Desegregating the Past: The Public Life of Memory in the United States and South Africa

By Robin Autry

At the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, visitors confront the past upon arrival. They must decide whether to enter the museum through a door marked whites” or another marked non-whites.” Inside, along with text, they encounter hanging nooses and other reminders of apartheid-era atrocities. In the United States, museum exhibitions about racial violence and segregation are mostly confined to black history museums, with national history museums sidelining such difficult material. Even the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture is dedicated not to violent histories of racial domination but to a more generalized narrative about black identity and culture. The scale at which violent racial pasts have been incorporated into South African national historical narratives is lacking in the U.S. Desegregating the Past considers why this is the case, tracking the production and display of historical representations of racial pasts at museums in both countries and what it reveals about underlying social anxieties, unsettled emotions, and aspirations surrounding contemporary social fault lines around race.

Robyn Autry consults museum archives, conducts interviews with staff, and recounts the public and private battles fought over the creation and content of history museums. Despite vast differences in the development of South African and U.S. society, Autry finds a common set of ideological, political, economic, and institutional dilemmas arising out of the selective reconstruction of the past. Museums have played a major role in shaping public memory, at times recognizing and at other times blurring the ongoing influence of historical crimes. The narratives museums produce to engage with difficult, violent histories expose present anxieties concerning identity, (mis)recognition, and ongoing conflict.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jan 31, 2017
• ISBN: 9780231542517

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DESEGREGATING THE PAST

ROBYN AUTRY

DESEGREGATING THE PAST

The Public Life of Memory in the United States and South Africa

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

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Copyright © 2017 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54251-7

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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ISBN 978-0-231-17758-0 (cloth : alk. paper)

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Cover design: Mary Ann Smith

Cover image: ©Shutterstock

For Kevin, because I remember

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Museums Visited

List of Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION: DESEGREGATING THE PAST

From Selma to Soweto (and Beyond)

Identifying with the Past

Consensus-Driven Memory

Museums: Between History and Memory

Desegregating the Past

Note on Terminology

1. MEMORY ENTREPRENEURS: HISTORY IN THE MAKING

Historical Capital

Making History Social

Making History Black

2. THE CURATED PAST: REMEMBERING THE COLLECTIVE

South Africa: Showing Citizenship

United States: Recasting Blackness

3. MANAGING COLLECTIVE REPRESENTATIONS

Transforming Older Museums

Developing New Museums

4. MEMORY DEVIANTS: BREAKING THE COLLECTIVE

Whose Simulated Past?

History as Avant-Garde?

CONCLUSION: MUSEUMIFICATION OF MEMORY

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As someone who studies the stories we tell about ourselves, I hesitate to do so in writing, so I’ll keep mine brief. While the titles and roles of the people I’d like to thank—graduate school advisors, friends, colleagues, students, family—may be familiar, the actual people are extraordinary. I often felt misplaced in the sociology program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Luckily, I made a couple of wonderful friends, including Gay Seidman, who served as my advisor. Her humor, intellect, and generosity were without bound. I was also fortunate to cross paths with Mara Loveman, whose approach to the study of race, willingness to work closely with me, and eventual friendship were transformative. I also gained from the encouragement of Tara Becker, Erik Wright, especially at a time of crisis, Heinz Klug, Jim Sweet, and Tom Spear.

I am indebted to the curators, museum directors, researchers, and tour guides who talked openly with me about their work—what they hoped to achieve, where they feared they’d come up short. While I question the broad politics of what they do, there is not one individual whose insight and dedication failed to impress. The highlight of this fieldwork, other than visiting South Africa for the first time, was touring black history museums with my sister Angela, who waited as I traveled at a snail’s pace taking photographs and notes. While I did not snag the national grants and fellowships that turn heads, this research was financially supported by a number of sources. I received several grants from the University of Wisconsin, including the Advanced Opportunity Fellowship and multiple Foreign Language and Area Studies fellowships to try to learn Zulu and Xhosa. I was especially honored to receive two memorial awards: the Stanley J. Tarver Memorial Award and the Scott Kloeck-Jenson International Travel Award. I also benefitted from a postdoctoral fellowship in the sociology and history departments at the University of Minnesota, where I was welcomed enthusiastically by Ron Aminzade, Mary Jo Maynes, Teresa Gowan, Kevin Murphy, Cawo Abdi, Michael Goldman, Rachel Schurman, Josh Page, David Pellow, and Joachim Savelsberg. I am also thankful for the time I spent as a fellow at Wesleyan University’s Center for the Humanities and at Yale University’s Center for Comparative Research.

Thanks to John Levi Martin, who I doubt even remembers me, for nudging me toward book editors at a conference, and walking me over to meet Eric Schwartz, who I would later work with at Columbia University Press. I’m thankful to Eric and to Lowell Frye, along with everyone else at CUP, including the anonymous reviewers for their time and interest. I am also indebted to the eagle eye of my sister Angela Autry Gorden and Catherine Capellaro for copyediting earlier drafts. Jennifer Autry, my wonderfully creative mother, helped with the digital images.

For many of the same reasons as in graduate school, I often feel misplaced at Wesleyan. Luckily, I have badass students who are sharp, funny, and refreshingly offbeat. Thanks especially to my research assistants Lina Breslav, Dorothy Ajayi, and Grace Carroll. I also have a few badass colleagues turned amazing friends, namely Jonathan Cutler and Greg Goldberg, who make me laugh endlessly and push me to think and rethink what I thought I already knew. This book is far better for their input.

This trip down memory lane concludes, per usual, with my family, both chosen and given. You know who you are, and you know what you mean to me. Everything.

LIST OF MUSEUMS VISITED

SOUTH AFRICA

Apartheid Museum, Johannesburg, opened in 2001, Member of International Coalition for Sites of Conscience

Constitution Hill Number Four Prison Museum, Johannesburg, opened in 1964, Member of International Coalition for Sites of Conscience

Cradle of Humankind, Gauteng Province, opened in 2005

District Six Museum, Cape Town, opened in 1994, Member of International Coalition for Sites of Conscience

Freedom Park, Pretoria, opened in 2004

Hector Pieterson Memorial Museum, Soweto, opened in 2002

KwaMuhle Museum, Durban, opened in 1928

Mayibuye Center, Cape Town, opened in 2001

MuseumAfrica, Johannesburg, opened in 1933

Nelson and Winnie Mandela Home, Soweto, opened in 1997

Origins Centre, Johannesburg, opened in 2006

Robben Island Museum, Cape Town, opened in 1997

Slave Lodge, Cape Town, opened in 1998

South African Jewish Museum, Cape Town, opened in 2002

South African Museum, Cape Town, opened in 1825

Voortrekker Monument, Pretoria, opened in 1940

Workers’ Museum, Johannesburg, opened in 2010, Member of International Coalition for Sites of Conscience

UNITED STATES

African American Civil War Museum, Washington, D.C., opened in 1992

African American Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, opened in 1976

African American Museum and Library at Oakland, Oakland, California, opened in 1994

African American Museum of Iowa, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, opened in 1994

African American Panoramic Experience Museum, Atlanta, Georgia, opened in 1978

American History Museum, Washington, D.C., opened in 1964

Anacostia Community Museum, Washington, D.C., opened in 1967

Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, Birmingham, Alabama, opened in 1992, Member of International Coalition for Sites of Conscience

Black American West Museum, Denver, Colorado, opened in 1971

Black Holocaust Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, opened in 1988 (Closed 2008)

California African American Museum, Los Angeles, California, opened in 1981

Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, Detroit, Michigan, opened in 1965

DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago, Illinois, opened in 1961

Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, Big Rapids, Michigan, opened in 1996

King Center, Atlanta, Georgia, opened in 1968

Museum of African American History, Boston, Massachusetts, opened in 1972

Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, California, opened in 2005

Museum of Tolerance, Los Angeles, California, opened in 1993

National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, Tennessee, opened in 1991, Member of International Coalition for Sites of Conscience

National Museum of American Indian, Washington, D.C., opened in 2004

National Park Service Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, Atlanta, Georgia, opened in 1980

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., opened in 1993

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

Desegregating the Past

It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.

—Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

At the entrance of the Apartheid Museum located just outside of Johannesburg, South Africa, visitors face a dilemma: they must choose between two passageways marked in Afrikaans and English as Blankes/Whites Only or Nie-Blankes/Non-Whites. Generally, this causes a commotion, especially on days when large groups of schoolchildren and tourists descend, as visitors uncomfortably consider their options. On many occasions, people sort themselves and file into the separate entrances even if it means splintering groups that arrived together. This powerful moment speaks to the complacency still ingrained in us when it comes to the use of racial classification as a sorting mechanism as much as it does to our willingness to obey rules, whether those of the museum or society at large. Visitors are quickly reunited as the passageways join, but the initial entrance is unsettling and immediately places the visitor in a simulated space that feels more real and personal than most museum experiences.

Filled with visual, textual, and audio material that depicts the settlement of Johannesburg after the discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand and the racial nightmare that had just begun, in this somber memory space visitors confront the brutal history of colonialism and apartheid. Confined within the dimly lit mazelike museum—around each corner a new set of images, text, objects, and sounds—guests are effectively submerged. This total sensory experience is an emotional appeal for personal alignment that is inescapable as they pass a series of oversized mirrors placed midway through the tour.

FIGURE 0.1 Entrance to the Apartheid Museum; Johannesburg

There is little relief as visitors exit the museum. Still reeling from the onslaught of graphic images, 131 hanging nooses, and survivors’ testimony outlining the staggering violence, they must now contend with the reality of museums as part of a competitive tourist industry. The roller coaster, the casino, and busloads of tourists all seem out of place. As one stands in the sprawling parking lot echoing with excited shrills of delight and terror emanating from the nearby theme park, the line between history and entertainment is anything but clear. How did the country’s first museum dedicated to telling the history of apartheid end up as part of the Gold Reef City recreational complex? As an offshoot of the casino, the museum was built to comply with national casino licensing regulations that mandated investment in a public project. Represented by Abe and Solly Krok—twin brothers who amassed their family fortune by selling skin-lightening creams at the height of apartheid—the casino developers pitched the idea of building a museum.¹ With this peculiar trajectory, the Apartheid Museum illustrates that beneath the surface of sacred sites of memory lurks the profane.

Indeed, revisiting the past is a lot more involved than meets the eye. Why revisit it at all? What makes some versions of the past more believable than others? What does it mean to know the past in the first place? Research on what is often termed truth and reconciliation tends to focus on transitional government structures, truth and reconciliation commissions, and disputes over the redistribution of political and economic resources—raising fundamental questions about the way societies reemerge and stabilize after periods of intense internal conflict. How is collective memory reconstructed in these fragile social contexts? What role does it play in resurrecting the inclusive rhetoric of nation? In the aftermath of state violence, how is nationhood reconstructed to acknowledge painful histories, while rhetorically drawing all citizens into an imagined unified community? In the United States after the civil rights movement and in South Africa after the antiapartheid struggle, citizens and governments alike have grappled with an impossible task: the desegregation of the past.

Ostensibly, the ability to fashion a shared past hinges on people’s abilities to come to terms with periods of conflict and violence—to settle the historical record, so to speak. This does not necessarily involve the types of truth telling, confession, and witnessing that we recognize in debates about postconflict negotiations and transitional justice.² It does, however, demand constructing some form of social consensus over what happened and its placement in, or confinement to, the past. This consensus or its illusion involves fitting past events into a narrative of nation that contextualizes difficult moments as regrettable but as paving the way for the current improved, if not altogether peaceful, state of affairs. As classic studies of nations and nationalism have shown, museums and other sites that convey a shared past are essential to imagining nation and to restoring a sense of wholeness and unity to otherwise heterogeneous and even divisive societies.³

I started this project interviewing curators and museum directors about the promise of historical museums to revise, confront, reconcile, and heal. I often encountered puzzled looks and responses from staff more preoccupied with the material aspects of content development or the mundane realities of operating a museum. Considering that museums have become some of the only public spaces where periods of conflict are openly discussed, the fact that these material aspects were so crucial in how they were created and maintained raised a new set of questions about the making and unmaking of collective memory narratives. Once representations are produced, how are they maintained over time, by whom, and with what resources? Touring black history exhibitions, sometimes guided and other times self-directed, I recognized that what was on display was the familiar narrative of black identity formation that I had been consuming and encouraged to identify with as long as I could remember. While I recognized it as a collective identity narrative, it did not always resonate with my personal understanding and experience of blackness. The details of this personal accounting are less important than my awareness of a gap, an identity gap or dissonance, which led me to reconsider the practical and ideological work of museums in promoting specific orientations toward imagined pasts as markers of collective identity.

This study seeks to examine the way history museums have emerged as sites where collective representations of painful periods are displayed. In both the United States and South Africa, the exhibition of histories of racism, oppression, and intolerance should not be taken for granted. The inclusion of these events as part of the national story remains contentious and uneven within each country and across different types of museums. Throughout this book, I explore this unevenness in terms of agitation around the development of museums, as well as examining the content itself. This approach treats museums themselves as objects of analysis as much as their installations and programming, as I seek to explain why some representations of the past appear more empowering, threatening, nostalgic, or authentic, than others. I show how particular forms of racial subjectivities—or ways of making sense of the world—are elevated as inevitable, the morally righteous products of history. Through museums and a variety of other socializing agents, we learn to orient ourselves to each other and the social world at least partially through our tangled, and oftentimes ambivalent, relationships with the past.⁴ Such an interpretive treatment of museum content and practice highlights the social construction of moral worth deeply embedded in the act of representation and narrativity as attempts are made to create order by making sense of the past.

On the one hand, this comparative approach seeks to explain similarities and differences in the way history is constructed in South Africa and the United States. However, this is not a traditional comparison where patterns and mechanisms are contrasted across the two settings to test general theories about the world. Instead, in order to understand how the past is staged across the twenty-nine museums included in this study (thirteen in South Africa and sixteen in the United States) as a cultural phenomenon, I juxtapose the aesthetics and politics of representing two very different histories in two very different countries that nonetheless invoke each other. This introductory chapter begins with a discussion about logic of comparison. Next, I link debates about historical representation to deep-seated tensions between multicultural and universal strands in national culture. I consider how these deliberations about the relationship between history and national culture also inform our understandings of collective memory. Finally, I take up the question of museums as sites of memory that exist at the intersection of symbolic and material worlds.

FROM SELMA TO SOWETO (AND BEYOND)

For more than three decades, freedom struggles shook the core of U.S. and South African societies, challenging established systems of racial segregation and exclusion. While the antiapartheid struggle reached its crescendo during the 1980s, well after the height of the U.S. civil rights movement, the tactics and moral logics of resistance that challenged white racial domination are routinely compared.⁵ The demands of these democratic movements reverberated throughout both countries, triggering a collective reassessment of social norms and values, leading to the demise of outright racial rule with the passage of key civil rights legislation during the 1960s in the United States and the first democratically elected president in South Africa in 1994. Prompted by these immense upheavals, black cultural activists and their allies interrogated the restrictive social boundaries that denied them citizenship, including those that shut them out of museums and other public culture institutions claiming to represent national culture. Their agitation provoked heated debate about the participation and representation of historically marginalized communities at museums and sparked a reconceptualization of museum-society relations.

From Hollywood films to scholarly monographs, parallels in the way ideas about race and racial difference organize South African and U.S. societies have fascinated observers for decades. In particular, the 1980s marked the growth of comparative investigations into the structures and implications of racial domination in both places. This rich tradition of comparative work reflects on the peculiar, but oddly familiar, histories of race as a principle for organizing society. The centrality of black-white racial dichotomies in both countries spawned critical insights into processes of colonialism, segregation, and apartheid, and collective mobilization and resistance.⁶ At times these studies point us in different directions about the causes of de facto segregation in the United States and how it differs from South African apartheid, but there is general agreement about the centrality of racist thought in fomenting lasting social divisions. As historian Greg Cuthbertson puts it, South Africa’s racial madness finds therapy in American segregation, as both societies seek asylum in multicultural democracy.⁷

More recent work expands this comparative lens to include other cases, most notably Brazil and Israel, to further explore how racial difference became an organizing principle across societies with very different histories.⁸ Other studies draw attention to lesser known aspects of the central themes—slavery, colonialism and conquest, racialized capitalism, segregation and apartheid, and black politics—in the comparative literature, such as Ivan Evans’s innovative study linking forms of social control and segregation to differences in U.S. and South African cultures of unofficial or extralegal forms of racial violence and terror.⁹ Granted, racial and ethnic categorization are contentious everywhere, but there are few places where the idea of race has been mapped along a rigid white-black dichotomy that so deeply structured social relations. In fact, South African and U.S. history are typically invoked whenever racial formation, classification, and resistance are discussed in comparative perspective. Indeed, U.S. and South African societies figure as centrally in comparative studies as they do in our popular racial imaginations.

The United States-South Africa comparison promises to shed light on the deep tension between imagined truths and reconciliations after social ruptures caused by the freedom struggles. In South Africa, a negotiated revolution ushered in a new democratic order charged with the monumental task of uniting a deeply fractured society to halt civil unrest, rampant distrust, and economic collapse during the 1990s. A postapartheid national mythos was inscribed into a new set of institutional arrangements, from the newly established Constitutional Court to the redrawing of provincial and municipal boundaries.¹⁰ Radical changes in the political and economic sphere were accompanied by efforts to confront the brutality and trauma of the colonial and apartheid regimes on a national level. Of course, museum development has not been the only cultural platform for such engagements. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was the first and most visible and comprehensive effort to come to terms with a traumatic past through publicized confessions, interrogations, and survivor accounts. Despite its limitations,¹¹ the TRC delivered the rhetorical power of reconciliation as a transformative force, one that could harness a collective memory of violence for the foundation of a new national identity.¹²

In contrast to the dramatic restructuring of South African society, the U.S. civil rights movement yielded less radical reforms in a very different sociopolitical setting. On the one hand, it prompted the passage of key legislation that desegregated public spaces and institutions, opening the space for the growth of a black middle class and increased political representation. Yet the United States did not pursue any national-level dialogue or convene truth commissions to confront that nation’s history of slavery, racial violence, and segregation.¹³ More than any other platform, commemorations—from naming streets and schools to debates about reparations—have sustained public conversations about legacies of racial segregation and America’s slave past.¹⁴ Lacking nationally structured channels for these confrontations with the past—and in the absence of more radical restructuring of society—the memorial landscape of the United States has been somewhat bifurcated along racial lines, especially since the growth of the black history movement.

In the post-civil rights and postapartheid eras, race and racism remain key areas for comparative research because both societies still display festering racial divisions and inequalities despite new political dispensations, socioeconomic gains, and rhetoric of inclusion. Indeed, the idea of race and racial difference is implicitly and explicitly woven into policy solutions for these dilemmas, marking the need for continued comparative research. However, this is not a comparative study of racialization or racial logics in contemporary U.S. and South African society, nor is it a comparison of their histories. Rather, I draw on these cases to better understand the representational project attempted in many societies that have undergone mass atrocities: the construction of collective memories that correspond to specific notions of collective identity that minimize unrest. In both settings, the struggle to achieve an inclusive society has involved revisiting and restoring key moments from the national past that inform present-day social life as part of understanding the dynamics of contemporary political debates in the aftermath of racial conflict and challenge.

However, as sociologist Barry Schwartz cautions, it is imperative to interrogate the basis and politics of official or traditional histories.¹⁵ We must also unpack the way alternative accounts are produced. Although black history museums represent movement toward exposing the symbolic violence integral in reproducing systems of inequality, this book is neither an endorsement nor a celebration of the revisionist impulse to revisit the past. And it is not an evaluation or a critique of the historical accuracy of revised accounts.¹⁶ Rather, it is an examination of how and why history is constructed in museums—settings with an air of secular sacredness. And it looks at the ways identity narratives can mask the material or political-economic and institutional aspects of revision and museum work, irrespective of the content on display.

IDENTIFYING WITH THE PAST

What difference does the past make in our lives today? Beyond understanding how present-day social relations and institutions are shaped by historical events, we also turn to the past to help construct and assert our identities. What does it mean to be American or South African in the twentieth-first century? How does that meaning vary across racial-ethnic, gender, or religious communities? We typically conflate collective and personal identities, assuming that the latter represent idiosyncrasies or variations on the overall collective experience. To a large extent, the way we think about the past conforms to the logic of collective or public life: it is not so much that we mine the past for evidence to support contemporary understandings of society; rather, we share an impulse to use an aspirational lens to gaze at the past. Collective memories represent shared knowledge about the past that helps explain the nature of group membership and identity.¹⁷ This is the ambitious project of collective memory: to see the past through the present as a means to draw people into a collective narrative that transcends the individual.

In both the United States and South Africa this process has entailed a nervous balancing act between the imperatives of national unity and the politics of difference or diversity. South African sociologist Ran Greenstein has commented that despite similarities in the way that race and racial conflict have figured so centrally in the national histories of both countries, actual patterns of racial identity formation differ, with a more consolidated version of black identity emerging in the United States compared to South Africa.¹⁸ Greenstein is less interested in why collective identities or collectives matter to people than he is with ahistorical readings of them by academics and politicians alike. While I consider and compare how collective identity and experience is narrated in museums, I also