Chapter two from Dr. Golding’s book, Learning at the Museum Frontiers discusses long-term collaborative research with the Caribbean Women Writer’s Alliance (CWWA) at the frontiers of the Horniman Museum in London. They aim in cooperations with museums and the Black Body research network to ‘break the museum silence’. Deals with issues of ownership and cultural heritage. Deals with differing interpretations of African social history and with feminist-hermeneutic perspectives of literary and cultural heritage studies.
Things I most enjoyed about the article included its inspiring and cogent quotes, the blending of poetic language and traditional academic writing conventions (I was reminded that there are some truly impressive and wonderful writers in the world), the use of first-person for self-revelation, the observation of Gardner’s eight intelligences, the detailed examples of how the ‘history’ changed depending upon the docent . . . the repeated grounding of the project’s academic and social diversity into museum praxis.
Question . . . are any of us that have been raised within European educational scaffolding completely free from hierarchal and colonialist paradigms of thought and behaviour? Implicit in the article is an answer of ‘no’ to this question, with exciting opportunity and provision for change. I observe within myself and the expressions of the artists/scholars in the article that we are all in a sense at war with our own cultural identity and beliefs--or rather, what we believe to be ‘the truth’ about our own culture and identity! There is a profound internalisation of what is often termed the ‘Western’ perspective teamed with a tendency toward an exclusionary, bifurcated social mentality. Good vs. bad, right vs. wrong, true vs. false . . . there seems to be a strange and very powerful social dictum that there be ‘one’ good-right-truth, one way of being and/or perceiving . . . perhaps based in religious or competitive commercial socialisation patterns? Where is the mutual trust? Where is the mutual expression of respect?The exciting thing about this project and the article, is that this kind of cross-disciplinary discussion fosters the recognition of this deeply entrenched, inadequate interpretation and proposes avenues for how to move on from it, while supporting the use of collections in an active and participatory way. In fact, activity is the the prescribed avenue. :) Simply observing the objects isn’t necessarily transformative. This of course presents challenges for the role of curator as conservationist/guardian . . . but perhaps invites the question, what is it exactly that we are guarding these objects against and preserving them for? It would seem that in order to fully research and understand the meaning of objects we need to actively use and employ objects in creative community.
