of the societies that produced the works on display. Yet in contrast to its art-dealer-chic foretaste in the Pavillon des Sessions of the Louvre, appallingly named, ‘Arts Premiers’, nor does it do full honor to the aesthetic aspects of what it shows. MQB wants to be a museum, then, neither of purely art objects nor of social artifacts. Architect Jean Nouvel has tried boldly to transcend that old disjunction. The debate between displaying cultural objects either as art or as artifacts is exhausted (Ethnologie française 2008). Few anthropologists today believe that placing information about the uses and imputed cultural meaning of single objects on display in a showcase can bring a culture to life. Nor does an aesthetic mode of representation necessarily negate life. Imagine how impoverished our idea of our own Western societies, let alone other ones, would be if we had no knowledge how the beautiful and the creative were appreciated. And just because of our thirst to know what is so valued, in a perverse way, certain kinds of displays meant to valorize the high aesthetic quality of the objects – by both what they show and what they do not show – imply an insidious ontological statement. We are encouraged mentally to reconstruct the society from the masks, statues, household utensils, ritual objects, and ornaments on display. We are invited to believe that the societies from which they came were more artistic, in a primitive way, than ours; that, when not carving masks or weaving textiles, all they did was dress up, sing, and dance. Sometimes they hunted and killed enemies with handsomely made weapons. We learn that they worshiped strange gods. By that which is non-vu we are led to believe that they had no modern technology nor did

they seem to think about either the natural or the supernatural world rationally, or indeed historically.3 We do not learn much about whether they are alive, or making these objects anymore, or whether they have died out, or that perhaps they are simply getting their aesthetic pleasures from the Christian calendar art on their kitchen walls, while some younger members of the society are arranging exhibitions of new work in galleries and museums all over the world. Accordingly, we have to ask how the MQB happened when it did and how it did? A little origins-history would be illuminating. Most of the things shown at the MQB were collected by marine officers, missionaries, and anthropological expeditions during the colonial era. They were given a permanent home in the Musée d'enthnographie which opened in 1878. In the heady leftist-humanist optimism following the triumph of the Popular Front government of the mid 1930s, the institution tried to diminish its identification with the governing functions of the colonial empire by changing its name to the Musée de l'Homme, and, for the same reason, its mode of exhibition to less an exhibition of trophies traded or captured from savage tribes to a more ‘scientifically’ classificatory interior décor (Lebovics 1995). Before the change of name the institution contained a hall dedicated to the cultural anthropology (called folklore then) of the regions of France. At the time of the creation of the Musée de l'Homme, this collection, still in the same building, was made into a separate museum dedicated to ‘les arts et traditions populaires’ of the French countryside. Some decades after World War II this museum about the peasant cultures of France found a new home in the Bois de Boulogne on the western edge of Paris. The war had made overseas fieldwork impossible. Claude Lévi-Strauss, who returned from New York exile after the war, lead the shift of interest from material culture, first, to kinship studies and, then, to myths. These methodological changes made museums of cultural artifacts less central to the study of small cultures. More or less in tandem with the demise of the French colonial empire, the Musée de l'Homme sank in importance, budget, and visitor numbers. When he became France's first culture minister André Malraux filled an underutilized building at the Porte Dorée left over from the Paris Colonial Exposition of 1931 with African and Pacific Ocean

cultural objects from the ethnographic museum's collection, which, however, were displayed primarily as works of art. In the new millennium, as President Jacques Chirac began to plan his retirement from office, and, specifically, to think about how best to monumentalize his moment of leadership, as a predecessor, Georges Pompidou, had done, he decided to have a (future) Musée Chirac built. Chirac admired and collected what some collectors and dealers were still calling ‘l'art primitif’. No one was visiting the old Musée de l'Homme. The one at the Porte Dorée was off the beaten track. And tourists were overcrowding even the new Grand Louvre to the relative neglect of other museums in the city. And, yes, most the colonial empire had disappeared (largely in the 1960s) and the seemingly requisite generation had passed for that fact to become capable of assimilation to the national narrative. The newly fashionable English word, ‘postcolonial’ began to appear in French writings about empire and after. So was conceived a major new marker for France's relations with the global South. Jean Nouvel, who had designed the Institute du Monde Arabe, was named as the architect for a museum building to go up on the last space free along the Seine, on the Quai Branly, next to the Eiffel Tower on Paris's museum row. The Musée de l'Homme was closed as was the Musée national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie. Their collections went to the new institution. From the storerooms of the Musée Guimet came ‘village’ art from Asia. And works sold or donated by a few private collectors – including works once owned by Claude Lévi-Strauss and André Breton – entered the collection. The MQB, after much debate, its street address becoming its temporary name, opened in the summer of 2006. Since then, although well-attended by the public and much advertised around the city and even at the airports, it has suffered a great deal of criticism from the scholarly world for its museological shortcomings, its socalled aestheticizing proclivities, and its disconnects with the present-day societies from which the objects it shows came. For example, during the pré-figuration, one of France's most influential anthropologists, Maurice Godelier, had insisted on giving visitors more ethnographic information and context, before he was removed from the planning team. Most recently some anthropologists have continued to critique the MQB along these lines in a special dossier in Ethnologie française (2008). But contexting in

museum displays is more a work of creating theatrical tableaux than of science, and synchronic as they are, such installations show us only a snapshot of the past cultures of dead people. As Sally Price put in her recent book on the museum, Paris primitive: Jacques Chirac's Museum on the Quai Branly, ‘museum media demand a particularly merciless level of selectivity’ (2007, p. 158; Dias 2007; Le Débat 2007). Perhaps, as historian of Africa Catherine Cocquery-Vidrovitch proposed, it would have been better to offer viewers an historic understanding of ever-innovating living cultures with pasts, presents, and futures.4 But historians of the lands from which these objects came were largely excluded from any of the planning or current administration. How then was special aesthetic of the present museum arrived at? Historically, of course, there is an old bad habit, especially in France, to referentiality. The MQB represents the colonial Other primarily within the framework of contemporary Western aesthetic culture. The affinities of the beautiful with the exotic-primitive have a long history in France. Long before Picasso saw the African figures at the Paris Ethnographic Museum that inspired his ‘Demoiselles d'Avignon’, the colonial had been integrated into cultural production. What lycéen does not know Baudelaire's ‘Black Venus’? Was not Josephine Baker, wearing only bananas, the toast of the Paris intelligentsia? And where – beyond their unconscious – would the Surrealist have found creative ideas if they had not discovered Africa and the American Indians? (Lebovics 2006a). But how does such an exhibition strategy move France in the direction of postcoloniality? Is the risk not that all becomes artworks while the living people disappear from view? And by representing what is primarily a political and an economic question as a cultural one, do we not doom ourselves to endless and irresolvable critical debates, powerless to confront the cruel legacy to be extirpated? The decision to re-clothe a colonial past in cultural forms is the product of a conjunctural confluence of forces. Force one – advised by his primitive-art-dealer friend Jacques Kerchache – President of the Republic Jacques Chirac ordered the building of the museum. He wanted this establishment to serve as a place of memory of his presidency, of course, and but particularly as a place of honor of peoples (whose art he collected) who have been in the past ‘scorned’ (méprisés), as he put it in his address at the Opening on 20 June 2006. He hoped that the visitor, ‘who will pass

through the doors of this Musée du Quai Branly will be gripped by emotion and a sense of marvel. [He] wanted the experience of the museum to bring her to an awareness of the deep truth which the museum displays, and so, in turn, make her a bearer of its message, this message of peace, tolerance, and respect for others’. But in the really existing museum the marvelous trumps respect for others: so no place was made for displays about the colonial era or of the history of slavery, or even of people from the former colonies living in today's France. Then, second, and of at least equal importance with presidential glory, we must not forget tourism. This topic is rarely raised in the stormy intellectual debates about the new museum, although it is certainly a major cause of its creation. In June 2006 alongside Bruno Latour, who moderated the opening conference of distinguished participants, and the museum's president Stéphane Martin who welcomed everyone, stood the Minister of Tourism. How many of these profound aesthetic, intellectual, and exhibition questions about this new lieu de oubli might be better illuminated if we followed the money? In 2004, a planning year for the MQB, tourism composed a hefty 8.3 percent of the Gross Domestic Product. In that year, out of a total of 50.2 million visitors to the top 14 cultural sites in all of France, 20.1 million people visited museums, 15.8 million of them the Louvre, the Pompidou, and the Orsay, the three principal Paris art museums. At the same time, the footsteps of the very few visitors to the Musée de l'Homme and the Musée national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie in the far off Bois de Vincennes (at the eastern periphery of the city) made loud echoes in their empty halls. Across the river, and second only to the Louvre in popularity, stands the Eiffel Tower. And that beckoning structure is just next door on the MQB, to the site chosen to build a new museum of the art of the South. Sixty percent of tourists who enter any French museum visit only the Louvre. There they see the glories of past great urban or court civilizations. But with fewer and fewer visitors drawn to see weird colonial things in dusty old buildings, a new place was needed to show the public the treasures of the planetary South, which, like Napoleon's filling the Louvre with European and Middle Eastern war booty, had come to France as a result of its role as imperial metropole. In 2000 a bridgehead was first created by Jacques Kerchache in the Pavillon des Sessions of the Louvre where nearly a 120 splendid pieces –

mostly masks, statues, and drums, that is, male art – were put on display in the classic modernist manner: objects cleaned and shiny, handsomely lit in well-separated glass cases, with just minimum information as to place of collection, materials, and possible date of fabrication. That foretaste hopefully would tempt those enchanted by what they saw in what he called the ‘Arts Premiers’ wing of the Louvre to cross the Seine and continue their visit to the South on the other side. The appealing presentation of exotic objects for tourists encourages display strategies much like those which are deemed to honor a former President of the Republic: they include neither extensive discussions of religious beliefs, kinship systems, nor economic life, nor of colonialism nor slavery, nor historical changes, nor of the lives lived by contemporaries in these societies. A third aspect of the importance of this new museum is the key role French leaders hope it will play in demonstrating France's support for the aspirations of the peoples of the South. France was the chief European champion of the 2001 UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity. President's Chirac's remarks at the museum's inauguration continued the same line of thinking. Most recently, President Sarkozy has spoken of ‘our privileged partnership with the lands of the South’. With much less economic, political, and military capital than some larger nations, French policymakers have decided to mobilize the nation's vast stocks of cultural capital in the interest of expanding advantageous relations with the formerly colonized. This strategy – or the way it is being done, of course, can elicit suspicion, even hostility, from the once-colonized as we saw, for example, in angry responses to President Sarkozy's patronizing speech delivered at the University of Dakar in July 2007 (Sarkozy 2007; Konaré et al. 2008; Coquery-Vidrovich 2008; Gassama 2008).5 But, despite certain ineptitudes, there is no doubt that a politics of cultural outreach is meant for the long term and that it is worldwide in reach. For example, while others offered various kinds of aid in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, in addition, to a putting on a fund-raising concert in Paris, and to creating three-month residential fellowships in Paris for displaced jazz musicians, the French government followed up these gestures by sending paintings from the Louvre to the New Orleans Museum of Art! Finally, we come to the fourth and grandest force driving the representation of the colonial. At the entrance to the museum site, architect

Jean Nouvel has erected a two-story glass screen to protect the museum from the urban busyness of the roadway and the Seine river traffic, and, with the same architectural gesture, to guard the objects within from contacts with contemporary urban life. The museum it delimits serves as an excellent exemplar of both the lure and the fear in the West of what for too long has been termed ‘the primitive’. The President's architect decided to create a building in Paris which evokes the mood and sensibility of a primordial, dark, ghostly world in the global South. To better understand how the aesthetic strategy of Jean Nouvel obscures a political project and so effectively blocks France from exiting to a postcolonial world, let us look more closely at his construction. Our story begins with a visit. Once inside the glass wall, the street-level view of the site is anarchic. As if dropped by an inattentive giant, in no apparent order, several wings lay connected to a large exhibition plateau. They are, we will learn, the offices, some smaller exhibition and studio spaces, a café, and the bookstore gift shop. The big structure is elevated above the ground, Corbusier-like, by columns. On the second story a glass facade covers the display hall. This glass curtain is decorated with a continuous silk-screened tropical forest image, creating the effect of a long barrier of dense foliage. The glass jungle is punctuated along its length with 28 different-sized yellow, orange, brown, grey, and aubergine-colored boxes, perched like tree houses, on the glass verdure. Inside, these boxes appear as punched out little exhibition spaces along the wall of the main hall for smaller thematic displays. In postmodern fashion Nouvel has given the façade so many angles and facets that it is hard for the eye to gain a ‘commanding’ perspective of the structure. We walk twisty paths towards the big building. The walkway is bordered by still young plantings of grasses, bushes, and trees, which, with time, will create lush vegetation quoting the flora of the lands whose treasures, are on display inside. We note that the walls of the office area are covered with a dense growth of hanging plants. As we later discover, so are some of the executive offices. As in the case of the garden and some outside walls, the greenery is regularly watered by computer (a staff member working in one of the ‘green’ offices told me she felt like her desk sat next to the vegetable aisle of a supermarket, especially when the produce was being misted!). Eventually, during the leafy seasons, the museum will just peep out here

and there from behind the forest. But even now the entrance door is hard to find. Not because of the foliage, as most plants are not very high yet, but rather Nouvel's demotion of the idea of a grand entranceway, makes finding the entrance difficult. Even after passing the ticket windows, architecturally echoing those one might encounter at the entrance to a theme park, getting in requires guidance from the staff. Once inside the hall, we come upon a familiar face, or actually several faces: the three-story-tall totem pole, that once had belonged to Tsimshian chief Gedem Skanish, and that had stood in the colonnade at the entrance of the Musée de l'Homme. Facing the pole, protected in a glass cylinder that extends to the top floor of the museum, is stored the museum's holdings of musical instruments. To reach the permanent collection, we start on the New York Guggenheim-like-ramp which leads through a white walkway with an avant-garde installation of images and words projected on the floor. Walking further we arrive at the entrance to a dark tunnel leading to the main hall. The hand rails snake irregularly along the walls of the curving passage-way, introducing us to the dominant theme of the snake, which is repeated throughout the building and by the building itself. There is usually light at the end of the tunnel, as the optimistic saying puts it. On emerging from this one, we are plunged into the yet darker world of the exhibition plateau. We hear music with a strong drum beat playing faintly. The music and the ‘primitive’ objects vaguely visible from a distance in the obscurity of the hall made several reviewers think of Joseph Conrad's story of African savagery Heart of Darkness (Kimmelman 2006; Lebovics 2006b).6 In response to criticism, the light level has been somewhat increased since the opening, but it is still subdued to a level I would characterize as gloomy. The low light both draws the eye more imperatively to the displays standing under cones of brighter illumination, and at the same time seems to intensify the surrounding gloom. Very small lighted letters in a black frame, gives minimum information. In 2009 dates of acquisition and donor information were added, as well as a sentence or two about the ritual or practical use of the object on display. Nouvel had initially wanted a very dark hall and limited textual information because, as he said in interviews, he wanted to evoke the original settings, the mystery and spirituality, of the worlds of the pieces on display. Despite the changes, the effect he desired is still largely preserved.

The principal exhibition space, one great hall, is divided into four areas: Asian, Pacific, African, and American. These geographical areas are presented, incorrectly, as coherent culture zones. But they are not clearly demarcated, with the exception of changing floor color; we are never sure where we are or how to get to some other zone. Again, in response to criticism, a few markers for a sens de la visite have been put up, but Nouvel's floor design confounds them, so they do not help enough. This wandering in the subduing darkness of primordial cultures, this sense of being lost, is just the effect that Nouvel was looking for. It is responsible for the vagueness, and even sadness, of this account of a visit. Two thick brown mound-like walls segment the main exhibition space. The passages they mark out are called ‘the rivers’, the arrangement suggesting at the same time a sediment-filled jungle river bordered by the mud construction of precement civilizations. Varying in height from something like 5 feet to more than 8 feet, the walls run the nearly 560 foot length of the great hall. But on touching the material, it turns out not to be mud, but rather leather. Given all the blatant imagery of savagery we have already encountered, the leather wall feels macabre to the touch. Television screens playing loops of rituals or dances are inserted here and there along the way. In little bends or cut outs, perhaps two people can sit and, using a touch screen monitor, also imbedded in the wall, more deeply explore some cultural question pertinent to that area. There are not many of these interactive screens, and people tend to spend a lot of time at them. One has to wander and wait before a screen becomes free. Finally, somewhere in Africa, we can access a few layers on a monitor. What we see is well done, interesting and – as far down as we went – as culturally informative as one might want. The intelligent touch screens in that setting make us feel even more intensely the unresolved tensions both at the MQB and in our thinking about whether we should look at striking objects from non-urban, non-literate societies as artifacts of their lives, as anthropologists might, or as works of art, as an art historian would. But as we continue the tour, the innocent dilemma dissolves in our minds. Nouvel's museum has transcended that simple, and out of date, dichotomy. Nouvel has created a postmodern museum, which is unfortunately not a postcolonial one. That is, his scenography – yes, he determined that too – offers us an aesthetic display that is untrue in two crucial ways. Anti-imperialist artistic values

are transvalued to celebrate great power magnanimity; and he has subsumed the cultures depicted to a vision of capitalist mediatic spectacle. To be sure, an aesthetizing tendency has largely won out. Objects from widely varied cultures are all shown in homogenized ways in well-designed glass cases. Here and there particularly handsome pieces are isolated in dramatically highlighted displays to emphasize their qualities as great art. So, we see objects from the South whose history begins only in the West.7 Nouvel has attempted entirely to transcend the art-artifact debate by two postmodern strategies. First, because his is at the same time an aesthetic and a political move, we might find most fascinating Nouvel's adaptation architecturally and in the displays of a magic realist style. Magic realism is the quintessential anti-colonial literary (and artistic) style of the Caribbean (Alejo Carpentier), of Latin America (Gabriel García Márquez), and of India and the Indian diaspora (Salman Rushdie), to name just the bestknown writers. Although this is not the place for an extended discussion of the movement, except to note its early influences from French surrealism, the affinities between it and Nouvel's vision of the global South are striking: a world of real tropical plants and a modern building designed as a snake fetish. Evoking a magical ambiance, stylish glass cases imprison spiritual objects in a setting of primordial darkness. We are shown mysterious artifacts, forbidden rituals are hinted. We see mystifying representations of other worlds. Whereas the magic realists wanted to express the continuing struggle of non-European cultures to the hegemonic colonialist rational, Nouvel has high-jacked (détourné) the resistance movement's ideas to serve as the décor of a state museum of a onetime major colonial power.8 As he wrote in a sentence underlined in red in his Louisiana Manifesto (Nouvel 2006), ‘C'est bien sûr un travail de poésie, puisque seule la poésie est capable de fabriquer de la métaphysique instantée’ (‘To be sure, it's a work of poetry, because only poetry is capable of creating imminent [instantée] metaphysics’). The forces of order can, and do, practice the détournement of democratic impulse. From the beginning, the dedicated art historians and ethnologists at the museum each wanted to bring the museum closer to their own disciplinary understanding of how the South should be shown. Let me just recall the early and great tensions during the initial planning phase between Jacques Kerchache, the dealer and connoisseur of African art, and the eminent

ethnologist of New Guinea, Maurice Godelier, which ended with Godelier being locked out of his office. Nouvel has preempted that debate by employing the figuration of anti-imperialism to build his monument to the colonial enterprise. This snake of a building bites no colonial administrators. Then, second, and perfectly consistent with this powerful architectural visionary's perversion of magic realism, there is the insight that French critiques of the modern media-world allows us. In one of those set-piece theatrical conversations between important intellectuals of which the French are so fond, Nouvel was paired with Jean Baudrillard to discuss ‘the singular object’ in architecture. In the dialogue Nouvel speaks of all his buildings as based on ‘a concept that I know interests you’, he says to Baudrillard, namely ‘the concept of illusion’ (Baudrillard and Nouvel 2002, p. 6). To unravel Nouvel's architectural statement, we should flesh out Baudrillard's take by adding the contribution of Guy Debord. For Nouvel, this acknowledged master of surfaces, especially transparent ones, has given us a spectacle. The diversity, contradictions, and complexities of the worlds the museum contains appear to us, to take Debord's words, as an ‘affirmation of appearance’; the lives lived in the cultures on display register ‘as mere appearance’ (Debord 1971). Nouvel's is a spectacle made of the cultural capital of peoples of the southern hemisphere accumulated, turned into commodities of the culture industry, and bombastically displayed. In his museum, objects are transformed into images. He wanted, as he wrote in his manifesto, ‘to privilege the immaterial’ (Nouvel 2006). His museum offers a grand horizon-filling persuasion-image of the South. As architectural historian Nebahat Avcioglu described the transformative move in her article on the ironies of mosque-building in the West, ‘the colonial trope, image-as-identity [is made] into one of post-colonial identity-as-image’ (2007, p. 92). In attempting to make the elision from the colonial (real conquered peoples) to the postcolonial (their captive cultures) precisely by way of spectacle, the installations at the MQB serve, to adapt Debord's words, ‘as the visible negation of life, as a negation of [colonial and immigrant] life which has become visible’.9 Western publics have caught on to this modernist way of framing apparently decontextualized works displayed in art museums. It is the same for ‘primitive’ art: museum visitors know that there is an untold story behind the striking work standing

alone in the well-lit display case. Accordingly, here and there at the MQB we discover islands of anthropology.10 Let us look briefly at three important displays. First, in most of the museum's four areas, and in some of the little alcove-boxes we see one or more arrangements of the variations of a same object. Assembled examples of painted skins of Plains Indians; the varieties of ceremonial masks of the Pacific Northwest; from the Pacific, war clubs of similar design; and Dogon masks collected by Marcel Griaule are displayed side by side. At first look, the effect is a little like the old nineteenth-century ethnographic museums that organized displays on, now discredited, diffusionist or evolutionary principles. Here's how they used to show things in anthropology museums. But at Quai Branly the intent is more to show how the makers and their societies, even in the case of utilitarian objects, were interested in – often subtle – formal nuance. Second, to demonstrate both the specificity and myth-creating unity of the peoples of the Americas, anthropologist and student of Lévi-Strauss, Emmanuel Désveaux has curated an exhibition of diverse objects from all over the Americas organized according to the dichotomies and unities of structuralism. Désveaux's exhibition baffles viewers with its abstractions. The third and most fascinating anthropological display is ‘Les Amériques noires’. Its display case faces backward from the entrance at the far end of the walk through the cultural areas. Indeed, this is the most culturally sophisticated display we encounter. But its themes of empire, black skins, cultural métissage, and even how all these entered South American national identities are not echoed anywhere else on the exhibition plateau. The exhibit was largely the initiative of anthropologist-historian Serge Gruzinski, specialist on Mexican cultural métissage. It displays, for example, a red, black-dotted, cloth Voodoo globe, stuffed with potent materials, and contained in a metal armature surmounted by a crucifix. A banner decorated with sewn patterns and sequins in the Haitian Voodoo manner shows Saint James the Greater (Saint Jacques Major) – like Saint George, important to many of the traditional religions of the Americas – sitting astride a horse. This same Saint James is the patron saint of Spain. A naïve painting from the colonies shows mixed artifacts and rituals. Wrought-iron figures, tridents, and not quite Christian crosses all give evidence of the amalgamation of African and Christian beliefs and practices

produced by the transportation of slaves to work in the new world. But these are three seemingly ethnographic displays of a new kind. In the first example we are shown multiple versions of often utilitarian objects as variations in an art form. The second, the Lévi-Strauss-structuralist display, proposes a kind of idealist unity of humanity abstracted from real lives lived in historical time. And the third, ‘Les Amériques noires’, by its uniqueness on the exhibition floor suggests that métissage is unique in history, rather than demonstrating the basic truism that cultures have always borrowed, traded, and mixed. Although easily missed because of its bad location, the exhibit proposes a valuable additional dimension to the museum's displays. The two transverse paths across the museum's long axis suggest cultural contact of neighboring zones. But in its simplicity, that map of cultural geography is misleading. In contrast to the way the exhibition shows them, the contacts were often from very far away: Cowry shells from the Indian Ocean, an accompaniment of the slave trade, are found in all four areas, as are European trade beads as well. What we see sometimes as the Golden Age of the art of a non-European society usually happens once the artists get Western tools – which they never refuse – to make elegant versions of what they made before contact. So even the much prized ‘classical’ pieces are in fact products of long distance commerce. Our knowledge of today's dense global cultural networks puts the museum's simple depiction of cultural vectors – as local neighboring contacts – in a way that has the unintended effect of primitizing the description of how the cultures on display were early systematically connected to the elaborating world system. The resulting relatively static vision of the societies of the South is where modernist aesthetics and classical anthropology converge: we are shown locally unique objects existing in an ethnographic and aesthetic Now, or more accurately a spectral timelessness. If the museum's spectacle removes it from both the movements of historical time and changes of place, its insistent contemporaneity puts into relief a nagging question we had about what we were seeing: are these cultures we are viewing dead, changed, still creative, or just part of the swelling mixture of cultural flotsam and jetsam that defines our global era? ‘Les Amériques noires’ exhibit seems an attempt to explain cultural persistence-and-change today at least in the realm of religious mixing. But

the people who created these things and had these beliefs are they still here (Lebovics 2007)? Two interrogations nest in that simple phrase. First, it should be noted that it is impossible today to mount an exhibition of indigenous cultural objects in the United States, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand without the full cooperation and participation of artists, elders, and community leaders from that society. As far as we know, that was not the case with the MQB. What might still be a living or remembered cultural tradition in the area on display is ignored. From the museum's perspective, at this point at least, they ‘are no longer here’.11 Second, the question, ‘Are they still here?’, also wants to know: are the artists of the cultures on display still making pieces in the societies' traditions, quoting from tradition, making ‘airport art’, or, refusing the traditional styles, but proudly wearing their ethnic identities nevertheless, making art like their Western confreres in New York, London, Paris, and Berlin? What is the MQB's relation with contemporary art? Nouvel invited members of an Australian aboriginal artists' cooperative to paint the corridors and window frames of the office building on the rue de l'Université side as well as on the ceiling of the gift and book shop. But these serve more as elements of décor than as serious treatment of contemporary aboriginal work as art (Lebovics 2007).12 Again, recently, and probably because of the heavy criticism, including that of this author, a number of paintings by members of the same Australian cooperative were placed on display in the northwest corner of the exhibition space. There are temporary shows of contemporary art from the South programmed, but it appears that a planned division of labor will bring most displays of new work (as in the case of Africa Remix in the summer 2005) to the Centre Pompidou or as with ‘Kréole Factory’ to La Villette (April–July 2009), rather than to the Musée du Quai Branly.13 Edward Said once pointed out that in Joseph Conrad's tales in general, and in Heart of Darkness, especially, individuals' efforts to ‘see a direct relation between the past and the present, to see past and present as a continuous surface of interrelated events, is frustrated’ and that if an event in the past was ‘an episode of disaster …, one is made gloomy and sad’ (1966, p. 95), ‘The result is that sadness aims at eliminating the obligation to seek new ways’ (1966, p. 101). A President's pride to monumentalize himself as someone who values the art of the peoples of the developing world, the need for tourists' dollars, a

strategy of French foreign policy to court the South in the face of the threat of US-driven globalization, and the cultural ignorance of a world-famous architect, as well as his embrace of a doubtful aesthetic maneuver which once again links modernism with the primitive to represent visually France's relationship with its formerly colonized in the old paternalistic way – none of these forces shaping the MQB bring France any closer to postcoloniality. In her spirited defense of the museum against the criticisms of her anthropologist colleagues in a recent number of the Ethnologie française, Anne-Christine Taylor, who heads the Département de recherche et d'enseignement at the MQB, pointed out that this museums, and many others today, were more than their main exhibition space (2008). The MQB clusters discussions, activities, and ideas along with the main exhibition. It has an elaborate website. There are film series, conferences, publications, adult education programs – all largely state-of-the art. An energetic program of temporary exhibitions, in particular the one on métissage that Gruzinski curated (Planète métisse: To Mix or Not to Mix, 14 October 2008–19 July 2009), offer visitors visions and ideas more subtle and more thoughtful than what we saw in the exhibition plateau. James Clifford's gracious review of the museum (Clifford 2007) which looks to a better museum in the future, certainly reflects the hopes of many of the museum professionals trapped inside the tropical world created by Nouvel. For similar reasons, and also to make up for the problems caused by the one-dimensionality of linear museum exhibitions in our hyperspace age, other museums, like France's new museum of immigration at the Porte Dorée, have embarked on ambitious programs of often state-of-the-art media and arts activities. For the present, auteur theory – the panoply of ways of experiencing the museum that its professionals want taken into account in any assessment – and reception theory – what visitors see when they visit the main exhibition space of the institution – yield different understandings of France's efforts to move towards the postcolonial. Hopefully, in the future a way will be found to bring a greater convergence. Then, too, a kind of museological métissage, if I may put it this way, is developing. Created originally as a museum of Western modern art, the Centre Pompidou has in the past, and will, I think, in the future, do shows on contemporary art from, or related to, the global South. The ‘Africa Remix’ show was certainly indicative of that transition, and before that the 1988–1989 extensive exhibition of contemporary southern artists in

‘Magiciens de la Terre’. And despite its future incarnation as a museum of physical anthropology, we can expect the Musée de l'Homme, when it reopens, to present, as well, some ethnographically oriented exhibitions. Other museums in Paris, private, like the Dapper, as well as state museums, will also feature contemporary art by southern artists. So not all depends on the MQB getting the story right. Yet after the frustrations of our initial hopes for France's new museum of postcoloniality, we have to wait and see if, with its eventual removal from the control of its master-builder, the Musée du Quai Branly/Chirac can be reshaped to help visitors see new, more egalitarian and more culturally sophisticated aspects of the relationship between France and the formerly colonized. A little like the project of postcoloniality itself, the museum would then better be able to find ways to bypass the false starts, roadblocks, and historical burden of the colonial to a better rapport between itself, a French national museum, and the lands of the South.

Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge the generous help on questions of museology and of argument given me by Susan Hinely, Ethan Lebovics, Patricia Mainardi, and Wolf Schäfer.

Notes 1. Lest anyone think this minor piece of bad taste is a fiction, let me assure the reader that, since as a student I first encountered mustard so presented in a Routiers-endorsed provincial restaurant, I have collected these cultural objects. Moreover, the reader might consult my Mona Lisa's escort: André Malraux and the reinvention of french culture (Lebovics 1999) for a discussion of the frustrations and fruitless protest of Italian statesman Amatore Fanfani when he claimed that the loaned painting on display in the National Gallery in Washington had been painted by an Italian in Italy. 2. Charles Saunders Pierce first divided signs as to whether they served as an icon, an index, or a symbol. 3. A bit of the history of French cultural anthropology: until his death in 1939, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl argued that ‘primitive’ societies understood the world with a different logic than we Westerners did (1910 and 1922). After his death, and after World War II, Lévi-Strauss set himself the project of proving the contrary, that all humanity shared myths and a common human rationality. 4. E-mail correspondence from Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, 10 July 2007. 5. There before the assembled faculty and students of the university he said, among other things, ‘the problem with Africans is that they continue to live in symbiosis with nature […] The problem with Africa is that it continues to hold on to a lost paradise …’ And he revived an old

neo-imperialist project of Eurafrique (Eurafrica), with, ‘France wants to prepare the Eurafrica project with Africa, a project that is inscribed in our common destiny’. Some of the outraged responses are collected at the website of the Comité de vigilance face aux usages publics de l'histoire: http://cvuh.free.fr/spip.php?article123 (accessed 24 November 2008). 6. After one of my visits to the MQB, I went to a Champion supermarket in the Latin Quarter. I was startled and for a moment thought I was hallucinating, when on walking into the produce section I heard bird songs and other woodsy sounds coming from hidden speakers. I wished that Guy Debord were pushing a shopping cart alongside me so that we could have discussed the culture industry while waiting in the check-out line (for more on Debord, see below in the text); or if Debord could not have made it, I would have settled for the more dour thoughts of Theodore Adorno. 7. With our foretaste of the recent increase in demands for improperly taken artworks to be returned (the Getty Museum Italian scandal, objects voluntarily to be returned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Greeks' renewal of their older outstanding claim for the Parthenon pieces at the British Museum), we will continue to see a worldwide increase in claims for restitution of all cultural goods. The museums holding Amerindian objects in North America regularly receive requests by individuals of Native American heritage for the return of family or tribal possessions somehow come into the hands of the museums. And of course, one day, not long from now, either French people whose ancestors lived in the former colonial empire or, more likely, heads of the states created after decolonization will arrive at the doors of the Musée du Quai Branly to request the return of their cultural treasures. When in the course of a conference on the eve of the museum's opening (France and its Others: New Museums, New Identities, sponsored by the University of Chicago Center in Paris, 1–2 June 2006) Abaubakar Sanogo, then a francophone African graduate student studying film at the University of Southern California, asked the French museum administrator participants about returning cultural articles, we heard a marvelous baroque discourse on what a complicated question that was, but no answer to the question. 8. For the Situationist usage of the word, see Internationale Situationniste 1 (June 1958). 9. As posted on a Debordian website and found at: http://library.nothingness.org/articles/all/all/display/16; italics indicate the author's emphasis; the text in brackets is mine. Somewhat differently, Kimmelman concluded in his harsh review that ‘Quai Branly's story is the spectacle of its own environment’. Still captivated by the aesthetic moderns' claim of the universal applicability of their canons, Kimmelman held up the totally decontextualized art exhibit at the Pavillon des Sessions in the Louvre as the way to go. 10. After Maurice Godelier was forced out he was immediately replaced by Emmanuel Désveaux, a former student of Lévi-Strauss, who in turn, in less than a year, gave way to Anne-Christine Taylor. Her own research focuses on the ‘process by which ordinary or industrial objects become works of art’ (Taylor 2006, p. 18). Soon after his departure from the MQB planning team, Godelier received from Roger-Gérard Schwartzenberg, research minister, the Centre national de la recherche scientifique's (CNRS) highest honor, the Médaille d'or. 11. In North America, at least, the Indian myths, or stories about cultural objects, collected and published by Franz Boas, for example, are regularly replaced in exhibition information by the often differing stories that contemporary elders tell the curators. 12. Three of the eight Aboriginal artists came to Paris for the opening: Judy Watson, Yunupingu – whose younger brothers Galarrwuy and Mandawuy sing in the rock band Yothu Yindi – and John Mawurndjul from Maningrida in Arnhem Land. The museum's currently slim acquisitions budget is being used mostly to fill holes in the collection. There is no policy of which I am

aware to systematically acquire contemporary art from the four areas on display. For more on the larger strategies and divisions of labor regarding acquisitions and exhibitions in the French national museum system, see Lebovics (2007). 13. The program of activities of the MQB, including an elaborate tribute for the 100th birthday of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (who has put his considerable symbolic capital behind the museum), are available at the museum's extensive website: http://www.quaibranly.fr/fr/programmation/expositions/index.html.

References Avcioglu, N., 2007. Identity-as-image: the mosque in the West. Cultural Analysis, 6, 91–112. Baudrillard, J. and Nouvel, J., 2002. The singular objects of architecture, trans. R. Bonononno. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Clifford, J., 2007. Quai Branly in process. October, 120, 3–23. Coquery-Vidrovitch, C., 2008. Le musée du quai Branly ou l'histoire oubliée. In: A. Adame Ba Konaré, P. Boilley and E. M'Bokolo, eds. Petit précis de remise à niveau sur l'Histoire africaine à l'usage du Président Sarkozy. Paris: La Découverte, 125–138. Debord, G., 1971. La Société du Spectacle. Paris: Champs Libre. Dias, N., 2007. Le Musée du quai Branly: une généalogie. Le Débat, 147, 65–79. Ethnologie française, 2008. Volume 4 (116), 627–700. Gassama, M., ed., 2008. L'Afrique répond à Sarkozy: Contre le discours de Dakar. Paris: Philippe Rey. Kimmelman, M., 2006. A heart of darkness in the city of light. New York Times, 2 July. Available at: http://travel2.nytimes.com/2006/07/02/arts/design/02kimm.html (accessed 13 January 2009). Konaré, A., Ba, Boilley, P. and M'Bokolo, E., eds., 2008. Petit précis de remise à niveau sur l'Histoire africaine à l'usage du Président Sarkozy. Paris: La Découverte. Lebovics, H., 1995. La ‘Vraie France’: Les enjeux de l'identité culturelle, 1900–1945. Paris: Belin.

Lebovics, H., 1999. Mona Lisa's escort: André Malraux and the reinvention of French culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lebovics, H., 2006a. Imperialism and the corruption of democracies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lebovics, H., 2006b. The Musée du Quai Branly: art? artifact? spectacle! French Politics, Society, and Culture, 24 (3), 96–110. Lebovics, H., 2007. Two paths to postmodernity: the American Indian Museum in Washington and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. Cahiers Parisien/Parisian Notebooks, 3, 887–895. Le Débat, 2007. Le moment du Quai Branly, 147 (November–December). Levy-Bruhl, L., 1910. Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures. Paris: Alcan. Levy-Bruhl, L., 1922. La mentalité primitive. Paris: Alcan. Nouvel, J., 2006. Louisiana Manifesto. Humlebaek, Denmark: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Price, S., 2007. Paris primitive: Jacques Chirac's Museum on the Quai Branly. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Said, E., 1966. Joseph Conrad and the fiction of autobiography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sarkozy, N., 2007. Available at: http://www.elysee.fr/elysee/elysee.fr/francais/interventions/2007/juillet/al locution_a_l_universite_de_dakar.79184.html (accessed 24 November 2008). Taylor, A.-C., 2006. Interview with Nicolas Journet. ‘Retour à l'objet de l'art’. Sciences Humaines, 3 (June–August). Taylor, A.-C., 2008. Au Musée du Quai Branly: la place de l'ethnologie. Ethnologie française, 4 (116), 679–684.

Still the family secret? The representation of colonialism in the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration Mary Stevens Department of Information Studies, University College London, London, UK Housed in the former ‘Palace of the Colonies’, the question of how to represent the colonial past is one of the most difficult France's new national museum of immigration (the CNHI) has to negotiate. Drawing on extensive data collected from 2004 to 2007, this article maps the debates around the place of colonialism and its ambiguous relationship to immigration in the new institution. Colonialism was openly addressed in the planning period, yet by October 2007 the museum stood accused of denying this history. This ‘flattening’ of the colonial discourse is attributed to a series of processes that occurred during the design phase: containment, deferral, disciplinary exclusion, and (in a limited sense) censorship. The article concludes with a consideration of the prospects for the future of this major site of colonial memory. This museum has chosen, deliberately, to avoid the awkward subject (le sujet qui fâche): colonization. Yet this shared history, this ‘family secret’ […] accentuates the difficulties faced by the most recent waves of immigrants in integrating. (Le Monde, 10 October 2007)1

So concluded Le Monde newspaper in its review of the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration (CHNI) on opening day in October 2007. The CNHI is France's new national museum of immigration, the first of its kind (publicly funded, national) in Europe. The aim of the museum is to effect a change in public attitudes towards immigrants by drawing attention to their contribution to the construction of the modern nation-state. Since the 1970s politicians and civil society activists have been debating the status of cultural diversity in the French republican system, which has generally placed the emphasis on assimilation and the subordination of distinct group identities to a monolithic notion of a homogenous citizenry. One way to understand the CNHI is to see it as the latest in a succession of more or less successful policy measures to reconcile notions of ‘Frenchness’ with

increased cultural diversity. This diversity, certainly in so far as it concerns non-Europeans, has its origins primarily in France's colonial past. The status of the colonial past in French collective memory is seen by many as the key sticking point in the project to construct a historical narrative that would reinforce rather than undermine social cohesion (Cohen et al. 2007, p. 10). It is reasonable to assume then that any attempt to construct a new consensus around the idea of shared nationhood must address ‘the colonial fracture’ (Blanchard et al. 2005), especially one that seeks to address one of its most enduring manifestations, namely the stigmatization of immigrants of colonial origin and their descendants (Bouamama 2006; GuénifSouilamas 2006). In this context the lacuna claimed by Le Monde is already remarkable. But it is all the more extraordinary given the new museum's location at the Palais de la porte dorée in southeastern Paris that was originally built for the 1931 colonial exhibition as a permanent museum of the colonies. The aim of this article is first to explore the accusation that the colonial past has been marginalized in the CNHI. I will begin by seeking out the public traces of this history in the new institution before attempting to identify the set of processes that may have determined its representation. The terminology used by Le Monde implies a psychoanalytic reading of the national relationship to the colonial past. Indeed, since Benjamin Stora's La Gangrène et l'oubli (1991), Freudian language has been a commonplace of French discussions of the difficult place occupied by the colonial past and the Algerian War in particular.2 One of the problems with the psychoanalytic account (decolonization and the Algerian War as collective trauma, post-colonial denial as a form of melancholic reaction) is that it removes any notion of agency. I suggest however that the silence that has long surrounded France's colonial past is not the product of some uncontrollable collective psychic event but rather the result of a concatenation of decisions and non-decisions by active agents. In exploring the discourse around colonialism in a particular setting this article aims to shed some light on the particular interpersonal, institutional and disciplinary mechanisms that authorized or blocked its expression. Moreover, as ‘central nodes in the narrative networks that states and societies develop to cultivate national character’ (Luke 2002, p. 230), museums constitute sites for the crystallization of a wider national debate. I hope thus to use the museum as

a framework for exploring both why and how speaking out about colonialism continues to be such a fraught endeavour in France. The material for this article was gathered during the course of fieldwork conducted in France between March 2006 and October 2007 (with preparatory visits in December 2005 and January 2006 and a follow-up in 2008 to visit the first temporary exhibition). Although I was not able to take a full participant observation approach, the Cité's firm commitment to a transparent planning process considerably facilitated my task. For example, I was able to visit the building site three times between September 2006 and May 2007 and I have drawn heavily on the consultation documents published online and on a CD accompanying the 2004 report (Toubon 2004). The bulk of the data was nevertheless collected through semistructured interviews. Forty-one informants from the Cité, community organizations, government departments and universities agreed to be interviewed. These interviews were often followed-up informally, for example at the Cue's many colloquia and productions. Observation of the wider social context in which the Cité was embedded – through monitoring the media and engaging with immigrant rights activism in Paris – also added an important dimension to the fieldwork. Since this article mostly makes use of data collected in informal interviews with museum professionals, research participants are described only loosely by their position in the organisation in order to respect the understanding in which their experiences were shared. One site where the colonial past is omnipresent is the building itself. The Palais de la porte dorée was conceived as a vehicle for colonial propaganda and remains inseparable from it, even if its euphemistic appellation – named for its address rather than its content – continues to ‘attest to a French incapacity to name the things touching upon this past’ (Jarassé 2007, p. 57). Running around three sides of the building beneath a modernist portico, avast bas-relief by the sculptor Alfred Janniot –1130 m2 of it to be precise – celebrates ‘the economic contributions of the colonies to France’ in which ‘the realities of forced labour are masked by a seductive harmony and plastic beauty of the bodies’ (Jarassé 2007, p. 62). On the palace's more discrete western façade this monumental frieze yields to a memorial to France's imperial ‘heroes’, from the eleventh-century crusader Godefroy de Bouillon to Paul Dislère, a leading colonial administrator of

the early twentieth century. The glorification continues inside in the 39 m2 salle des fêtes or function room, the ceremonial heart of the 1931 exhibition, where Ducos de la Haille's frescoes extol France's ‘contributions’ to its colonies, with allegorical representations of ‘Justice’ and ‘Liberty’ and compositions depicting scenes such as the abolition of slavery (a priest ‘emancipating’ a black youth). In the building's previous incarnations, for example as the Museum of African and Oceanian Art (1960–2003) the colonial iconography was largely ignored, with visitors left to construct their own interpretations. In this more self-consciously postcolonial age, and in particular in the context of the controversy surrounding the law of 23 February 2005 which placed the representation of the colonial period at the top of the political agenda, total silence was no longer an option for the CNHI.3 But this vast material inheritance, a total of 2000 m2 of frescoes and bas-reliefs, not to mention Albert Laprade's whole architectural concept (a reworking of a traditional Moroccan palace) presented an enormous challenge to the new team, struggling to put together a project that was already highly politically sensitive. Not everyone involved in the project immediately recognized the urgency of this challenge. There is evidence for example to suggest that the choice of the Porte dorée to house the CNHI does not seem to have been perceived as potentially problematic by the project's leaders until after the decision had already been taken. Indeed, according to historian Pascal Blanchard, Jacques Toubon (the former culture minister and close associate of President Chirac's appointed to spearhead the project) denied at a conference in 2003 that the building had ever been ‘the museum of the colonies’ (ACHAC and Blanchard 2003) and in the minutes of the meeting of the Conseil scientifique of 8 July 2003 the building is described unconditionally as ‘ideal’ (Toubon 2004, p. 138). According to the Cité's website ‘the idea of the Palais de la Porte dorée imposed itself immediately and naturally’.4 This very ‘naturalness’ was a source of concern for a number of my informants: more than one member of the museum team I spoke to saw in the automatic and ‘natural’ link between immigrants and the former museum of the colonies evidence of the collective unconscious of the ruling elite at work. The same point was made publicly by Pascal Blanchard in a 2003 article for the newspaper L'Humanité: the choice of building ‘reveals deeper, more troubling, more symbolic assumptions’

(Blanchard 2003). He has subsequently argued that the decision was part of a deliberate strategy of ‘erasure of colonial history’ (Bancel and Blanchard 2007a, p. 124). It has been suggested that sustained opposition to the project from the Ministry of Culture meant that the project leaders were obliged to take whatever site they were offered. Interview data gathered in 2006 by Narguesse Keyhani contradicts this version however, since Luc Gruson, one of the directors, here implied that the idea came from within the project team (Keyhani 2006, pp. 97–98). Either way, the controversy engendered by this choice, questioned by audience members at every single public meeting I attended between 2005 and 2007, appears to have taken the project leaders by surprise. Whilst the importance of helping the public decode the building's symbolism begun to be more widely appreciated there were however few concrete advances. One curator explained how, shortly after arriving at the Cité in 2005, he had been asked to develop a plan for a permanent exhibition on the history of the building, to be installed in the mezzanine galleries. Yet in 2006 this was abandoned (or, officially, indefinitely postponed) for reasons that were variously presented to me by different informants as ‘lack of resources’, ‘lack of time’ or, more cynically, ‘lack of ambition’. Instead, at a preview in September 2007 the frescoes in the ‘forum’ (the former salle des fêtes) were explained to visitors with a short and entirely descriptive temporary sign. At the full inauguration on 10 October 2007 this panel had disappeared altogether, although similar ones explaining other parts of the building (such as Reynaud and Lyautey's circular salons) remained in place. Instead, visitors were presented with a short factual leaflet which offered a limited introduction to the building. Like the panels, it described the themes of the frescoes and bas-reliefs (the contribution of France to its colonies and vice versa) without engaging with the nature of the representation of the colonial other, or the possible consequences of this visual language on the collective imaginary. More information was available in a book by curator Maureen Murphy, published on the same occasion and available for 10 euros (Murphy 2007). Murphy's book does not shy away from the more troubling aspects of the building's history; for example, she includes a portrait of sculptor Janniot working on the ‘Dahomey’ section of the bas-relief from a naked black model; to the alert reader this image says more about the uneven distribution of visual authority between colonizer and colonized in the Porte dorée than any

number of carefully worded paragraphs (p. 31).5 Yet the price of the book obviously restricted its audience to those members of the visiting public with both the necessary resources and a particularly strong interest in the history of the building. Reviewing the various efforts at interpretation it is hard not to agree with Dominique Jarassé that the building's awkward inheritance has been held at a distance, judged to be incompatible with its new multicultural destination (Jarassé 2007, p. 57). Additional weight is given to this argument by the fact that the CNHI was absent in the programme of events to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the colonial exhibition that ran throughout 2006 in the 12th district of Paris (where the Cité is located). The series included the erection of temporary panels outside key sites of colonial memory in the neighbourhood, including one opposite the Porte dorée, perversely without any involvement from the current tenants. The official line appears even to have been to make a virtue of this refusal to confront the colonial past directly. In a film clip posted on the Cité's website in October 2006 the architect Patrick Bouchain explains that the fact that the Porte dorée's function has been so radically overturned should be read not as an act of denial but as a metaphor for the capacity of the Republic to transform lives (in other words to make ‘citizens of immigrants’).6 This approach posits the post-colonial present as a radical and comprehensive break with the colonial past rather than the working through in a metropolitan context of the colonial legacy; the narrative of rupture does little to explain the stigmatization of immigrants in contemporary France. In a context where the building's history was hushed up for so long it is hard not to see the strategy of radical reversal as a form of continued occlusion. Paradoxically, the climate of silence around the building was complemented by a much more direct approach when it came to events programming. The decision to mark the 14 July 2006 with a reading of the Martinican author Aimé Césaire's Discours sur le colonialisme (Discourse on Colonialism) was on the surface a very bold decision, not least since this was the first public event to take place under the auspices of the CNHI in the Porte dorée. The Discours after all is one of the most powerful attacks on the colonial enterprise ever penned; Césaire presents colonialism as the precursor of Nazism and France as destined for degeneracy under the weight of its own hypocrisy (Césaire 1955). In contrast to the horrors

evoked by the text the actual event was a glamorous affair; the room was full with over 400 expectant spectators7 and almost all the staff were present and dressed for a gala evening (suits, dresses, jewelry). Césaire himself even gave his blessing to the event.8 At the time I wondered whether the prominence afforded to such a polemical piece was indicative of a new chapter in the French – or at least the Cite's – relationship with the colonial past. The performance was greeted with a lengthy and fervent standing ovation, which I interpreted as a huge collective sigh of relief, a tribute to the Cite's bravery in finally speaking out on this topic.9 However, with hindsight I feel this optimism may have been premature; the performance was more of a one-off concession than a statement of future direction, a prime example of a strategy of containment. Speaking about the building at a conference in June 2006 the director Luc Gruson argued that a sort of ‘exorcism’ of the building's colonial phantoms needed to take place before it could take on its new functions. The same language was used by Toubon in his speech on 14 July 2006: The presentation of the Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire, a historic, passionate and burning text, constitutes a sort of rite of passage to turn the page symbolically from the first vocation of this building and to open its future mission, in the service of true history, the whole history of our country. (Toubon 2006)

Here we are confronted with the troubling idea that ‘true history’ requires erasure (or at least controlled forgetting) of the building's original purpose: rupture again rather than continuity. Instead of a symbolic eviction, a more desirable strategy might have been to work towards a peaceful accommodation with the building's ghosts, which would have embraced both continuity and ambiguity.10 The event was seemingly perceived as having served its purpose; in the latter months of 2006, after the staging of the Discours and an important conference in September (‘History and Immigration: the colonial question’ at the Bibliothèque nationale) – ‘placebos’ in the words of historians Bancel and Blanchard (Bancel and Blanchard 2007a, p. 119) – all the indications were that colonialism now slipped back down the list of the Cite's priorities, just as a media backlash against collective memory discourses informed by postcolonial theory came into full swing.11 As historian Daniel Sherman has noted in relation to some of France's ethnographic museums, ‘in one sense “postcolonial” seems to mean not having to say you're sorry’ (Sherman 2004, p. 702). Moreover, the

cocktails and canapés on 14 July may have disguised an ongoing discomfort. A graphic designer who had worked for the Cité reported to me that his first version of a publicity poster for the event featured the figure of the colonizer clutching a globe. However, this was rejected on the basis that it was ‘too provocative’. The final version, which made use of creative typesetting to overlay the CNHI logo on to an extract from Césaire's text, was produced at the last minute and was seen by my informant as disappointingly anodyne. A further impact of the debates of 2005–2006 was the decision that the first temporary exhibition should address this controversy (read, ‘once and for all’). Once again, this may not have been quite the bold move it seems. A first project for a temporary exhibition on the relationship between colonialism and immigration was put together in the autumn of 2005 by curators from the CNHI in conjunction with the member of staff at the Quai Branly museum responsible for the ‘history collections’ (the material relating to France's colonial history transferred out of the Porte dorée with the departure of the African and Oceanian art). Whilst the senior curator at the Cité would not confirm this, according to some informants the outline was scrapped on the basis that it insisted too heavily on colonialism. The recruitment of the well known museum iconoclast Jacques Hainard, director of the Ethnographic Museum of Geneva, to work as the guest curator on the revised version suggested that the exhibition was unlikely to shy away from controversy, although the restricted terms in which it was now framed (a discussion of ‘foreigners’ in France in 1931, the year of the colonial exhibition) made it arguably less propitious to a full discussion of the colonial legacy on contemporary French society. In addition it could be argued that to talk about ‘foreigners’ in 1931 was precisely not to talk about colonialism, since the colonial subjects who participated in the colonial exhibition were, at least insofar as they were from French colonies, not in judicial terms foreigners at all (one informant described colonialism and immigration in 1931 as an ‘impossible subject’); at the very least the new narrower emphasis would make it easier to qualify certain broader themes as ‘irrelevant’. In the event the temporary exhibition did tackle colonialism in 1931 with a directness that has few precedents in France. The first room of the exhibition used dramatic lighting and punchy short texts to highlight in

strongly reflexive fashion the role of the new technologies of communication and display of the 1930s in disseminating colonial propaganda. The fundamentally racist character of much of the publicity around the colonial exhibition was also highlighted, notably by a large reproduction of a magazine cover featuring an exaggerated statue with teeth like daggers and huge bulging eyes and a caption making explicit reference to the presumed practice of cannibalism amongst certain of France's colonial subjects.12 Anti-colonial political activity also received good coverage, as did the development of an official and notorious surveillance regime targeted at North Africans in these years. One dimension that was lacking however was a sustained reflection on the ongoing legacy of the collective imaginary fostered by the iconography of the 1930s. Admittedly, visitors exited the temporary exhibition space via a corridor plastered on both sides with a dense post-1931 chronology, but whilst this successfully catapulted visitors back into the present, it did not necessarily encourage reflection on the baggage their fellow travellers through the twentieth century may have brought with them. Given its absence in ‘1931’ one might have expected the question of the legacy of colonialism to be addressed in the permanent exhibition. Yet references to colonialism appear in only a small number of locations. One reason for this was a continual to-and-fro between the temporary and the permanent exhibitions in the run up to opening with the promise of the temporary exhibition being used to defer tackling the issues. A very preliminary outline of the permanent exhibition did include a thematic section entitled ‘Colonization and decolonization’ (Toubon 2004, p. 66). However, during the exhibition's various redesigns, the space occupied by this theme was repeatedly reduced. In order to consider the way colonialism was represented in the permanent exhibition we might consider the section entitled ‘Terre d'accueil, France hostile’ (‘Land of welcome, hostile France’). This section was originally the responsibility of a particular curator, who was sympathetic to postcolonialist discourses and fought for the inclusion of sections in the ‘landmark tables’ (tables de repères)13 addressing on the one hand the scientific racism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and on the other ‘the arrival of colonial racism in the metropole and its post-colonial legacy’ (CNHI 2006, p. 20). The designer's plans from

October 2006 also suggest a willingness to highlight the specificity of the colonial gaze by reusing cases from the 1931 installations in this section (although these were later declared too fragile) (Atelier Pascal Payeur 2006, p. 14). Before long however, according to the curator, her insistence on underlining the specificity of the (post)colonial experience resulted in her being moved elsewhere; the text of the table became the sole responsibility of an internal historian, in conjunction with outside historical consultant historians (the curator who had been moved was trained in anthropology and perhaps more familiar with some of the themes described above). By the time of opening the emphasis had changed in order to diminish the significance of the colonial experience and underscore the commensurability of all experiences of stigmatization. The text introducing the whole section now read as follows: In every age, public opinion reinvents the figure of the inassimilable foreigner. At the end of the 19th century, the ancestral fear of the Other, of the person who comes from elsewhere, is generalized. The establishment of nation-states, the consolidation of the republic, and the discourse of the press and of elites reinforce xenophobic feelings stigmatizing the foreigner as the ‘opposite of the National’. The stereotypes that are put in place will shape representations of immigration for a long time to come […]. Rejection [of foreigners] also feeds off anti-Semitism and the racism directed at colonial migrants. With each wave of immigration grievances return; with each crisis tensions are heightened.

In this text the emphasis on the repetition of experience (‘every age’, ‘each wave’, ‘each crisis’) acts to diminish the specificity of the colonial experience, which is present, but as an afterthought (‘also’), and as equivalent to the Jewish experience. This equivalence is underscored by the juxtaposition of images of colonial and anti-Semitic stereotyping in the table. This small example illustrates however the extent to which more broadly the setting of disciplinary boundaries in the museum acted to delegitimize colonialism as a subject of inquiry. The written contributions of the members of the provisional scientific council (in 2003–2004) show a clear divide between subjective, experiential and formal, bureaucratic definitions of migration, emphasizing the crossing of national boundaries rather than feelings of alienation and displacement.14 In the event the second definition, arguably most in keeping with the traditional parameters of historical research, won out, although there was a suggestion that temporary exhibitions (again) would provide opportunities for the presentation of the

narratives it excluded (Blanc-Chaléard 2003, p. 15). And once (im)migration was understood as the crossing into national territory then questions of internal migration, both within the hexagon and between the constituent parts of the French empire had to be excluded.15 In one simple move, immigration was uncoupled from colonization, despite the avowed inherence of the former to the latter. This narrow disciplinary framework also acted in conjunction with a widely held belief that, since the representation of immigration has been over-determined by colonial stereotypes, the best way to ‘correct’ the account was to assert the numerical importance of European immigration (rather than to question the reasons for the dominant perception) (see for example, CNHI 2004, p. 18). The result was a further downplaying of the colonial experience. Furthermore, the permanent exhibition did not enjoy the same thoughtful reflexivity as its temporary counterpart and the failure to signal the responsibility of a particular current in historiographical thinking for the intellectual (if not the actual) authorship of the exhibition text had the effect of creating the illusion of objective facticity; a particular academic position – that the history of immigration amounts to a subdiscipline in the history of nation-state – is presented as incontrovertible fact. This by no means comprehensive overview of the representation of the colonial past in the first year of the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration has revealed some curious paradoxes. Le Monde's assertion that the subject has been deliberately avoided is clearly only partially true; not only would this have been impossible in the aftermath of the debates of 2005–2006, but such a conclusion would also negate the contributions of the many team members deeply committed to representing these histories. There is evidence of the role of colonialism in structuring attitudes to immigration, notably through the deployment of a racist iconography, and this dimension could have been further highlighted. It is no longer colonialism that is absent, but rather its enduring impact on social relations in the post-colonial period, a denial in keeping with the rupture/reversal approach to colonial history described above. A number of different arguments or approaches were used to achieve this particular refusal. These can be summarized as (1) containment (as in the decision to stage the Discours sur le colonialisme as a once-and-for-all exorcism), (2) deferral

(the toing and froing between the permanent and temporary exhibitions), (3) disciplinary exclusion (colonial attitudes as not part of the history of immigration, narrowly defined) and rarely but nevertheless occasionally, (4) active (political) censorship by the project leadership (as in the pulling of the first poster advertising the Discours sur le colonialisme). Ultimately however, the Cité faced an impossible task. Colonialism weighs so heavily on the Porte dorée (it is literally intrinsic to its architectural foundations) that a strategy that would allow it to be successfully subsumed in another narrative, even one so closely linked as the history of immigration, is almost inconceivable and even its desirability questionable. The very existence of the CNHI at the Porte dorée only accentuates an absence for which it can never fully compensate: the lack of a museum that would really take on the necessary but unenviable task of dissecting France's colonial past (Bancel and Blanchard 2007a, p. 126). To return to the quotation from Le Monde, colonialism in the CNHI is indeed a kind of ‘family secret’, paradoxically the kind that is no ‘secret’ at all. It is hard to imagine how it can be kept much longer.

Notes 1.

All translations from French are my own unless otherwise stated.

2.

For example, writing in Le Monde in November 2000, with reference to the recent publication in the newspaper of a series of ‘revelations’ about torture in Algeria, the historian Pierre VidalNaquet declared the plethora of accounts as explicable ‘only in near-Freudian terms: it is the return of the repressed’ (cited in Cohen 2002, pp. 233–234). The members of the ACHAC collective (Association pour la connaissance de l'histoire de l'Afrique contemporaine) who have perhaps done the most to bring the colonial lacuna to the attention of a wide audience in France, also refer in this context to the ‘return of the repressed in memory’ (Blanchard et al. 2006, p. 6).

3.

In February 2005, the National Assembly, at the behest of a still powerful and increasingly desperate pied-noir lobby (see Esclangon-Morin et al. 2006) passed a law requiring schools to teach the ‘positive aspects of colonialism’ (‘Loi no 2005–158 du 23 février 2005 portant reconnaissance de la Nation et contribution nationale en faveur des Français rapatriés’, available at: http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/WAspad/UnTexteDeJorf?numjo=DEFX0300-218L [accessed 24 August 2006]. A bitter debate about the status of the colonial past in contemporary France raged throughout the remainder of the year (see De Montvalon 2005), peaking with the government's decision to revive colonial-era security provisions to quash the urban unrest during the autumn of 2005 (Bernard 2005).

4.

Le Palais de la Porte dorée. Available at: http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/index.php? lg=fr&nav=35&flash=0 (accessed 7 August 2007).

5.

This image was also reproduced in massively enlarged form at the entrance to the first temporary exhibition ‘1931: Foreigners at the time of the Colonial Exhibition’.

6.

Film: ‘Suivez leurs regards’. Available at: http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/index.php? lg=fr&nav=302&flash=0, (accessed 14 December 2008).

7.

Spectacle: discours sur le colonalisme. Available at: http://www.histoireimmigration.fr/index.php?lg=fr&nav=271&flash=0 (accessed 23 October 2007).

8.

Spectacle: discours sur le colonalisme. Available at: http://www.histoireimmigration.fr/index.php?lg=fr&nav=271&flash=0 (accessed 23 October 2007). Césaire's remarks were dated 15 June 2006.

9.

A new discourse on colonialism at the CNHI?. Available http://marystevens.wordpress.com/2006/07/15/a-new-discourse-on-colonialism-at-the-cnhi/ (accessed 14 December 2008).

at:

10. Indeed, one staff member, when asked what it was like to work in such a symbolically charged building replied ‘like living with ghosts that cannot be exorcised’. The idea of ‘living with ghosts’ recalls Derrida's concept of spectrality and his exhortation to live with ghosts as the basis for a humanism that can incorporate troublesome, difficult pasts and resist the temptation, evident in much Marxist thinking, to found change on a clean slate. The ghosts, as marginal figures, provide a salutary reminder of the tyrannies of past hegemonies (Derrida 1994; Jameson 1999). 11. The autumn of 2006 historian Daniel Lefeuvre published Pour en finir avec la repentance coloniale (Lefeuvre 2006). In this book he singles out a group of ‘penitents’ for particular censure, including the ACHAC group (see Bancel and Blanchard 2007b, pp. 46–47). Lefeuvre's rhetoric was subsequently picked up by presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, keen to mark his ‘rupture’ with Chirac's more conciliatory approach and shore up the far-right vote. For a response to Lefeuvre's attack see Coquery-Vidrovitch (2006). 12. The caption read as follows: ‘What an ugly face! / Hang on, that reminds me … what was your mother doing, giving me the cold shoulder at lunchtime?’ (‘Quelle sale gueule! / – Tiens, ça me fait penser… qu'est-ce qu'elle avait ta mère à me faire la tête à déjeuner !’). The French text plays on the double meaning of ‘faire la tête’ meaning both to ignore someone and, literally, to make (or here, cook) a head. I have tried to render it with a similar idiom. 13. These were interactive display tables, incorporating text, images and embedded video screens and intended to provide the in-depth historical background to each of the exhibition's nine themes. 14. See in particular the contributions of Dewitte, Green, Phan, Tribalat, Volovitch-Tavarès, all available on the CD (Toubon 2004). 15. As Gérard Noiriel explained with reference to Le Creuset français: ‘In Le Creuset français [the French melting pot], I deliberately put the colonial question to one side because immigration, in its strong and current sense, implies not just a movement in space but also the crossing of a border’ (2007, p. 16). The influence of Noiriel's thinking was crucial in the development of the CNHI. Ever since the publication of Le Creuset français (Noiriel 1988), Noiriel has argued against the idea of a specific colonial experience of migration. In Gens d'ici, venus d'ailleurs neither the Empire nor decolonization appear in the index and there is only the briefest of references in the body of the text (where it is noted that Algerians suffered from racism during the period of the war) (Noiriel 2004, p. 164). Noiriel's stance has been criticized by Favell amongst others on the basis that it is as oppressive of historical specificity as the colonial system was of cultural difference (Favell 1998, pp. 64–65). Noiriel has recently defended his position, arguing that the media is more important in the construction of degrading stereotypes than any so-called ‘colonial imaginary’ and that to ascribe contemporary discrimination to the legacy of

colonialism is tantamount to affirming a far-right discourse that would differentiate between ‘assimilable’ European immigrants and their ‘non-assimilable’ successors (Noiriel 2006, p. 170, 2007, pp. 679–681). For his critics however to argue that post-colonial immigrants are just as (un)assimilable as their European predecessors is to make them responsible in the eyes of racists for ‘failures’ that might better be attributed to the obstacles inherited from colonialism.

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République mise à nu par son immigration. Paris: La Fabrique, 196–218. Césaire, A., 1955. Discours sur le colonialisme. Paris: Présence Africaine. CNHI, 2004. Résumé du rapport présenté au Premier minister, 8 July, CNHI, Paris. CNHI, 2006. Installation permanente: programme scientifique version 6, unpublished document, 15 November. Cohen, J., Dorlin, E., Nicolaïdis, D., Rahal, M. and Simon, P., 2007. Dossier: Le Tournant postcolonial à la française. Mouvements, 51 (3), 7– 12. Cohen, W.B., 2002. The Algerian War, the French State and official memory. Historical Reflections, 28 (2), 219–231. Coquery-Vidrovitch, C., 2006. Le Passé colonial entre histoire et mémoire. 21 March. Available at: http://cvuh.free.fr/4mars/coquery.passe.colonial.html (accessed 12 November 2007). De Montvalon, J.-B., 2005. Mémoire et histoire, examen critique ou repentance: Le Débat fait désormais rage. Le Monde, 13 December. Derrida, X., 1994. Spectres de Marx. Paris: Galilée. Esclangon-Morin, V., Nadiras, F. and Thénault, S., 2006. Les Origines et genèse d'une loi scélérate. In: C. Liauzu and G. Manceron, eds. La Colonisation, la loi et l'histoire. Paris: Syllepse, 23–58. Favell, A., 1998. Philosophies of integration: immigration and the idea of citizenship in France and Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Guénif-Souilamas, N., 2006a. La République aristocratique et la nouvelle société de cour. In: N. Guénif-Souilamas, ed. La République mise à nu par son immigration. Paris: La Fabrique, 7–38. Jameson, F., 1999. Marx's purloined letter. In: M. Sprinkler, ed. Ghostly demarcations. London: Verso, 26–67. Jarassé, D., 2007. The former Palace of the Colonies: the burden of heritage. Museum International, 59 (1–2), 56–65.

Keyhani, N., 2006. La Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration: L'Émergence de l'histoire et de la mémoire de l'immigration comme enjeux politiques. Master's Thesis, Université Paris X – Nanterre. Lefeuvre, D., 2006. Pour en finir avec la Repentance coloniale. Paris: Flammarion. Luke, T.W., 2002. Museum politics: power plays at the exhibition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Le Monde, 2007. La France immigrée, 10 October. Murphy, M., 2007. Un Palais pour une Cité. Paris: RMN. Noiriel, G., 1988. Le Creuset français: Histoire de l'immigration, XIXe–XXe siècles. Paris: Seuil. Noiriel, G., 2004. Gens d'ici venus d'ailleurs: La France de l'immigration, 1900 à nos jours. Paris: Chêne. Noiriel, G., 2006. ‘Color blindness’ et construction des identités dans l'espace public français. In: D. Fassin and E. Fassin, eds. De la Question sociale à la question raciale? Représenter la société française. Paris: La Découverte, 158–174. Noiriel, G., 2007. Immigration, antisémitisme et racisme en France (XIXeXXe siècle): Discours publics, humiliations privées. Paris: Fayard. Sherman, D., 2004. ‘Peoples ethnographic’: objects, museums, and the colonial inheritance of French ethnology. French Historical Studies, 27 (3), 669–703. Stora, B., 1991. La Gangrène et l'oubli: La Mémoire de la guerre d'Algérie. Paris: La Découverte. Toubon, J., 2004. Mission de préfiguration du Centre de ressources et de mémoire de l'immigration. Paris: La Documentation française. Toubon, J., 2006. Introduction de Jacques Toubon à la représentation du Discours sur le colonialisme d'Aimé Césaire le 14 juillet 2006 au Palais de la Porte Dorée, July 14. Available at: http://www.histoireimmigration.fr/upload/file/ext_media_fichier_269_Di scours%2014%-20juillet%20Toubon.pdf (accessed 23 November 2007).

Object/subject migration: the National Centre of the History of Immigration Dominic Thomas Departments of French and Francophone Studies, University of California, Los Angeles, USA The National Centre of the History of Immigration (CNHI) opened in Paris in 2007 in a building initially constructed for the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition. The planning period and inauguration were informed by public controversy, the museum's unwillingness to actively engage with France's colonial history denounced, and finally tensions were exacerbated by the creation earlier that year by newly elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy of a Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-development. This measure was deemed contrary to the primary objective of the CNHI which was to foster a new approach to immigration history based on its constitutive relationship to French history. Closer scrutiny of the CNHI project provides helpful insights into the political landscape of twentieth-century France, the symbiotic relationship between government ministries and cultural practices, the tenuous connections between national politics and globalization, while also suggesting the kinds of measures that will have to be taken for decolonization to finally occur.

Constructed for the International Colonial Exhibition of 1931, the Palais de la Porte Dorée has been the home of the Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration (CNHI, The National Centre of the History of Immigration, www.histoire-immigration.fr) since it opened in October 2007. This site was initially occupied by the Musée Permanent des Colonies and later by the Musée des arts africains et océaniens (MAAO) until it relocated in 2006 to the Musée Quai Branly. The symbiotic relationship between the French state and museum establishments has been clearly established, but little attention has been paid to the various ways in which this relationship has served to perpetuate a transcolonial network of power relations. This interconnectivity has also translated into a tenuous relationship in public discourse in terms of the ways in which history and memory have been articulated (Duclert 2006). The Press Dossier released at the time of the CNHI's inauguration underscored the ties with the government authorities and various ministries

in terms of both the conceptualization and actualization of the project and the ongoing state-sponsorship mechanisms confirmed by the number of institutional partners, whereby the CHNI ‘is a public establishment financed by the Ministry of Culture and Communication, the Ministry of National Education, the Ministry of Higher Education and Research, the Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-development’ (Press dossier n.d., p. 18). A consideration of the CNHI's objectives and mission therefore seems warranted. Civil servant and former Minister of Culture, Jacques Toubon, was appointed to shepherd the project through to completion; to this end, the Mission de préfiguration de Centre de ressources et de mémoires de l'immigration published by the Documentation Française (2004a) is a useful document in order to gauge the rationale that informed the project's organizational principles. ‘The recognition of the place of immigrant populations in the destiny of the Republic is important,’ Toubon explained, ‘and should help every French person arrive at a more accurate idea of French identity as it stands today, while also reconciling the multiple components that make up the French nation with those values that represent its strengths’ (2004b, p. 9). The emphasis is placed on the constitutive dimension whereby immigration is to be understood as an integral part of French history. This is of course a complex framework within which to structure the project, and as we shall see when we return to this dimension shortly, a vision that has been contested and that has triggered oppositional statements that only further reveal the lack of consensus surrounding this initiative. Let us explore the stated objectives a little further: Under the aegis of its research and cultural project, the public establishment aims to: outline and manage the national museum of the history and cultures of immigration, an original cultural ensemble of a museologic and research nature, responsible for preserving and presenting to the public collections that are representative of the history, arts and cultures of immigration; to preserve, protect and restore for the good of the State those cultural objects included in the inventory of the national museum of the History and Cultures of immigration for which it has responsibility and thereby contributing to the enrichment of the national collections; gather in a resource centre all kinds of documents and information relevant to the history and cultures of immigration as well as to the integration of people who have migrated, including aspects that relate to the economic, demographic, political and social dimension, and accordingly to disseminate this information, including through digital and electronic means, to the general public and to professionals; to develop and promote a network of partners throughout France […] in order to reach our three fundamental goals: cultural, pedagogic, citizenship. (Press dossier, p. 3)

Two particular challenges are thus outlined from the outset: The first is to incorporate the history of immigration into the common heritage as something inseparable from the construction of France and to recognize the place of foreigners in our common history […] The second is to place at the heart of the project the general public and the ‘inhabitants’, the National Centre of the History of Immigration defines itself as both a space and a network. (Press dossier, p. 3)

The commitment to fostering an inclusive approach to French immigration history was also reflected in the particular concern for democratizing access to the collections and relocating the migrant experience within broader national narratives. The rationale was that an appeal to a large audience through a paradigm that endeavored to account for the multidimensionality of the historical experience, in theory at least, would encourage a reinterpretation of that history with collective attributes. In fact, a special issue of the journal Hommes et Migrations was even devoted to this question and featured the multiple outreach measures adopted (schools, local associations, trade unions) with this end in mind. Ultimately, the thinking was that such a method could alter and displace ‘negative representations of immigration and of bringing audiences closer around the recognition of the major contributions immigrants and their families have made to the construction of the Nation’ (Poinsot 2007, p. 1). Such strategic calculations were ultimately rendered all the more complex for two main reasons. First, precisely because the traditional role of museums has often been to link processes of commemoration with those of glorification – of military victories, conquests overseas, and so on – to decouple an examination of French immigration history from a concerted analysis of a transcolonial framework that would highlight French imperial ambitions and their indissociability from subsequent migratory patterns would be to obfuscate or revise a key chapter in that collective experience. And second, as Michel Wieviorka was right to bring to our attention, yet another problem was posed by the question of immigration given that in the current political climate of French politics, ‘immigration is not perceived as a historical process, but rather as a social question’ (Wieviorka 2007, p. 9). Thus, whereas the CNHI project emphasized a spirit of inclusivity, the question of historical accuracy and memory rendered the initiative all the more complicated. It thus remains crucial to foreground the terminological bifurcation of the term ‘immigration’ in terms of its multiple signification in

the French context – as pertaining to the migratory act to those policy mechanisms associated with that dimension, and also to those elements connected with ethnic minority issues in a post-migratory timeframe. To a certain degree, Jacques Toubon was aware of the plurality of symbolic registers associated with ‘immigration’ in the French hexagon and the planning process took into consideration the question of changing mindsets: Because of a lack of historical perspective, most of our fellow citizens understand immigration as a recent phenomenon, one that is temporary, accidental, somehow a threat to the national community, whereas in reality our experience of immigration, with its failures and success stories, emerges as a constitutive element that is important to French reality. Thus, wanting to show the key aspects of this collective construct, is to want to change current views on immigration and in turn to work towards the on-going project of achieving integration and social cohesion. (Press dossier, p. 1)

As a dynamic space that will continue to host conferences, symposia, seminars, educational visits, and hold both permanent and temporary collections, the CNHI is not a typical museum project and in its capacity as a centre national is less interested in conservation and display, than in narrating, documenting, and recording a particularly history, namely that of migration/immigration in France. Indeed, the CNHI exceeds the parameters of the criteria established by the International Council of Museums (ICOM) definition as to what is a museum: Article 3 – Definition of Terms, Section 1. Museum. A museum is a non-profit, permanent institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates and exhibits the tangible and intangible heritage of humanity and its environment for the purposes of education, study and enjoyment. (ICOM n.d.)

The challenge of altering received notions and perceptions of étrangers (foreigners) and immigrés (immigrant communities), of questioning the lines of demarcation between indigenous national populations and immigrants, and of rethinking popular constructions of insiders and outsiders, necessarily entails a complex engagement with the social and political apparatus of national identity formation. As Wieviorka points out, rethinking the role of immigration in French history would ‘imply looking at the construction of national identity in quite different ways and finding a degree of pride in having been a country of immigration for a good century and a half’ (2007, p. 8).

The reconfiguration of immigration as a constitutive element in French history goes against the historical characterization of the question given that immigrants have tended to be defined in terms of their supplementary status in the national narrative. Nancy Green's comparative analysis of the American and French context confirms these key differences given, as Poli et al. have argued, that in the American context the Ellis Island experience ‘inscribes immigration at the heart of the national story’ (2007, p. 12; Green 2007; Behdad 2005). The insistence on immigration as an essentially late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century phenomenon therefore resists the notion of immigration as a foundational component of the nation and perpetuates the hierarchization between national and immigrant categories (somewhat paradoxically, similar tensions have been observed in the United States in recent years where the positive attributes previously associated with immigration discourse have been reformulated – around the figure of the illegal and undocumented – as an undesirable component of globalization rather than as a positive historical phenomenon). Clearly and unambiguously, the CNHI insists that the nation came first and that immigration was grafted upon this pre-existent body, something to be embedded in that pre-existent history. As they embark on their journey through this history, visitors to the CNHI are immediately oriented in this direction by a large information panel: for two centuries, immigrants from all over the world have been shaping France. Unlike France's European neighbors who have experienced emigration, France became very early on a country of immigration. The French Revolution provided the foundations for a new way of conceiving of the nation. As early as the 19th century, the nation-state emerged along with citizenship. From that point on, foreigners and citizens were distinguished in juridical terms […] Initially of European descent and later from the old territories of the French colonial Empire, immigrants have come from all over the world […] Each successive group has its own history, its own memory. For a long time we ignored these; yet, one cannot begin to understand contemporary French history without according them the space that is justly theirs in our shared past. Our permanent exhibit is devoted to this history.

On the surface, this information panel appears to adhere to the principle of incorporation and to a constitutive interpretation of national cohesion and history. However, rather than inscribing migration in everyone's genealogy, this genealogy is problematized by the insistence of the post-nineteenthcentury experience, that is as a supplement to a pre-existing national identity. In fact, as Alexandra Poli, Jonna Louvrier, and Michel Wieviorka (2007) have signaled in their research on French education and curricular

structures, ‘migratory movements are only rarely inscribed in history’ (p. 11). The CNHI wants to promote the symbiotic aspect of the nationalimmigrant relationship, precisely in order ‘to explain what France owes to immigration, to provide millions of inhabitants of this country the possibility of situating their individual history in a much larger whole without it disappearing or having to be dissolved’ (Lafont-Couturier 2007, p. 9), but this configuration comes up against an opposing logic pertaining to the foundations of the French nation. Not surprisingly, this historical narrative that cultivates monolithic interpretations of history and identity coincides with that version that is reproduced and transferred to successive generations in the French classroom. ‘This then constitutes an obstacle to the process of taking into consideration the experience of alterity and of various particularities introduced by the theme of immigration’ Poli et al. argue, since ‘the nation is preexistent, and the Republic itself assumes that particularities be dissolved. Or that they remain confined to the private space, and there is no room either in the national imaginary or for that matter in the very functioning of republican institutions for heterogeneous or diverse elements inherent to immigration’ (2007, p. 12). The French Museum landscape has evolved dramatically in recent years, and certainly from the late twentieth century onward as an outcome of former President François Mitterrand's aggressive cultural program. Panivong Norindr convincingly demonstrated how ‘The continuity between Mitterrand's grands travaux and the politics of urban design of his predecessors since the Second Empire can be located in the ways these new urban markers delimit, inscribe, and reconfigure in space an image of France as a dominant cultural center’ (1996, p. 234). The interesting shift in more recent years reveals a significant and disquieting concern with French identity. The French authorities are evidently struggling to redefine France's position and role in a rapidly mutating global landscape in which antiquated conceptions and interpretations of human relations have been superseded by new forms of human interaction and community formation, preconditions and logical outcomes of an increasingly interconnected world. As Fabrice Grognet has argued, For a decade, France has been recomposing the various identities it plans on presenting in various museums […] the Cité involves the constitution of new national collections (artistic, ethnographic, oral and written archives) around immigration, in order to show how the Other

has been present in France for a long time and contributed implicitly to the process of expanding the composition of the French Nation. (2007, p. 29)

Already with the Musée Quai Branly the objective had been to provide a space devoted to the cultures of the other, thereby further perpetuating segregated arrangements in the cultural and political domain (Clifford 2007; Price 2007; Thomas 2008, 2009; Vogel 2007); in the case of the CNHI, the defining umbrella rubric for the project is provided by the statement that ‘Leur histoire est notre histoire’ (‘Their history is our history’) – in each instance, the relationship between the other and the we remains exceptionally vague, confused and complicated by the question of appropriation, reductive constructs, and of course the futility of collapsing identities and origins as required by Republican ideals that have not erased racism and in which the collective signifier remains open to (mis)interpretation. Not surprisingly, the creation in 2007 by newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy of the Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-development has triggered controversy. Central to the operations has been the objective of privileging chosen and selective economic migration (that is, the circulation of objects and certain subjects) and dramatically reducing family-related immigration (i.e. reunification). Harsh policies have been adopted (and extended through lobbying at the European Union and by introducing the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum) and accompanied by new detention centers and expulsions/forced repatriations (Revue Lignes 2008; Caligaris and Pessan 2008; Glissant and Chamoiseau 2007). These measures are at odds with and contradict published documents relating to the CNHI's intended role which was precisely to humanize the migratory and immigrant experience – to treat migrants as subjects rather than as objects. In turn we can now witness an intensification of the dehumanization of these populations as they continue to be characterized as economic and social burdens. Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, this: has made it easier to expel them and to dissociate such harsh measures from any reference to the migrants's own experience. Additionally, the commitment to a dramatic reduction in family reunification in favor of the economic migration needed to build a more cohesive ‘European family’ ignores and occludes the constitutive dimension of the collective migration experience over a much longer historical timeframe. (Thomas 2009)

This kind of discourse encourages suspicion and xenophobia, obstacles to the kind of reconceptualization and recontextualization necessary to achieve the kind of constitutive and incorporative understanding of the migration experience alluded to earlier. These developments only serve to further accentuate the degree of interconnectivity between the work of the ministries and the museums. On 18 May 2007 eight members of the CNHI's distinguished research team (Marie-Claude Blanc-Chaléard, Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand, Nancy L. Green, Gérard Noiriel, Patrick Simon, Vincent Viet, Marie-Christine Volovitch-Tavarès, and Patrick Weil) resigned in protest of the new ministry's agenda that was seen as contrary to the objectives of the CNHI. A public statement by these researchers reiterated the ways in which the CNHI had been conceived to dismantling rather than reaffirming such narrow interpretations of identity: This space was conceived with the aim of changing the ways in which people looked at their society by reminding them how, over two centuries, foreigners, arriving in successive waves, have contributed to the development, transformation, and enrichment of France. Accounting for diverse histories and individual and collective memories, making them a part of everyone's history, with its moments of glory and its ‘shady zones’, helping in this manner to move beyond prejudice and stereotyping, these are the things that brought us together in this project. The creation of a ‘ministry of immigration and national identity’ puts into question these objectives. Words are symbols and weapons in politics. Defining identity does not come under the purview of a democratic state. Linking ‘immigration’ with ‘national identity’ in a ministry is without precedent in our Republic: such a creation by this presidency inscribes immigration as a ‘problem’ for France and the French […] Bringing together these two terms is to associate a discourse that stigmatizes immigration with a nationalist tradition founded on suspicion and hospitality towards foreigners experienced during times of crisis. The challenge of the CNHI was to bring people together and to look to the future, gathered around a shared history that all may identity with, yet this ministry threatens on the contrary to instill the kind of division and polarization whose toll history has shown. That is why we are resigning today from our official responsibilities at the CNHI. (CNHI Research Committee 2007)

These contradictions point in the direction of a failed decolonization and to greater problems that are today part of the fabric of French society. Another way in which this dissent has manifested itself has been in the debates surrounding the location of the CNHI in the Palais de la Porte Dorée itself given the history of the site. Indeed, many critics and observers believe that rather than obfuscating the longer history of the building, France's reckoning with its colonial past could have benefitted from a more sustained engagement with this history. Instead, appeals have been made to

former colonial subjects and their descendants in Africa and to postcolonial communities residing in France itself move beyond the past. For example, in Dakar, Senegal on 26 July 2007, President Sarkozy claimed that ‘I have not come to erase the past since the past cannot be erased, nor I have I come to deny that mistakes were made and crimes committed […] we cannot expect today's children to pay for the crimes of the father …’ and then later on 17 December 2008 at the Ecole Polytechnique where he delivered his ‘diversity speech’, evoking change: We must change our behavior, we must change our habits. We have to change so that the Republic can remain alive. We have to change so that no French person ever feels like a foreigner in their country […] I am convinced that many French people want these changes, that many French people are hoping for them […] people who love this country and who feel that loving their country consists in making a place for all of its children. (p. 10)

While echoing some of the objectives of the CNHI planning document, these rhetorical ploys are undermined by the semiology and stereotypes inherent to the broader discourse. Additionally, there is no recognition of the significant challenge posed by the greater need for initiating a process of decolonizing mindsets (Mbembe 2005; Simon 2005). Numerous arguments and heated debates have taken place in France in recent years concerning multiple facets of French society, from colonial history, memory, and postcoloniality (Blanchard and Veyrat-Masson 2008; Manceron 2008; Weil 2008), including exchanges that have informed the contested terrain of postcolonial studies as a disciplinary paradigm (Blanchard et al. 2005), the memorialization of slavery (Glissant 2007; Vergès 2006), the legacy of Algeria (Stora 1992), and the educational sector (Falaize and Lantheaume 2008; Boëtsch 2008; Noiriel 2007). All of these issues intersect with government policy and are reformulated for consumption by various electoral constituencies. The cohabitation of such seemingly opposed contextualizations and interpretations of history remains a challenge. The fact that the Palais de la Porte Dorée could never be a neutral site may seem obvious. ‘The dominance of the metrople over its colonies,’ Maureen Murphy has argued, ‘is clearly expressed in the choice of architecture: the purpose was not merely to display products from the colonies but also to convey the subordination of the latter to France's power’ (2007b, pp. 46–48) and,

as the only structure that would survive the exposition, the ‘permanent museum of the Colonies’ was conceived with the aim of giving the discourse deployed in the Bois de Vincennes an enduring presence. At that time, the hope was that the condensed historical, artistic and economic image that was offered of the Empire would encourage visitors to invest in those products brought back from the colonies, perhaps even to settle overseas. The building as well as the frescoes that decorate the internal space and that are still visible today, bear witness to an ideology tainted by contradictions. (2007a, p. 27)

Much in the same way as migration is today a central component in the theorization of globalization, the global reach of Empire is inscribed in the architecture whereby ‘The bas-reliefs, ordered according to geography, illustrate the benefit of the colonies to the metropole’ (Murphy 2007a, p. 29) and in turn the frescoes themselves found inside the building ‘illustrate France's influence in the world’ (Murphy 2007a, p. 33). These displays of colonial power and of colonial labor working tirelessly at the service of France's imperial ambitions and expansionist drive share a complex linearity with the subjects on display in the CNHI that are featured as migrant laborers having made invaluable contributions to France's economic, military, and political power. What is therefore particularly striking is the disconnect between these positive attributes and the increasingly harsh measures invoked by the Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity, and Co-development to combat immigration as a negative entity. The longer history of displaying and representing the other cannot be ignored particularly when we consider human zoos (Bancel et al. 2009), the 1931 exhibition, and now the images of migrant experiences at the CNHI. The colonial past is inescapable and remnants everywhere in colonial and postcolonial rhetoric and scientific discourse. ‘For if exotic objects on display in European museums, in particular in France, reflect the history of French expansion overseas,’ as Robert Aldrich has shown, they also shed light on a broad range of museological, political, and moral questions relating to the exhibition of non-European works of art and artifacts […] Even the occasional visitor will soon become aware of the sheer number of objects in the collections of Paris museums that have come from former colonies and that the traces of colonialism are omnipresent throughout French society. (2005, pp. 84–85)

Their history may well be our history, but they remain the other when they enter national territorial boundaries and are subjected to control, categorization, and objectification as human subjects.

Leading researchers and activists, such as Nicolas Bancel and Pascal Blanchard, have insisted that the vacancy of the Palais de la Porte Dorée was a missed opportunity to inscribe the experience of immigration as a chapter in a broader and more pertinent history that would have included slavery, colonialism, and the postcolonial era (Bancel and Blanchard 2007). Indeed, given that the 1931 Colonial Exhibition at which ‘The colonial epic is presented as a lesson in nationalism, the colonial act itself fully-inscribed in the values of the Republic’ (Bancel and Blanchard 2007, p. 115), alarming reverberations are to be found in the imperatives of the Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-development and the current incarnation of discourse pertaining to the threats to Republican ideals. There has been inadequate engagement with that history and with its legacies in public consciousness; furthermore, those very populations targeted by the democratization of access agenda associate the ‘longer history’ of contact and exchange in a transcolonial framework. For example, organizations such as the ethnic minority advocacy group Les Indigènes de la République conceive of themselves as ‘descendants of slaves and deported Africans, daughters and sons of the colonized and of immigrants’ and the Comité pour la mémoire de l'esclavage, Mémoires de la traite négrière, de l'esclavage et de leurs abolitions explicitly situates slaves in French history, whereby ‘Their history and culture are constitutive of our collective history’ (2005, p. 11). The objects that were formerly on display at the MAAO may well have migrated westward across the city, but the images of human subjects on display at the CNHI remain forever connected with their precursors (González 2008). The CNHI collection brings together a disparate range of objects, photographs, digital archives, and installations, organized in such a way as to stage and perform immigration. The permanent collection is divided into sub-sections demarcated by pillars inscribed with headings that include ‘Ici et là-bas’ (‘here and back there’), ‘Au travail’ (‘off to work’), ‘Face à l'état’ (‘dealing with the state’), ‘émigrer’ (‘emigrating’) and ‘diversité’ (‘diversity’). Each explores aspects of the ‘migrant’ experience, pointing out how ‘The past is not erased when one leaves ones country. All migrants bring with them their mother tongue and culture and seek out compatriots upon arrival in order to recreate micro-communities […] More often than not, it's the next generation that begins to distance itself from this origin …’ (Ici et là-bas). This kind of narrative is interrupted by a combination of

descriptive accounts of ‘socioeconomic’ and ‘socio-cultural’ problems associated with assimilation and integration, including housing, given that: Upon arrival, with only limited means or a settlement plan, migrants often find themselves in precarious living conditions […] Access to adequate housing will later symbolize the migrant's gradual settlement in the host society. From the 1950s on, the State will actively develop public housing. (Ici et là-bas)

These spaces will become emblematic of contemporary urban diversity. In the section on work: ‘Emigrating is a phenomenon often determined by factors that are outside of the individual's control but that is lived at a human level’ (Emigrer). This is of course incompatible with the Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity, and Co-development's insistence on migration as a purely economic issue. In turn, the section on ‘diversity’ reflects the socio-cultural reality of a vibrant multicultural France with migrations from originating in multiple locations and in multiple forms – ‘a space for multiple cultural encounters […] that continue to enrich the French national heritage’ (Diversité). In reality though, efforts at defining a common or shared French (and for that matter European) identity continue to be informed by such categories as desirable and undesirable subjects. Photographs, audio-visual resources, posters, family objects, and legal documents, among others, endeavor to document the manifold facets of the migrant experience to/with France, components augmented with a number of installations. Certainly one of the most striking is Barthélémy Toguo's Climbing Down (2004), a 20ft construction in which single beds have been stacked one upon the other and draped with cheap multi-colored shopping bags from the discount department store Tati, bags often used by poor migrants as luggage, and thereby addressing notions of social displacement and mobility. The descriptive label informs us that: Climbing Down refers to immigration shelters. The artist is tackling serious problems relating to separation and precarious housing. The work reveals the tensions that can arise in the public space and in the shelters, in the shared space and in the private space where individuals recreate a micro-universe, marked out by bags and suitcases that contain traces of the homes they have left. The relationship between the individual and the collective and the interior and exterior becomes a tenuous one.

Isabelle Renard has fastened on the ‘oxymoronic’ (2007, p. 21) quality of the title contained in the juxtaposition of ‘climbing’ with ‘down’; the artist

addresses the psychological challenges that come from separation, an often overlooked component of the migratory struggle given the imperative of attaining a successful economic outcome, notions implied by the link one is compelled to make because of the allusion to social climbing and to upward mobility. Several video installations also focus on the question of loss. Zineb Sedira's Mother Tongue (2002) traces the violence of cultural alienation that accompanies displacement, as communication is interrupted and limited across generations between a grandmother, her daughter, and daughter (Sebbar 1984). The information panel explains how: The artist examines notions linked to preservation and loss of cultural identity. Through a matrilineal chain, the artist, her mother and daughter dialogue, two at a time and on three screens, each in their respective mother tongue and in three languages: French in the case of Zineb Sedira, Arabic for the mother, and English for the granddaughter. However, dialogue appears to have been broken between the granddaughter and the grandmother who do not seem to understand one another; if the artist's triple language skills bear witness to her diverse identity, then the cultural differences engendered by the diasporic experience are revealed between her mother and daughter.

The looping video installation takes place over three sequences: (1) Mother and I (Arabic-French) (2) Daughter and I (French–English) (3) Grandmother and Daughter (Arabic-English). Naturally, the notion of a mother tongue is complicated here since the point of the installation is that they do not/no longer share mother tongues. The installation is simultaneously about words and silence, revealing what is lost in translation through migratory processes. One is forced to reflect on how such outcomes might well differ in other transnational diasporic settings in which biculturalism may have been further encouraged. In another montage, Mother, Father and I (2003), Zineb Sedira projects concurrently on separate screens interviews she conducted with her parents on the subject of the 1954–1962 French-Algerian war. This results in a polyvocal account of her family's ties to Algeria and to how the war is remembered. The disparate and gendered accounts that result from this act of memorializing a troubled history serves to question the mechanisms that have been deployed for recording official historical memory while also articulating perspectives and observations (how, for example, might the father have access to mother's private position, and how might gender deliver certain variables?) that might not otherwise have been known. The originality comes from the fact

that the daughter (Sedira herself) remains symbolically silent in her capacity as observer filmed on a different screen facing her parents' testimonial narratives. The communication that takes place between her father and mother is not structured around direct exchange but rather emerges from the space between them as a reciprocal engagement with history. The intimacy of the disclosure is maintained while Sedira is able to confirm that ultimately, no single, monolithic narrative of immigration can exist: Zineb Sedira's private history, along with her family's, who left Algeria for France, constitute the privileged subject in the artist's piece. Mother, Father and I deals with themes relating to multiple identities, the war, departure, travel, and her life in France. Zineb Sedira's work follows a historiographic mode, but the documentary style she adopts is also influenced by traditional story-telling techniques. The use of her own image also allows her to question her history and identity. (Information panel)

Her parents in fact speak at the same time but not to each other. They have shared their lives and histories living side by side, but ultimately their respective experiences of that history warrants autonomous validation, offering through the intimacy of disclosure what is arguably a more accurate contextualization of that collective journey. In this regard, this installation provides a compelling alternative to the corpus of works known as Beur literature produced by the children of North African immigrants living in France from the 1980s on (Benguigui 2001; Begag 1986; Hargreaves 1991), who have traditionally ventriloquized the parents' experience in their films and novels (currently, the focus on literature at the CNHI has been limited to a few recordings of interviews with francophone authors such as François Cheng, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Milan Kundera, and Andreï Makine, whose national origins are outside but who have chosen to produce works French – the extensive corpus of films and literary works that have explored immigration has thus far been ignored [Dubreuil 2008]). One of the most original concepts developed at the CNHI is that of the allocation of a space to a ‘galerie des dons’. Through a symbolic acknowledgement of Marcel Maus's influential work on the ‘gift’ and the fluid nature of ‘value’ as it is accorded to objects across cultures, the CNHI wants to encourage individuals and families to share with the general public personal symbols of their respective migratory experience, thereby further foregrounding the ‘human’ and personal dimension. As Fabrice Grognet has remarked,

objects that had previously only been family heirlooms, identity papers, expired job contracts, personal or institutional archives swell the ranks of objects that serve as ‘witnesses’ to immigration in France […] Added to the inventory, this artificial grouping of objects of different nature and origins find unity as components of a national collection. (2007, p. 30)

As a free handout and map published in English of the CNHI entitled Cité guide points out, ‘Through an interactive presentation which calls upon the demands of history and the emotion of eyewitness accounts, images, archive documents, objects which were part of the lives of some of these individuals and ancient and contemporary works of art also provide an insight into this world.’ Naturally, these concerns are not specific to the French context and other European Union members have been implementing measures aimed at heightening public awareness of the precariousness of migrant workers and immigrant families. In Spain, for example, the office of the Secretary of State for Immigration and Emigration has launched (with other partners) a sensitization initiative that has included a mobile exhibit, ‘Los deseos cerca de Tí en La Ruta Prometida: une exposicíon donde podrás compartir tu deseo’ (‘Desires Near You on the Promised Route: An Exhibition Where You Could Share Your Desire’), that addresses the dangers of ocean crossings and immigrant conditions. These kinds of initiatives now define the work being done by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR): Climbing over razor wire fences, taking to sea in leaking boats or stowing away in airless containers, refugees and migrants around the world risk their lives every day in desperate attempts to find safety or a better life. Behind the dramatic headlines and the striking images of people on the move, there are personal stories of courage, tragedy and compassion. Although refugees and migrants often use the same routes and modes of transport they have different protection needs. (UNHCR, n.d.)

If the stated objective of the CNHI to reach an improved understanding of the role immigration has played in French history is to be achieved, then a concerted effort will have to be made to denounce those paradigms and stereotypes disseminated by the Ministry of Immigration, Integration, National Identity and Co-development, revisionist concepts pertaining to colonialism subsumed in favor of a decolonization that will provide accuracy to colonial history and actually alter mindsets, and individuals and institutions encouraged to abandon and relinquish a one-dimensional genealogical apparatus at the service of nationalistic tendencies.

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About the Series Routledge Studies on African and Black Diaspora marks a critical development in publishing theoretically and historically significant works on the lived experiences of people of the African decent in all parts of the world. The series publishes works of the highest quality from across the broad disciplinary fields of social sciences and humanities with a strong emphasis on theoretically informed and empirically grounded texts. Focus issues include the centrality of power, knowledge, gender, rece, class and other forms of social identity in exploring different boundaries (cultural, geographic, political, social and psychological) through which people of the African decent have moved in the context of globalized and transnational spaces. The Editors welcome book proposals as well as manuscripts that address issues of the African and Black Diaspora. Single authored manuscripts as well as thematically coherent edited volumes will be considered. Inquiries may be directed to the Series Editors: Fassil Demissie, DePaul University, ([email protected]), Sandra Jackson, DePaul University ([email protected]) Abebe Zegeye, University of South Africa ([email protected])

Index Page numbers in Italics represent tables. Page numbers in Bold represent figures. Abolition ′07: corridor 45; Hackney Museum 41; visitors 49 Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (1807) 42 aesthetic display 3 Africa: missionaries at work 75; Musée du Quai Branly (MQB) 107 Africa Museum 27, 28; Belgium 26; displays 26 African art 85; France 85 African reformer 90 African women 68; collecting cocoa 70; plantations 71 Agence de Coopération Culturelle et Techniquew (ACCT) 93 airport 92 Aldrich, R. 133; colonial fracture 5; colonial museums 2 Amselle, J-L. 56 Amsterdam: Tropenmuseum 8 And I still rise: Hackney pupils and poets speak out about enslavement (2007) 46 anthropologists 102 architects: building museums 14 architectural landscape 55 architecture: primitive art 76 Arendt, H. 33 Arnaut, K. 56 art: ethnography 95 art par excellence 76 art-artefact debate: Nouvel, J. 108 artistic diffusion 3 arts premiers 93, 95–6, 102; primitive art 20, 21 auxiliary activities 14

Baartman, S.: and Cuvier, G. 87 Baker, J. 88 Bancel, N.: and Blanchard, P. 133 Barringer, T. 15 bas-relief 66, 68, 70 Beaubourg effect 92 Belgium 60; Africa Museum 26; colonial memories 60; colonisation 55; Congo 59; Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) 8 Belgo-Belgian issue 55 Beloved (Morrison) 47 Belve Museum 56 Bernier, C-M. 51 Bhabba, H. 48, 92 biblical quotation 17 black imagination 42 Black Paris - Black Brussels 58 Blanchard, P. 117; and Bancel, N. 133 Bourdieu, P. 79, 85 Braggard, V.: and Planche, S. 2 Breaking the Chains: exhibit 34 Bristol Board of Tourism 38 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 36 British Empire and Commonwealth Museum 8, 32, 33 British Museum 14 building museums: architects 14; Empire of a Thousand Years 14; ornamentation and décor 14 Carbot, J.: Port of Bristol 33 centre national 128 Centre Pompidou: Musée du Quai Branly (MQB) 93 Cesaire, A. 119, 120 Ceuppens, B. 56 Champs-de-Mars 76 children 46; creative writing workshops 48 Chirac, President J. 6, 74, 76, 103

Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration (CNHI) 3, 4, 13, 21, 115, 127, 128, 130–1, 132, 133; collection 134; items on display 22; paintings and statutes 22 Clifford, J. 58, 76, 95, 111 Climbing Down (Toguo) 134 Code in the light of contemporary practice: International Councils of Museums (ICOM) 6 collections: proprietorship 5 colonial dispute 59 colonial experience 121 colonial exposition 89; France 87 colonial fracture: Aldrich, R. 5 Colonial Institute 18 colonial life 69 colonial medicine 74 colonial memories 58; Belgium 60 colonial museums: Aldrich, R. 2 colonial workers: Indochinese 72; work environment 68 colonialists 13 colonies: excavation 74 Commonwealth Education Trust 19 Commonwealth Institute 23, 27; Empire Museum 24; Kensington High Street 18–19 community space 45 Congo: Belgium 59; experiences 61; independence 57 creative writing workshops: children 48 Crne, S. 5 Crystal Palace 15 cultural objects 78 curators 27, 28, 43, 48 curio memorabilia surface 85 Cuvier, G.: and Baartman, S. 87 Dahomeans 88 de Gaulle, C. 92 debates 28

decolonialization 1, 18–20 decorative arts 15 Demissie, F. 2–3 democratization 9 Diop, A.: and Senghor, L. 91 directors: museum 29 discourses 7 displays: Africa Museum 26 diverse audiences 38 Doumergue, President G. 65 Dove of Peace to the Five Continents: Ducos, P. 74 Durrant, S. 47 Dutch Colonial Institute 17 East India Company Limited 15 empire: exclusion 38 empire building 13, 14–18 Empire Museum: Commonwealth Institute 24 Empire and Us: exhibits 34 ethics of empathy 50 ethnographic museum: Sherman, D. 119 ethnographic objects 85 Ethnologie français (2008) 103 excavation: colonies 74 exhibit: Breaking the Chains 34 exhibition 19, 43; Magiciens de la Terre 92; Oosstwarts 25; temporary 57–9 exhibition space 107; Musée du Quai Branly (MQB) 107 exhibits: Empire and Us 34; Tropenmuseum 25 exploitation 57 Exposition Coloniale (1931) 4, 28 Exposition Coloniale Internationale 66, 69 First World War 15 Fonds Régionaux d'Art Contemporain (FRAC) 93 Fontana, E.: and Jules-Rosette, B. 3

Foucault, M. 33 France 18, 72, 81; African art 85; colonial expositions 87; debate on French society 132; Franco-Algerian War 19; Great Britain (GB) 24 French leaders 105 French museum landscape 130 French Revolution 129 geographical areas 107; Musée du Quai Branly (MQB) 107; museum 21 Giffiths, G. 8 Girault, C.: Petit Palais (Paris) globalisation: theorization 132 Godelier, M. 95 Golant, W. 18 Goldberg, D.: and Quayson, A. 48 Golden Age 110 government ministries 1 Great Britain (GB) 42; Bristol 34; France 24 Green, N. 129 Gruson, L. 118 Hackney: local residents 43 Hackney Council 41 Hackney Museum: Abolition ′07 41 Hainard, J. 120 Hartmen, G. 51 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 79, 106, 111 heritage: defining 37 Hesse, B. 44 historians 23 history of acquisition 5 Holocaust museum: visitor invitation 49 Hommes et Migrations 127 Hooper-Greenhill, E. 9 iconography: savagery and indolence 87

identity formation 1 Imagined Communities (Anderson) 33 Imperial Institute 15, 27 Indentification Papers (Fuss) 46 indigenous buildings and monuments: spatial reterritorialization 4 Indochinese: colonial workers 72 Institut du Monde Arabe 86 International Councils of Museums (ICOM) 6; 6.2 Return of Cultural Property 6; 6.3 Restitution of Cultural Property 6; Code in the light of contemporary practice 6; museum definition 128 International Slavery Museum: Liverpool 24 Janniot, A. 17; working with an African model 67 Jarassé, D. 118 Jardin d'Acimatation (Paris Zoo) 87 Jeronómos monastry 13 Journal Lumineux 88 Jules-Rosette, B. 94; and Fontana, E. 3 Kennnedy, R.G. 5 Kensington High Street: Commonwealth Institute 18–19 Kerchache, J. 104, 108 Kimmelman, M. 79, 94 King Leopold II: Royal Museum of Central Africa 16 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B. 85, 86 knowledge production 38 Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (KIT): Royal Tropic Institute 18 Kratz, C.A.: and Rassool, C. 5, 6 La Gangrène et l'oubli (Stora) 116 la plus grande France 13 La Verité sur les Colonies 90 Lakota: Sioux war 96 Laprade, A. 17, 90

l'art nègre 91 Latour, B. 104 Le Monde 122 Lebrovics, H. 3, 94; Musée du Quai Branly (MQB) 70 leftist humanist optimism 102 Legêne, S. 18 Lemaire, S. 59 Leopolds Ghost 57 Les Amériques noires 109 life-span 27 Lippert, J-L. 55 local residents: Hackney 43 London 34; British Museum 33; Imperial Institute 18 Lyautey, M.: museum office 73 MacKenzie, J. 15–16 McLeod, C. 2 Magiciens de la Terre 111; exhibition 92 Malraux, A. 103 mannequins 25 maps 16 Marbles, E. 34 Margolis, K. 7 marketing opportunity: overseas 4 Marleau-Ponty, M. 85 Martin, S. 104; Tribal Arts 94 materials 67 Maus, M. 136 mediator 32 Melanesian art 20 Member Nations 19 Mémorial national l'outre-mer 23 memory wars 55, 59–62 micro-architectures 78 migration: twenty-first century society 9 Minh-ha, T.T 79

Ministry of Immigration, Integration: National Identity and Codevelopment 133 mission civilisatrice 21, 65 missionaries at work: Africa 75 Mother Tongue (Sedira) 135 mourning: post-colonial narrative 47 MPC 81; birth of 71 mur végétal: Nouvel, J. 96 Murphy, M. 118 Musée African de Namur 56 Musée colonial 27 Musée de l'Homme 17–18, 20, 21, 78, 90, 102 Musée des arts africans et océaniens (MAAO) 127, 133 Musée des Arts d'Afriquw et d'Oceanie 19 Musée des Colonies 66 Musée du Quai Branly (MQB) 21, 72, 74, 78, 80, 94, 101, 110, 130; Africa 107; Centre Pompidou 93; exhibition space 107; geographical areas 107; Lebrovics, H. 70; Nouvel, J. 77; television screens 107 Musée Grévin 88 Musée Permanent de Colonies 65–72 museographic practices 55 museological practices 1 museum: building 13; directors 28; geographical areas 21; interior 69; visitors 29 museum office: Lyautey, M. 73 Museum of Slavery 42 narratives 86 nation-building 1 National Museums Liverpool: Transatlantic Slavery Gallery 7 natural history museums 13 neutralization: Dogon mask 85 Norridge, Z. 2 Nouvel, J. 79, 93, 103, 105, 107, 110; art-artefact debate 108; mur végétal 96; Musée du Quai Branly (MQB) 77

Oosstwarts 24; exhibition 25 ornamentation and décor: building museums 14 pain and pleasure: relations between 45 paintings: Salles de Fétes 70 paintings and statutes: Cité nationale de l'histoire de l'immigration (CNHI) 22 Palais de la Porte Dorée 21, 117 Petit Palais (Paris): Girault, C. Planche, S.: and Braggard, V. 2 plantations: African women 71 politics of circulation 5 Pompidou, G. 103 Port of Bristol: Carbot, J. 33; Triangular Trade 33 Port Dorée 111, 118 postcolonial France: reinventing tradition 96, 97 postcolonial memory 6 postcolonial narrative: mourning 47 postcolonial world: former colonial museums 20–7 postmodern dreams 92–9 Praça do Império: Vasco Da Gama 13 Price, S. 81 primitive art: architecture 76; arts premier 20, 21 proprietorship: collections 5 psychoanalysis 48 Quai Branly Museum (MQB) 7, 13 Quayson, A.: and Goldberg, D. 48 Rassool, C.: and Kratz, C.A. 5, 6 ready-made images 55 Regarding the pain of others (Sontag) 50 reinventing tradition: postcolonial France 96, 97 Renard, I. 134; oxymoronic 134

renovation projects 56 restructuring: Paris 20 Rivière, G-H. 90 Royal Museum for Central Africa 55; King Leopold II 16 Royal Tropic Institute: Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (KIT) 18 Sais, E. 111 Salles de Fêtes 19, 69, 117; paintings 70 Samba, C. 58 Sarkozy, President N. 130 school children 51 sciences coloniales 20 scientific experimentation 87 scientific work 14 semiotic gap 85 Senegalese village 89 Senghor, L.: and Diop, A. 91 Sherman, D.: ethnographic museum 119 Sioux war: Lakota 96 slave narratives 44 Slavery, empathy and pornography (Wood) 44, 45 Snowman, D. 37 South Kensington Museum 15 spatial reterritorialization: indigenous buildings and monuments 4 spectacular colonialism 87 spoils 4 Steel Brothers & Co. LTD 35 television screens: Musée du Quai Branly (MQB) 107 Terre d'accueil France hostile 121 Tervuren fair 16 theorization: globalisation 132 Thomas, D. 58 Tiers-mondisme 20 topography 8

Torpey, J. 61 Toubon, J. 119, 128 Tower of Babel 96 Transatlantic Slavery Gallery 24; National Museums Liverpool 7 Triangular Trade: Port of Bristol 33 Tribal Arts: Martin, S. 94 Tropenmuseum 24, 27; Amsterdam 8; exhibits 25 Trotter, C. 36 twenty-first century society: migration 9 United East India Company (VOC) 16 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) 136 United States of America (USA) 38 Victoria and Albert Museum 15 visitor invitation: Holocaust museum 49 visitors 44; museum 29 Watching the English (Fox) 37 Western public 109 Women's Emigration Association and the Colonial Nursing Association 15 Wood, M. 49; and Lawrence, D. 51; thesis 45 Wood, N. 44 work environment: colonial workers 68