Abstract
Since the 1960s the western world has experienced fundamental changes at the economic and social levels which have weakened the links between personal lives and the nation. This ‘postmodern condition’ has urged social institutions such as museums to emphasize the experiences of social groups which were formerly underrepresented in public culture. Museums have, therefore, turned into sites which engage memory and history, the personal and the collective, the local and the national, the marginalized and the norm in tense points of contact. Greek American museums are an interesting case study to explore this phenomenon. The Hellenic Cultural Museum in Salt Lake City, Utah is one example among the many. The museum is run by Greek American individuals, members of one of the local Greek Orthodox parishes, who have little access to state and federal funds or the US ‘power elites’. Local in scope as it is, the museum produces knowledge about the past in ‘spontaneous’ settings by exhibiting cultural objects associated with the experiences of the community’s forebears, the ‘early immigrant pioneers’. The question, however, becomes: What interests does such a cultural production serve? How does it engage local and national, personal and collective agendas? And what underlying attitudes towards the past does it entail? Through an analysis of the permanent exhibition of the museum, this paper explores the constructions of Greek American public memory in a local, community museum to question why nationally dominant representations may be invoked or challenged by a collectivity in contemporary US public culture.
Presenters
Angeliki TsiotinouPhD Candidate/Graduate Teaching Assistant, Department of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thrssaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Community Museums, Uses of the Past, Public Memory, Identity Politics
