Description
Book SynopsisRobyn Autry recounts the public and private battles fought over the creation and content of history museums. Despite vast differences in the development of South African and U.S. society, Autry finds a common set of ideological, political, economic, and institutional dilemmas arising out of the selective reconstruction of the past.
Trade ReviewAlthough comparisons of the anti-apartheid and civil rights movements abound, until now no scholar has attended to the comparative place of these struggles in the collective memory of the allegedly 'post-racial' U.S. and in South Africa's 'Rainbow Nation.' Desegregating the Past brilliantly reveals the power and limits of museums to reckon with a troubled racial past, casting new light on how we publicly remember the struggles against apartheid and segregation-and by doing so, how we forget. -- Alex Lichtenstein, Indiana University As South Africa and America wrestle with simmering legacies of cruel, racist histories, Robyn Autry's bold and layered text investigates how representations of a divided past are reconstructed into an imagined, 'desegregated' present. Invoking the museum as her mode of exploration, Autry powerfully reveals the compound and competing imperatives - ideological, political, economic, institutional - that have informed the maintenance and creation of public sites of memory as two nations transcend and transform their collective narratives. -- Andrea Durbach, author of A Common Purpose: The Story of the Upington 25 and director of the Australian Human Rights Center at the University of Sydney Desegregating the Past is a remarkable study of how collective perceptions of the past are shaped and displayed through contestation between public and private memory agents. Set in a comparative context, Autry examines the formation of racial and national identities in the USA and South Africa, and the balance between discourses of victimhood, solidarity and resistance in deeply divided histories. It is an important contribution to our understanding of how conflict and resolution are presented and re-presented in different historical contexts. -- Ran Greenstein, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa As both a historian and museum curator, I believe that Autry's sociological analysis of museums as institutions and as producers of collective memories is groundbreaking. Her extensive research in the United States and South Africa illuminates the difficulties of producing contemporary national narratives from the messy, contentious, and violent elements of both nation's pasts. -- Fath Davis Ruffins, Curator, National Museum of American History
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Museums Visited List of Abbreviations Introduction: Desegregating the Past 1. Memory Entrepreneurs: History in the Making 2. The Curated Past: Remembering the Collective 3. Managing Collective Representations 4. Memory Deviants: Breaking the Collective Conclusion: Museumification of Memory Notes Selected Bibliography Index
