[Hac-announce] The "Identity Museum", an interesting take.

[Thomas Platt]

See http://tinyurl.com/3xsppeg - Tom Platt

December 28, 2010, NY Times
To Each His Own Museum, as Identity Goes on Display, by EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Me! Me! Me! That is the cry, now often heard, as history is retold.  
Tell my story, in my way! Give me the attention I deserve! Haven’t  
you neglected me, blinded by your own perspectives? Now let history  
be told not by the victors but by people over whom it has trampled.

And why, after all, should it be any different? Isn’t that the cry  
made by most of us? We want to be acknowledged, given credit for our  
unique experiences. We want to tell our stories. We want to convert  
you from your own narrow views to our more capacious perspective.

I am exaggerating slightly — but only slightly. In recent years, I  
have been chronicling the evolution of the “identity museum” or  
“identity exhibition,” designed to affirm a particular group’s  
claims, outline its accomplishments, boost its pride and proclaim,  
“We must tell our own story!”

These cries have been made with varying degrees of urgency and  
justice. But in the last few weeks, with the opening of a highly  
tendentious exhibition about Muslim science at the New York Hall of  
Science in Queens and the unveiling of a highly ineffectual mishmash  
at the President’s House in Philadelphia, the identity exhibition has  
reached new lows.

In both cases, there is an accusation of injustice and an attempt to  
revise history. In the science show, the charge is muted and  
persistent, but the case is made only by distorting history and  
facts. At the Philadelphia site, many of the claims are fierce — and  
some just — but they too end up distorting history by demanding the  
sacrifice of other perspectives.

Of course, every recounting of past events has exaggerations and  
limitations. Even the great imperial museums of Vienna, London and  
Paris make an argument: they are meant to reflect the power and  
grandeur of their creators. Such museums are monuments, temples  
mythically recounting an empire’s origins, displaying its  
accomplishments, affirming its power and its encyclopedic grasp.

The placement of totem poles in classic museums of natural history,  
for example, is a consequence of 19th-century convictions, also  
imperial, that they were created by peoples who were closer to the  
natural world — part of natural history rather than the history of  
civilization.

To a certain extent, the identity museum is a polemical response to  
such museums. And revenge can be extreme. The National Museum of the  
American Indian in Washington — a pioneering example of the genre —  
jettisons Western scholarship and tells its own story, leading one  
tribe to solemnly describe its earliest historical milestone: “Birds  
teach people to call for rain.”

Through a gauze of romance, that museum portrays an impossibly peace- 
loving, harmonious, homogeneous, pastoral world that preceded the  
invasion of white people — a vision with far less detail and insight  
than the old natural history museums once provided.

Sometimes, though, the identity impulse is illuminating, as in the  
Nordic Heritage Museumin Seattle, which gives a Scandinavian angle to  
the settling of the Pacific Northwest. Sometimes it involves an  
unusual twist: the new National Museum of American Jewish History in  
Philadelphia shapes an identity that emphasizes not its distinctions  
from the American mainstream, but its connections to it: identity is  
characterized as assimilative.

Then there are the two most recent examples. The President’s House  
site is where the nation’s executive mansion stood from 1790 to 1800.  
And a display there could have provided some unusual insight into the  
American past, because not only did George Washington, as he shaped  
the institution of the presidency, sleep there, so did nine of his  
slaves. On Independence Mall in Philadelphia, which is devoted to  
ideas of American liberty, it would have made sense for this site to  
explore the conjunction of these two incompatible ideas — slavery and  
liberty — particularly as both were knit into the nation’s founding.

Instead, during eight years of controversy, protests and  
confrontations, the project (costing nearly $12 million) was turned  
into something else. Black advocacy groups pressed the National Park  
Service and the city to create an exhibition that focused on  
enslavement. Rosalyn McPherson, the site’s project manager,  
emphasized in an interview that the goal was to give voice to the  
enslaved. Community meetings stressed that slaves had to be portrayed  
as having “agency” and “dignity.” A memorial to all slaves was  
erected, inscribed with a roster of African tribes from which they  
were taken — a list that has no clear connection to either the site  
or the city.

The result is more than a little strange. One black advocacy group’s  
leader, Michael Coard, who was placed on the site’s oversight  
committee, wrote an angry, influential essay on the Web site of his  
organization, Avenging the Ancestors Coalition, that was just in its  
analysis of historical neglect, but distorting in its all-consuming  
strategy. It would allow no differentiation and qualification,  
treating the site almost as if it were the Slave Market of Charleston.

Even in the context of 18th-century slavery, though, this house (long  
demolished) must have been unusual: its internal structure may have  
teetered with the nation’s own paradoxes, resisting easy  
characterization. There is no conclusive evidence, for example, that  
it held “slave quarters.” In a city with more free blacks than  
slaves, the house sheltered more indentured and paid servants than  
slaves; accounts suggest that sleeping quarters may have mixed both  
race and status. John Adams, who also lived in this mansion, didn’t  
even own slaves.

Moreover, the scanty historical background presented in the  
exhibition’s annotated illustrations is almost mischievously  
diminishing. During the 10 years in which Philadelphia was the  
national capital and Washington and Adams were shaping the new  
country there, what we see of the “upstairs” world is this: unrest  
(riots opposing Adams’s policy regarding France), protest (against  
the Jay Treaty), fear (a yellow-fever epidemic) and hypocrisy  
(Washington is shown with a disdainful look as he awards a medal to a  
proud Seneca Indian leader). And the architecture of the site makes  
it seem as though we are standing in an open-air ruin.

The result: an important desire to reveal what was once hidden ends  
up pulling down nearly everything else, leaving a landscape as  
starkly unreal as the one in which Washington could never tell a lie.  
It is not really a reinterpretation of history; it overturns the idea  
of history, making it subservient to the claims of contemporary  
identity politics.

This approach is even more sweeping in the exhibition about Muslim  
science, “1001 Inventions,” at the Hall of Science. It claims to show  
how a millennium-long Golden Age of Islamic science lasting into the  
17th century anticipated the great inventions and discoveries of the  
Western world.

And indeed, before the 13th century, there was an extraordinary  
confluence of genius and innovation, particularly around Baghdad. But  
almost everything here is exaggerated. The actual period of invention  
is less than half of that suggested. Many achievements, said to match  
or anticipate ones that followed in the West, are best seen as  
important predecessors. Some assertions, based on slim evidence, are  
almost literally imaginary. And accusations and implications of  
neglect of Muslim enterprise ignore extensive citations in  
Renaissance manuscripts and later Western histories.

The exhibition also pays minimal attention to the very element that  
made Baghdad so important before its destruction in 1258: the  
cosmopolitan impact of interacting cultures. Influences are casually  
mentioned when they should be sharing center stage. Persian pre- 
Islamic breakthroughs, the confluence of innovations from China and  
India, the heritage of Christian scholarship from Syria, the  
importance of Byzantine Christianity with its links to ancient Rome,  
and the scholarly preoccupations of the region’s Jewish communities —  
these are scarcely noticed, minimized or ignored. The main point made  
about one of the few non-Muslim figures mentioned — Musa ibn Maymun  
(better known as the 12th-century Jewish physician and philosopher  
Maimonides) — is that his work demonstrated the influence of “Muslim  
colleagues” and drew on “Muslim philosophy.”

The show’s mission, we are explicitly told, is to “promote” Muslim  
heritage internationally and to strengthen Muslim identity and pride.  
Nearly a million people are said to have seen it in London and  
Istanbul and in smaller touring shows. The avidity of the acclaim is  
embarrassing: a version was shown at the United Nations and in the  
British Parliament. Classrooms in Britain have embraced its  
curriculum materials. Yet much of it is politically motivated  
exaggeration.

So both these identity exhibitions sacrifice the complications of  
history for the sake of identity. But consider: both of these  
presentations also end up neglecting the very forces that ultimately  
shaped revolutions in thought and practice.

In the upstairs world of Washington and Adams, so blatantly ignored  
in the Philadelphia site, was the beginning of a national experiment:  
the faltering and difficult task of shaping a new society in which  
equality and liberty would indeed become governing principles,  
ultimately weakening the institution of slavery.

And in the Golden Age of Islam, however we define it, the culture of  
learning was controlled by the mosques. As the fascinating book “The  
Rise of Early Modern Science,” by Toby E. Huff, suggests, this may  
have actually limited scientific research and its transmission. More  
important than Muslim control may have been the spirit of dissent  
evident in the words of some major figures, the free-thinking  
challenges that made scientific inquiry possible, the mixing of  
cultural currents that tested varying perspectives.

And those were the forces that ultimately led to the Western  
Enlightenment, with its more universalist claims and its recognition  
of slavery’s evils, and to a Golden Age that may still be going on.  
The Enlightenment had its limitations, of course. But it also shaped  
the great museums of the West. And many identity museums have yet to  
absorb that more transcendent vision.