"United in Our Diversity": The Public Production of a Nation

• In Event: 46.023 - Becoming Public: A Symposium on Research on Public Pedagogy, Representation, and the Public Sphere

Abstract

Public pedagogy is wrought with contradiction surrounding the nation. In addition to the obvious nationalist purpose formal schooling serves the public, the process of creating any nation relies on governmental and non-government institutions to formalize and impart a shared national identity. Museums have many meanings; each of us encounters this institution with different images and conceptions. The meaning of ‘museum’ is contained by history but finding liberation in new approaches to curation and pedagogy. In the case of South Africa, the decision by the government to invest in museums is an interesting one. The nation is struggling to identify itself against a past of colonization, violence, and racial oppression. One challenge is how to remember and account for a traumatic past while employing a hopeful narrative in the present and future. The government employs language of difference, unity, democracy, and heritage as core ideologies associated with the new nation. To be adopted into the national imagination, these ideas must become more than words. They must be built into the symbols, landscape, and experiences of South Africa(ns).
This paper looks critically at the implementation of the Department of Arts and Culture's mission to create a nation ‘united in our diversity.’ Success is intimately affected by South Africa's deconstruction of the discourse surrounding and experiences with the ideas of nation, race, and museum, concepts used interdependently to enforce apartheid society and structures. I explore the apartheid and post-apartheid discourse surrounding these ideas to contextualize the inquiry. I then assess the location, curriculum, and pedagogy of the existing and newly constructed museums in serving their mission as nation-building, deracializing institutions in contemporary South Africa. I consider the theoretical framing from decolonizing practices used to analyze how national museums in South Africa respond to critiques about the use of the nation and the intentions of a new nation to consider how race is address (or not) as an element influencing our collective national identity. By utilizing a decolonizing theoretical framework (Schmidt 2010; Subreenduth 2006; Wa Thiong'o 1986) that confronts and unpacks both intellectually and politically the worldviews that privilege Western ways of knowing the world. By examining the South African experience, can we, then, reimagine race to redress what role race had (and continues to have) in the formation of the U.S. and its positionality of race in museums?
The significance this research holds to public pedagogy is its examination of how the political context in South Africa changed to develop, uphold, and spread a government narrative of democracy, unity, human rights, and civic participation. What tenuous history do the public museums in the U.S. hold as tools of exclusion that displays dehumanizing narratives of past indiscretions? What can curriculum workers learn from the South African example to work in public pedagogy that eschews the historical emphasis on the human elements? This research has the possibility of locating those opportunities and sites of educational awareness that open up possibilities for critical learning and the potential impact they have on creating a united public ready for democratic participation and transformation.

Author

• Sandra Schmidt, Teachers College, Columbia University