Museums, Memory, and Violence: From Colonial Turkestan to Soviet Estonia and Post-Socialist Poland

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Through examining three distinct spaces and times - 19th-century colonial Turkestan, 20th-century Soviet Estonia, and 21st-century post-Socialist Poland - our panel interrogates the relationship between memorialization and violence in the space of the museum. How are violence and violent events - be they recent revolutions, historic colonial conquests, the looting and traffic of cultural and religious objects, pogroms or deportations - enshrined in museum space? Put another way, how does the violence of the past bear upon the display cases of the present? In discussing, or skirting around, the question of violence, how do museums, be they in 19th-century empires or modern-day nation states, create openings for visitors to come to alternate understandings of the past that may be at odds with the curators’ or exhibition designers' intentions? In what ways might exhibitions discussing violence or depicting it visually, via models of ruined cities or photographs of burned houses, serve as repositories of various temporalities, emotions, and narratives? We are interested in both the silences and conversations that violence enables in museums, as well as visitors’ mediation of these questions in museums’ exhibitions. By pursuing similar themes as we examine disparate spaces and times, we aim to create a better understanding of how museums function in a wide variety of contexts and how these institutions and technologies of power and rule are implicated in questions of both present-day and historic violence.

Sub Unit

• History: Since 1990

Chair

• Natasha Klimenko, Freie U Berlin (Germany)

Papers

• A Museum Moment Comes to Colonial Tashkent: Displaying the 1898 Andijan Rebellion and the Rise of the Muslim Visitor, 1898-1904 - Albert Charles Cavallaro, U of Michigan

• Soviet Colonial Amnesia and Its Legacies in Eastern European Exceptionalism: Soviet and Post-Soviet Representations of Russian Imperial Expansion in Estonian Museums - Linda Kaljundi, Tallinn U (Estonia)

• Jewish Absence Through Post-Socialist Eyes: Photography and the Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish Triangle - Oskar Czendze, U of Toronto (Canada)

Discussant

• Valentyna Kharkhun, Mykola Hohol State U of Nizhyn (Ukraine) / American U