Museum as medicine? Healing and heritage in Indigenous fiction from North America and New Zealand
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Kent
Department Name: Sch of English
Abstract
Fiction writers from across North America and Aotearoa/New Zealand have imagined museums as tombs for 'relics' (Grace, 1975), responsible for 'mis-educat[ion]' (Taylor, 2010), 'monuments of colonial dominance' (Vizenor, 1998) and as spaces where Indigenous cultural expressions can 'laugh[...]', 'wail' and 'sing' their demand to be heard (King, 2013). However critical attention to the creative representation of museums has largely come from visual arts scholars and museum practitioners. This project aims to address the absence of critical engagement with how museum-spaces are represented in Indigenous fiction and explore how these representations connect to the desire to "heal" colonial histories through the reclamation of cultural practice(s), narrative control and the recovery of material artefacts.
Research questions
In light of this gap I propose a comparative textual analysis within a framework drawn from (post)colonial and Indigenous cultural theory in order to answer four main research questions:
In what ways are ambitions towards healing through heritage supported, complicated and expanded by the texts?
How is the metaphor of "recovery" invoked across the texts to convey both a process of community remembrance and material restitution?
How far do the texts engage with Eurowestern models of curated and conserved heritage narratives and what alternatives do they imagine for the passing on of history?
What potential is there to learn from Indigenous practices of 'knowledge-making and remembrance' (Lonetree, 2012) in order to evolve Eurocentric understandings of the museum?
Methodology
Whilst considerations of the role museums play in processes of (post)colonial cultural healing seem more suited to a museum studies method, textual analysis can uniquely imagine alternatives that I want to explore. Using a framework drawn from both (post)colonial studies and Indigenous interjections that trouble the historic assumptions of this field, I want to establish a critical method that has the potential to shape the material and epistemological project of decolonization.
Through an analysis of the ways in which texts complicate (post)colonial healing, I want to consider the potential richness of the term "medicine" in Indigenous contexts, expanding Euro-American understandings of medicine as a curative treatment for disease and instead considering the power of presence, remembrance and imagining the future. In critically examining this definition, I want to interrogate how the texts imagine heritage (in and outside of the museum) as a kind of medicine and trace to what extent these imaginings can be translated into strategies for survivance.
The strengths of comparison
In following Chadwick Allen's provocation to place Indigenous texts in conversation with one another in order to trace distinct and divergent patterns of self-representation (Allen, 2012), I hope to gain a layered understanding of the complexity of contemporary Indigenous fiction across different spheres and contexts. This approach also builds on Daniel Heath Justice's recent survey of Indigenous writings from across what is currently known as North America (Justice, 2018). Justice's comparison of multiple traditions is a call to what Allen refers to elsewhere as a method of 'active' comparative reading that I will endeavour to follow in my approach (Allen, 2014). Ultimately, in placing culturally divergent texts in dialogue, I aim to map the diversity of Indigenous writers' articulations and imaginings of the museum-space and trace both common ground and culturally specific strategies for imagining (post)colonial heritage.
Research questions
In light of this gap I propose a comparative textual analysis within a framework drawn from (post)colonial and Indigenous cultural theory in order to answer four main research questions:
In what ways are ambitions towards healing through heritage supported, complicated and expanded by the texts?
How is the metaphor of "recovery" invoked across the texts to convey both a process of community remembrance and material restitution?
How far do the texts engage with Eurowestern models of curated and conserved heritage narratives and what alternatives do they imagine for the passing on of history?
What potential is there to learn from Indigenous practices of 'knowledge-making and remembrance' (Lonetree, 2012) in order to evolve Eurocentric understandings of the museum?
Methodology
Whilst considerations of the role museums play in processes of (post)colonial cultural healing seem more suited to a museum studies method, textual analysis can uniquely imagine alternatives that I want to explore. Using a framework drawn from both (post)colonial studies and Indigenous interjections that trouble the historic assumptions of this field, I want to establish a critical method that has the potential to shape the material and epistemological project of decolonization.
Through an analysis of the ways in which texts complicate (post)colonial healing, I want to consider the potential richness of the term "medicine" in Indigenous contexts, expanding Euro-American understandings of medicine as a curative treatment for disease and instead considering the power of presence, remembrance and imagining the future. In critically examining this definition, I want to interrogate how the texts imagine heritage (in and outside of the museum) as a kind of medicine and trace to what extent these imaginings can be translated into strategies for survivance.
The strengths of comparison
In following Chadwick Allen's provocation to place Indigenous texts in conversation with one another in order to trace distinct and divergent patterns of self-representation (Allen, 2012), I hope to gain a layered understanding of the complexity of contemporary Indigenous fiction across different spheres and contexts. This approach also builds on Daniel Heath Justice's recent survey of Indigenous writings from across what is currently known as North America (Justice, 2018). Justice's comparison of multiple traditions is a call to what Allen refers to elsewhere as a method of 'active' comparative reading that I will endeavour to follow in my approach (Allen, 2014). Ultimately, in placing culturally divergent texts in dialogue, I aim to map the diversity of Indigenous writers' articulations and imaginings of the museum-space and trace both common ground and culturally specific strategies for imagining (post)colonial heritage.
