Museum Anthropology最新文献

This article examines the Stone House Museum in Livingstonia, Malawi. The Museum is in a historic Stone House National Monument, a former residence of Reverend Robert Laws, one of the pioneer missionaries of the Livingstonia Mission. The article illustrates how objects, formerly relics of missionary heroism meant to inspire sacrifice and commitment, became “leftover” objects and were later re-made into museum pieces in the 1970s. Through a haphazard process of professionalizing the Museum to attract new publics in the 1990s and early 2000s, these objects became alienating and disconnected when put behind glass. The Museum echoed the Victorian ethos of romanticizing and prioritizing missionaries' “heroic” efforts over the stories of local people and culture. The material objects of the local Malawian community in the Museum were essentially put into a timeless past, tribal representations, and merely cast as a complementary background to the missionaries' activities. This article relies on an ethnographic methodology of museum histories, analysis of exhibitions and engagements with the Museum's publics. It reveals that the collection and displays of the local community were assembled as an adjunct to missionary paraphernalia. The Museum, despite its claims to be aligned with the post-colonial, kept its publics “out of history.”

Embarking on an adventure to tour Black museums and Civil Rights sites provides one of the best opportunities to understand history and culture. It is accomplished via an expert tour guide, site visits, as well as through documentaries, and video footage. Imagine learning from such footage about the youngest child, a 4-year-old and hearing him questioning about his participation in a Civil Rights protest; he proudly responds “for Teedom” [Freedom] that is bound to stick with you. It stuck with me so much that it became a term used in my art for brave youth involved in social justice. These acts of “Teedom” were evident throughout the Civil Rights Tour, one of the best adventures of my life.

This article explores the concept of fugitive histories through narrative multimodal anthropology in Black memory spaces. The aim of this research was to understand how multimodal anthropology and fugitive histories can be used to preserve and re-imagine narratives that counteract erasure. This article presents a narrative multimodal podcast I produced exploring my personal connection to racial violence, in conversation with a visit to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Legacy Museum to consider the ways in which narrative multimodal production and curation may benefit the health and well-being of Black communities, with a focus on Black fugitivity refusal, and reclamation as a strategic application of the Black Radical Tradition.

In 2024, the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture in Charlotte, North Carolina, celebrates its 50th anniversary. Founded as the as the Afro-American Cultural and Service Center in 1974 by Mary Harper and Bertha Maxwell-Roddey at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, this case study reflects on the Gantt Center's evolution from a community-based cultural space to a full-fledged arts and cultural institution in uptown Charlotte. It focuses on the opportunities and challenges this Black-centered and Black-led institution has faced over the past half century as it has evolved from a grassroots cultural organization to a hybrid fine arts, education, and cultural institution, negotiating the needs of a growing array of funders, leadership, artists, culture keepers, and audiences. Integrating historical material, interviews with past and current Gantt Center staff, and ethnographic observation, this case study describes how this historic institution honors its deep roots as an organization serving to Charlotte's Black community as it grows into a national and international center of Black arts.

This article presents artist activist Virginia Jackson Kiah as a key figure in the phenomenon of the African American house museum. Readers will benefit from this layer of Kiah scholarship and its contributions to the field of anthropology by looking at a talented artist fueled by her status as a Black woman denied civil, civic, and human rights. Therefore, Virginia Jackson Kiah recreated herself as an artist activist who led a cultural resistance to racism in the arts prior to desegregation and the civil rights movement. As a scholar outside the realm of anthropology, art criticism, and analysis, I approach this project from the stance of a storyteller applying cultural studies methodology and content analysis. I posit that more attention should be given to the total artist—not just the person that had a grasp of brush, paint, pencil, and canvas. Besides her gifts as a painter, little has been written about Virginia Jackson Kiah, the interdisciplinary artist activist who examined culture and history as a musician, composer, singer, pianist, and arts educator. This recovery project fills several voids using archived materials and interviews which recast a total picture of Virginia Jackson Kiah as an artist and activist.

Traditional Museums have dominated the American landscape, but there exist hundreds of “Black Grassroots Museum” that are preserved by what African Diaspora museum specialist, Deborah Johnson-Simon, calls “kulture keepers;” these are everyday folk who dedicate themselves to protect and preserve the artifacts and stories of Black survival, ingenuity, resistance, and resiliency inside their homes, churches, or in community spaces, lest we forget.