‘We are… we are everything’: the politics of recognition and misrecognition at immigration museums

Abstract

Qualitative interviews were undertaken with visitors at five museums that display the histories and experiences of immigration in the United States and Australia. This paper outlines the range of embodied performative practices of meaning making that visitors undertook during their visits and the meanings and political values that they created or reaffirmed in doing so. The key performance at these museums were the affirmation and reinforcement of familial, ethnic and national identities in which individuals explored the tensions between migrant identity and the nationalizing narratives of the resident nation. The performance of reinforcement could also be used to justify both politically progressive and conservative narratives of inclusion and exclusion. Building on performances of reinforcement some visitors also engaged in acts of justification, recognition and misrecognition. In illustrating and mapping out the range of banal and complex ways these museums were used by visitors, the paper argues that museums may be more usefully understood as arenas of justification rather than resources for public education.

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“…This may in fact compete with more forward-looking and inclusive notions so that the term community can mean different things to different people at the same heritage site. Laurajane Smith s crossnational empirical work in heritage studies confirms this (Smith 2017;Smith 2019). Her visitors to various labour history sites and museums in the US, Australia and the UK all took community as a positive term yet meant quite different things by it, largely based on their preexisting values and politics.…”

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“…Misrecognition was often framed as a cultural and institutional process of disrespect, stigmatisation, and denigration that devalued some people compared to others (the dominant ethnic and/or socioeconomic groups within a society) [197][198][199][200]. In the context of Indigenous communities, misrecognition included the general disrespect for Indigenous groups' cultural identities, values and knowledge systems (#3, #9, #18, #22, #26, #33), as well as Indigenous ways of living more broadly [85,191,192].…”

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“…They found that white middle/elite classes' cultural symbols spoke for national heritage experience, and white middle/elite classes' history were prioritized over that of others, such as black, ethnic, and feminine, in Britain. Smith (2017) draws on Fraser's recognition principle in her study of five museums that exhibit immigrants' histories and experiences in the U.S. and Australia [29]. She found that misrecognition was being cultivated through the representations that facilitated marginalization and injustice towards the immigrants (see also [30]).…”