Abstract
Museums have been described as sites of knowledge construction and consumption. Representing the past in different ways they serve as a vehicle of meaning. Being socially and historically located they utter a discourse which generates knowledge. Drawing on Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism according to which discourse is fundamentally dialogic and historically contingent, this study identifies and juxtaposes official and vernacular narratives embedded in museum exhibitions of the Greek American experience. By bringing these narratives in dialogic contact the presentation offers a discussion of their relationship and how it contributes to the making of Greek American public history and memory. This is a broader question that lies at the center of current scholarship in Cultural and Literary Studies, namely how official and vernacular, collective and individual, academic and popular narratives interface in public discourse and what meaning does this interface convey to the public. By doing so the research questions an assumption made behind many of the discussions around how representational systems work, especially with regard to the relationship between dominant discourses and power; discourse in the Foucauldian sense governs the way that a topic can be talked about, but also, it restricts other ways of talking or conducting ourselves in relation to a topic. This paper explains, instead, that museum narratives do not exclude but rather intersect with each other in different ways, arguing that the production of public history and memory in Greek American museums is not hegemonic and monophonic but polyphonic, allowing for dynamic renegotiations of ethnic identity.
Presenters
Angeliki TsiotinouPhD Candidate/Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thrssaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
Details
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KEYWORDS
Dialogism, Museum Narrative, Immigration, Memory, Identity, Greek America
Digital Media
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