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Today more than ever before, the historical witness is now a “museum object” in the form of video interviews with individuals remembering events of historical importance. Such video testimonies now not only are part of the collections and research activities of museums, but become deeply intertwined with narrative and exhibit design. With a focus on Holocaust museums, this study scrutinizes for the first time this new global process of “musealisation” of testimony, exploring the processes, prerequisites, and consequences of the transformation of video testimonies into exhibits.
Today more than ever before, the historical witness is now a “museum objectâ€_x009d_ in the form of video interviews with individuals remembering events of historical importance. Such video testimonies now not only are part of the collections and research activities of museums, but become deeply intertwined with narrative and exhibit design. With a focus on Holocaust museums, this study scrutinizes for the first time this new global process of “musealisationâ€_x009d_ of testimony, exploring the processes, prerequisites, and consequences of the transformation of video testimonies into exhibits.
This book is the first full-length study of the museum object as a memory medium in history exhibitions about the Nazi era, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Over recent decades, German and Austrian exhibition-makers have engaged in significant programmes of object collection, often in collaboration with witnesses and descendants. At the same time, exhibition-makers have come to recognise the degree to which the National Socialist era was experienced materially, through the loss, acquisition, imposition, destruction, and re-purposing of objects. In the decades after 1945, encounters with material culture from the Nazi past continued, both within the family and in the public sphere. In analysing how these material engagements are explored in the museum, the book not only illuminates a key aspect of German and Austrian cultural memory but contributes to wider debates about relationships between the human and object worlds.
Memorylands is an original and fascinating investigation of the nature of heritage, memory and understandings of the past in Europe today. It looks at how Europe has become a ’memoryland’ – littered with material reminders of the past, such as museums, heritage sites and memorials; and at how this ‘memory phenomenon’ is related to the changing nature of identities – especially European, national and cosmopolitan. In doing so, it provides new insights into how memory and the past are being performed and reconfigured in Europe – and with what effects. Drawing especially, though not exclusively, on cases, concepts and arguments from social and cultural anthropology, Memorylands ar...
Displays of Jewish ritual objects in public, non-Jewish settings by Jews are a comparatively re-cent phenomenon. So too is the establishment of Jewish museums. This volume explores the origins of the Jewish Museum of New York and its evolution from collecting and displaying Jewish ritual objects, to Jewish art, to exhibiting avant-garde art devoid of Jewish content, created by non-Jews. Established within a rabbinic seminary, the museum’s formation and development reflect changes in Jewish society over the twentieth century as it grappled with choices between religion and secularism, particularism and universalism, and ethnic pride and assimilation.
The World Wide Web (WWW) and digitisation have become important sites and tools for the history of the Holocaust and its commemoration. Today, some memory institutions use the Internet at a high professional level as a venue for self-presentation and as a forum for the discussion of Holocaust-related topics for potentially international, transcultural and interdisciplinary user groups. At the same time, it is not always the established institutions that utilise the technical possibilities and potential of the Internet to the maximum. Creative and sometimes controversial new forms of storytelling of the Holocaust or more traditional ways of remembering the genocide presented in a new way with...
Lifting the Shadow: Reshaping Memory, Race, and Slavery in U.S. Museums examines a small but significant wave of new U.S. memorial museums that focus on slavery and its ongoing violent legacies, including the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Montgomery’s Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, and Greenwood Rising, which commemorates the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre. These museums are challenging historical narratives of slavery and race by placing racial oppression at the center of American history and linking historical slavery to contemporary racial injustice, but they have opened in a period marked by growing racial tension, white nationalism, and political division. Sodaro examines how the violence of U.S. slavery and its lasting legacies is negotiated in these museums, as well as their potential to contribute to the development of a more critical historical memory of race in the U.S. at this particularly volatile sociopolitical moment.
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Exploring the relationship between museums and biographies, this collection of essays examines examples from the early 19th century to the present day.
The International Handbooks of Museum Studies is a multi-volume reference work that represents a state-of-the-art survey of the burgeoning field of museum studies. Featuring original essays by leading international museum experts and emerging scholars, readings cover all aspects of museum theory, practice, debates, and the impact of technologies. The four volumes in the series, divided thematically, offer in-depth treatment of all major issues relating to museum theory; historical and contemporary museum practice; mediations in art, design, and architecture; and the transformations and challenges confronting the museum. In addition to invaluable surveys of current scholarship, the entries include a rich and diverse panoply of examples and original case studies to illuminate the various perspectives. Unprecedented for its in-depth topic coverage and breadth of scholarship, the multi-volume International Handbooks of Museum Studies is an indispensable resource for the study of the development, roles, and significance of museums in contemporary society.