Branding public memory in the Walmart Museum

Abstract

Across the globe, visitors tour corporate museums. Corporate museums commemorate the history of a private company, often using standard methods of artifact curation and display. On the surface, these institutions appear like any other place of public memory. However, I argue that corporate museums pose a challenge to scholars who have conceptualized public memory as a domain of activity closely associated with the democratic ideal of the public sphere. Rather than promoting civic engagement or critical dialogue, corporate museums reduce public memory into a set of aesthetic resources that may be commodified, privatized, and thus transformed to benefit a social and economic system suffused by neoliberal capitalist values. To make this case, I perform a close reading of the Walmart Museum, showing how the institution memorializes the company’s founder as a technique for reinforcing established brand messaging and installing emergent modes of consumer citizenship under the guise of heritage tourism.