Focused Discussion (Asynchronous Session)
African Being, Museology, and Questions of Representation: An Analysis of the Living Museum of the Ju/'Hoansi-San
Focused Discussion Claudia Naa Densua Ankrah
Public history modalities, especially museums, are undergoing an international and intellectual reckoning in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter and George Floyd uprisings that began in 2020. The uprisings have challenged the long-established colonial, anti-Black and anti-Indigenous histories that have been normalized to the public through the different modalities of public history. This paper continues the critical analysis that began with the intellectual interventions of that crucial moment in 2020. The Living Museum of the Ju/'Hoansi-San in Namibia presents an interesting intersection of power in museological spaces, the importance of representation, and the need to meaningfully contend with colonial legacies and histories. By historicizing the lives and experiences of the San of what is now Namibia, the questions of power, coloniality, and meaningful historical representation can be discussed in the contemporary renderings created and endorsed by the Ju/'Hoansi-San living museum. Furthermore, a deep history of the museological space itself will allow for critical engagement on how to make museums in Africa purposeful, powerful, and aligned with the deep legacies of African self-liberation and the continuous calls for decolonization.
Resistance Is Not Futile: Strategies for Shtifing to the New while the Old Is Still in Place View Digital Media
Focused Discussion Doris Ash
We are a tipping point for understanding that museums must do things differently for future generations. Structural tensions of the past, present, and future concerning money, demographics, narrative, objects, learning and teaching have more fully revealed themselves as conflicts such COVID, Black Lives Matter, and Immigration among many others, exacerbate 'business as usual’ making conflict concerning the dialectic between structure and individual and collective agency more apparent. Personal and collective resistance to structural constraints can be difficult to notice as they often quietly manifest on different levels. Here we focus on transformative agency (Sannino, 2020), suggesting that collective resistance is key to countering modern instantiations of neoliberal forces, such as toxic individualism. In this discussion we consider the core structures of resistance in a museum setting, examining the reciprocal and the interlaced structural constraint and affordances that make up the whole. We look into what might constitute transformative agency in these circumstances. We rely on cultural historical activity theory, the structure agency dialectic and anti-neoliberalism.
