Canada 150: exhibiting national memory at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

Failler, Angela

doi:10.1080/13621025.2018.1462500

Cited by 6 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Notably, however, the transnational human rights paradigm does not automatically bolster a critical memorial approach. As Angela Failler demonstrates, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights-notwithstanding the mandate encapsulated in its name-mostly supports a self-congratulatory narrative of Bcozy nationalism ( Failler 2018). Finally, the mechanism of brokerage is clearly evident in the articles.…”

Section: Location In Memory Studiesmentioning

confidence: 94%

Locating Transnational Memory

Wüstenberg

2019

Int J Polit Cult Soc

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The conventional understanding of public remembrance has been contained within the boundaries of the nation, the state, or the local community. With the arrival of what Astrid Erll has called the Bthird phase^of memory studies (Erll 2011, 4), commemoration is now analyzed in terms of its Bunbounded^quality and is Bconsidered a fluid and flexible affair^(Bond et al. 2016, 1). Memory straddles established divides, it moves and travels, and it is actively transformed in the process. And yet, a significant part of what continues to fascinate scholars about memory is its groundedness in concrete locations. The possibility of Bvisiting^one's object of research, of interacting with those who experience memory as the intended (or unintended) audience, and witnessing transnationality Bup close^is what draws scholarly inquiry. So how can we best connect the obvious significance of the local to the reality of transnational remembering? This special issue addresses this tension between the production of remembrance through transnational processes and its grounding in concrete locations. Underlining the presence of transnationality in commemoration, this volume examines how historical events and experiences that transcend national boundaries, global norms, experiences of mobility, or awareness of the Bworld out there^are manifested in particular realms of memory. The contributors come from different disciplinary backgrounds (literary studies, sociology, political science, history, peace, and conflict studies) and focus on memory spaces in a diverse set of geographies-including in Australia, Austria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Norway, the Philippines, South Africa, and the USA. They also investigate sites dedicated to different and complex pasts that are transnationalized through various mechanisms and with different results for local remembrance. 1

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Section: Location In Memory Studiesmentioning

confidence: 94%

Locating Transnational Memory

Wüstenberg

2019

Int J Polit Cult Soc

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“…Subsequently, the exhibit was adapted for the CMI at Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where it ran for 8 months in 2019. These two museums, on opposite coasts of Canada, play different roles; the RBCM is a provincial museum and the CMI is one of nine national museums, and one of only two not located in Ottawa, the national capital (the other is the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, which opened in 2014 in Winnipeg, Manitoba; see Failler, 2018). The CMI is located at Pier 21, which was designated a historic site in 1999, prior to the national museum's opening there in 2011, because of its central role in Canadian immigration history (it is comparable to Ellis Island in the United States).…”

Section: R E Se a Rch Set Ti Ng A N D M Ethodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Museum families: Canadian kinship and material culture

Leinaweaver

2024

Museum Anthropology

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Understanding and documenting the ways that objects become entangled in, produce, sustain, and rupture family relations are crucial contributions of museum studies to anthropological kinship theory. This article analyzes a Canadian exhibit entitled “Family: Bonds and Belonging,” developed in response to Canada's 150th anniversary, in 2017, by a British Columbia provincial museum, then brought to Canada's national immigration museum in Nova Scotia in 2019. The article demonstrates how curators invite objects to narrate kinship, and entangle visitors as theoretical accomplices, all while building national projects. Layered concepts of “family” plays a central role in this exhibit, simultaneously introducing “family” as complex, diverse, and varied while also reproducing middle‐class conventions of family. I argue that this contradiction partly undercuts the representational content of the exhibit, and that the simultaneous multivalence and ideological uniformity of family in this setting points to how museum practices and procedures can unintentionally reproduce conventional ideas that implicitly counter curatorial work.

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“…Moreover, it side-steps ongoing forms of discrimination faced by queer people by almost exclusively curating stories that can be counted as ‘wins’ – that is, where LGBTQ struggles in Canada appear to have been overcome, left to the past, safely sealed off from the present. As I have argued elsewhere, these kinds of representations foreclose potentially rich opportunities to learn from difficult knowledge when they ‘forget’ or leave out of the frame less cheerful memories and stories that expose the ways in which certain queer, refugee, Indigenous and other marginalized peoples continue to struggle (and resist), especially if they are not petitioning for inclusion within the terms of state-conferred rights but are instead advocating for their dignity and freedom precisely by challenging the settler state’s authority to adjudicate and bestow these rights in the first place (Failler, 2018: 14). Put slightly differently, the CMHR’s avoidance of ‘difficult knowledge’ and its preference instead for ‘lovely knowledge’ that works to shore up feelings of (homo)national pride by relying on simplistic progress narratives measured by the advancements of the most privileged, comes at a cost to its ability to engage museumgoers and the broader public in deeper, meaningful conversations about how to enact change.…”

Section: The Museum and Exhibitionary Silencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unsettling homocolonial frames of remembrance: Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer interventions at the museum

Failler

2023

Memory Studies

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This article considers a Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer protest at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights as a flashpoint that exposes problems with how memory-making institutions are incorporating lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer issues into their programming and/or collections. The protest brings into relief the museum’s investment in a homocolonial framing of remembrance for the way in which the telling of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer ‘progress’ is entangled with a settler colonial political economy wherein the tokenistic inclusion of some queers into the sexual citizenry happens alongside the dispossession, devaluing and criminalizing of others. I then undertake some preliminary ‘curatorial dreaming’ upon two other interventions–commentaries uploaded to a digital story bank by a Two-Spirit and an Indigenous queer museumgoer, and the short film Woman Dress by Plains Cree artist TJ Cuthand. Along with the protest, the commentaries and the film unsettle homocolonial frames of remembrance and provide critical openings towards decolonial queer memory work at the museum.

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Canada 150: exhibiting national memory at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights

Cited by 6 publications

References 23 publications

Locating Transnational Memory

Locating Transnational Memory

Museum families: Canadian kinship and material culture

Unsettling homocolonial frames of remembrance: Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer interventions at the museum

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