Narratives of Community: Museums and Ethnicity

This book brings together a collection of essays on the revolution taking place in museums around the world as they look anew at the ways communities are represented. It highlights a fundamental shift occurring in 21st century museums: how they confront existing assumptions about people, and the pioneering ways they work with specific groups to narrate oral histories, tell ancestral stories and keep memories from the past alive.

The philosophical thread, woven through each chapter, expresses a rejection of popular claims that minority people are necessarily silent, neglected and ignorant of the processes of representation. This book showcases contemporary museums as spaces of dialogue, collaboration, reclamation and storytelling. It acknowledges the radical efforts many museums and communities make to actively engage with and overthrow existing misconceptions, on the important subject of race and ethnicity.

Prologue
Olivia Guntarik

1. Counter-narratives of Cultural Knowledge
Telling the Story of Possum Skin Cloaks
Vicki Couzens, Gunditjmara and Keeray Wurrong Artist

Multicultural Art and Self-Representation: An Interview with Artist James Luna
Klare Scarborough

Place, Narrative and Social Space
Patricia Davis, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of North Carolina, USA

Contextualising and Challenging Assumptions
Kate Craddy, Director, Galicia Jewish Museum, Krakow, Poland

2. New Models of Representing Memory
Relevance and Reality
Vicki Leibowitz, San Diego, USA

In Our Own Image
Julie Kendig-Lawrence, Collaborative Arts Resources for Education Manager, Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, USA

Old Forms, New Purposes
Victoria Dickenson, Chief Knowledge Officer, Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg, Canada

Apne Itihias To Maan Hai
Alison Taylor & Stacey Baines, Inclusion & Diversity Team, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry, UK

3. Involving Voice, Perspective and People
Are We There Yet
Magdalena Mieri, Director, Program in Latino History & Culture, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, USA

Advocating Culture Through Crafts
Carmita Eliza Icasiano, Founder, Manlilikha Artisans’ Support Network, Philippines

Practices of Inclusion
Annette B Fromm, Assistant Professor & Coordinator Museum Studies, Florida International University, USA

Humanising Contact Zones
Philipp Schorch, Victoria University of Wellington & Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa

4. Narratives of Nation and Imagination
Active Remembering in Utopia
Catherine Gomes, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Australia

Indexes of Exclusion
Marzia Varutti, Honorary Visiting Fellow, School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, UK

Fragments
Olivia Guntarik, School of Media and Communication, RMIT University, Australia

Epilogue
Olivia Guntarik

Dr Olivia Guntarik teaches in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University in Australia. She completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne and is currently writing a book on memory and migration. She writes regularly on place, remembering and cultural reflection and her research has been published in the Journal of Media Practice and Narrative Inquiry.

Title: Narratives of Community: Museums and Ethnicity
Editor: Olivia Guntarik
Pages: 432
Illustrations: 30
Size: 216 x 140mm
Date: 2010
Editions: £44.95 [paperback] | £34.95 [eBook]
ISBN: 978-1-907697-05-0 [paperback]

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