Where is the discourse now about race and power in museums?

More than twenty years ago, the International Center of the Smithsonian Institution set the terms of the debate when it hosted two conferences on “the presentation and interpretation of diversity in museums.” The resulting publications, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, edited by Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), and Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture, edited by Karp, Lavine, and Christine Mullen Kreamer (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press,1992), brought together papers by curators, anthropologists, artists, and scholars. These volumes epitomized the socio-cultural discourse of the time and mapped the ways in which the museum’s authority as a definer of culture was being called into question within an increasingly contested multicultural and post-colonial terrain. That they remain touchstones for the field says much about their impact. But the heyday of identity politics in the early 1990s gave way to a much different focus for museology. Most publications on museums that have since circulated in North American and Western Europe have focused instead on questions of cultural patrimony, relevance and audience, and the rising role of museums within globalized consumer culture.

Deeply indebted to this earlier landscape, Viv Golding’s thoroughly researched book Learning at the Museum Frontiers: Identity, Race and Power seeks to reposition museums as spaces where radical learning and the productive negotiation of race and difference can take place. If in 1990, the question, as posed by Karp, was, “What do exhibitions represent and how do they do so?” (Karp, 11), for Golding now the question is different. She instead examines how the museum can “function as a frontier space: a zone where learning is created, new identities are forged, new connections are made between disparate groups and their own histories” (Golding, 4.). If in 1990, “the challenge for exhibition makers [was] to provide within exhibitions the contexts and resources that enable audiences to choose to reorganize their knowledge” (Karp, 22–23), for Golding what the project now requires of museum workers is no less than an “imaginative reconstruction of museum knowledge and priorities . . . a change in focus: from the static display of museum knowledge about the material objects in the glass cases of our public galleries; to a continual cycle of investigations into how new embodied knowledge(s) might be constructed with the museum audience” (Golding, 169). Anchoring her argument is the notion of “power to activity,” or the creative capacity that human beings have to transform their world and transcend given limitations through experimentation, dialogue, and play. Golding builds her argument on progressive views of learning, which place the learner at the heart of the process of making sense of the world, and a belief that part of what museums can and should do is to challenge racism and raise individual and community self-esteem.

This shift of frame from a critical, hermeneutical approach to museum exhibitions to an active, constructivist, and dialogical view of museum knowledge is Golding’s contribution. A former educator at the Horniman Museum and now a lecturer in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, she accurately argues that such a shift in the conception of the function of museums must radically transform relationships within museums and permeate every facet of the work rather than remain relegated to museum education departments. Museum objects, displays, and the live programs institutions organize all constitute the spatio-temporal zone where power, learning, and race interact, a zone that, for Golding, holds great transformative potential.

Locating the specificity of her own perspective is one of Golding’s critical strategies, and she does so early in the book. The introduction describes the Horniman and its particular history. Golding declares, and then repeats throughout, her alliance to feminist-hermeneutics and states her indebtedness to the work of Black writers and theorists, including Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Stuart Hall, and Paul Gilroy. In the opening page of the first chapter she describes herself as “a mixed-race disabled academic.” What is baffling about this ambitious book is how a writer so conscious of her position, a museum educator so sensitive to the needs of those with whom she works, a researcher with such a sense of theoretical nuance, can be unattuned to the learner at hand—her reader. Who, exactly, is the intended audience of this book? Who is Golding’s reader?

Golding argues for the value of theoretically grounded practice in furthering museum work. So at least one intended audience for the book may be museum professionals and future practitioners. But the book betrays too much of where it began—PhD fieldwork—and reads like a magnificently researched but somewhat tedious dissertation. Published by Ashgate, the book looks and reads highly academic. Its design and a quick glance at its pages say “impenetrable” to most practitioners, a dubious choice for busy museum professionals whose time for reading is either at night or on the daily commute to and from work. Excessive details and examples permeate the book, from the introduction to the closing paragraph, leaving the reader struggling to find the big picture. An over-determined organization compounds rather than clarifies the problem. Consistently, Golding references writers, theorists, philosophers, curators, and others but provides no explanation of who these people are—an efficient choice for a dissertation, and an insufficient one for a book meant to reach anyone other than scholars and fellow PhD students. For any reader like me, reasonably well-read but not steeped in the wide-ranging scholarly research Golding has undertaken, the feeling is either that this writer mistakenly assumed too much of me and what I know, or worse, that I have joined the party too late, that the necessary introductions have happened, and that I must now fumble my way forward. Returning to the question, who is Golding’s reader? I venture to say it is neither students in the field who would benefit from a bigger-picture view and more meaningful context, nor museum professionals with little patience or time for this sort of writing.

Golding’s book often feels dated, largely the result of its didactic tone and many of the examples and references in the first half. She retraces territory without contributing significant new insights, dedicating, for instance, multiple pages to considering the late 1980s and early 1990s exhibitions Art/artifact at the Centre for African Art in New York and Into the Heart of Africa at the Royal Ontario Museum. Even her examinations of South African museums seem of a moment. In his 1999 essay for Daedalus “From Being about Something to Being for Somebody: The Ongoing Transformation of the American Museum” (128, no. 3 [Summer 1999]: 229–58) museum scholar Stephen Weil described how the rhetoric around museums and their purpose shifted significantly over three decades, from museums being perceived as places of refreshment, primarily for the affluent, to being places for education (specifically, sites for informal learning), to instruments for social change and communal empowerment (236). It is this late-nineties view of museums as tools for self-expression and self-recognition that Golding’s research emphasizes.

The patient reader will eventually be rewarded with fresher, more pertinent ideas. Golding is at her best when she concretely analyzes exhibitions and programs, critically studying museum aims and how institutions enact these in relation to their audiences. Her concise description of the “Other Half” tour at Colonial Williamsburg, where the costumed guides use active teaching strategies to tell a complex story that was informed by research and historical consciousness, allows one to see the importance of how interpretation happens. Describing the permanent exhibition African Worlds at the Horniman Museum, Golding shows how the design of the project communicates, and how community collaboration was fundamental to its conception and execution. The extended case study of the Museum of World Culture in Göteborg, Sweden, demonstrates in sensorial and intellectual terms how this museum has developed innovative exhibition strategies to enact what is stated in the remarkably clear exhibition policy articulated on its website: “Through its exhibitions the museum will create a dialogue with audiences that are diverse relative to age, class, gender, education, and ethnicity. The museum will develop an experimental and questioning style for its exhibitions, so that many different voices can be heard and also ambiguous and conflict-filled subjects can be articulated. Exhibitions will explore the unique understanding, poetry and power embedded in museum objects.”

These and other geographically diverse examples are closer to the socially empowering museum model Golding proposes. In a discussion of museum strategies at the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, Golding helpfully observes that, “there is an emphasis on taking action to address major human rights abuses, thereby transforming site visitors from passive learners to active citizens and promoting democratic values” (123). This is a model of active agency where museums are socially useful, and where the museum becomes a place to advance, through multi-sensorial experience, a capacity for creative development and departure. It becomes a “frontier” to resist and reconstitute limits, negotiating intercultural understanding. And it is a space of heightened consciousness where, as Golding concludes, individuals can enact the African concept of “umbutu”: “I am because you are” (200).