Literatura Inglesa IV: El Giro a la Posmodernidad UNIT 1

“THE POST ALWAYS RINGS TWICE: THE POSTMODERN AND THE POSTCOLONIAL” – LINDA
HUTCHEON

Connections between knowledge and objects of knowledge are said to be objectively

Knowledge thus accrued is said to be not only culture-neutral, but value-free.

Habermas argues that the ‘project of modernity’ has not yet been completed, that its moral
imperative to free humanity from injustice and to extend equality to the oppressed through
rational communal ground of consensus has not yet been achieved.

Both museums and academy in Europe and North America could be said to work toward the
acquisition of knowledge through collection, ordering, preserving, and displaying –the ‘objects’
of human civilization in all its varieties.

It is the ‘nature of those very ‘objects’ that has initially brought the postcolonial into the
academic debates and increasingly, into the discourse of museums, especially ethnographic
ones.

Over the last few decades, museums have begun to see themselves as cultural ‘texts’ and have
become increasingly reflexive about their premises, identity, and mission.

The history of most European and North American ethnographic museum collections is one
that cannot easily be separated from the specific history of imperialism.

That connection between historical imperialism and intellectual imperialism might be

The stewardship model of the museum as the guardian of the human heritage entails going
beyond this conservation function to include a scholarly and educational mandate, both for
experts and for the general public.

What James Clifford has called a “conceptual shift, ‘tectonic’ in its implications” in ethnography
is, in fact, a response to modernity by the postmodern, with major postcolonial implications.

The universalizing urge of modernity then begins to give way to the postmodern cultural
politics of difference.

The ‘new museology’ asks what the different purpose of the museum would be if gave up its
modern claims of neutrality and objectivity, and what the role of the spectator could be in the
now acknowledged act of the interpretation of objects.

There is a talk of desire to find ways to engage with living cultures rather than only with
objects of the past, of a desire not only to inform but to provoke thought.

A museum exhibition in Toronto, Canada, entitled ‘Into the Heart of Africa’ showed a small
African collection of the Royal Ontario Museum. The intention was to offer a (postcolonial)
‘critical examination of the Canadian missionary and military experience in turn-of-century

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Africa. The mode of presentation was postmodern in its foregrounding of how objects changed
meaning over time and in different contexts.

Canadian society has changed radically since World War II. Since many of the new arrivals
came from other Common-wealth countries, there was an inevitable new awareness of both
similarity and difference in the experience of Empire. Those differences are important to ‘Into
the Heart of Africa’, differences that obviously involve the ‘unbridgeable (racial) chasm’
between white and non-white colonies, as well as the related cultural and historical chasms
between settler and subjugated colonies.

The term of ‘postcolonial’ is simply going to mean different things because the experience of
colonization has meant different things.

As a nation, Canada was represented as having an uncomfortable dual historical identity as

Irony and reflexivity have become almost hallmarks of the postmodern. A related postmodern
motif is a call to institutions to make themselves and their publics aware of the history of their
collections and of the values embodied therein.

‘Into the Heart of Africa’ certainly provoked many questions – about colonialism and the
relationship between the politics of culture and the politics of meaning and representation-
but it was reflexivity itself, like irony, that came under fire.

The confusion about the intention of the exhibition was evident within a few months of the
opening. However, prior to this occasion, the museum’s small and fragmentary collection of
375 objects from Central and West Africa had remained in its basement for almost a century. It
was not a full collection of a range of African objects; there could be little pretense that it
would represent the cultural diversity, social complexity, or artistic achievement of the
multiple peoples of Central Africa.

For this reason, the decision was made to foreground in the exhibition both the material
limitations of the collection and the history and politics of its coming into being in this one.

The ‘new museology’ emphasized the importance to the meaning and significance of objects of
the circumstances in which they appear and are understood.

But there was yet another transformation to come after the exhibition opened: from museum
specimen to political symbol.

The exhibition’s focus was never intended to be entirely on Africa itself, but on the material
manifestations of the ideology of Empire in Africa.

The first printed message at the entry to the exhibition openly stated that Canadians were to
be the focus, that their ‘experience of Africa, as seen in this exhibition, was very different from
the way Africans perceived themselves, their own cultures, and these events’.

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In the first rooms of the exhibition, there was no semiotic signal to separate the African from
the imperial, despite the later claims that the intent was to show the beauty of the African
objects as a way of refuting ‘the nineteenth century Canadian supposition of barbarism’.

The enormous, wall-sized enlargement of an image of a mounted British soldier thrusting his
sword into the breast of an African warrior had a response against the exhibition itself for
perpetuating precisely such representations.

After that section, there was a small area called ‘The Life History of Objects’. And then, another
section in a white, cross-shaped room, labeled ‘Civilization, Commerce, and Christianity’
presented the artifacts collected by missionaries.

The last and largest area of the exhibition was a reconstruction of an Ovimbundu village
compound from Angola.

The problem with calling attention to the fictional or artificial arrangement of the objects in
this particular space became evident when you considered it in the context of the rest of this
museum. Priority is usually signaled by position, and the fact that this section did come after
the one that focused on imperial acquisition.

What was most amazing was that the exhibition offended audiences from all parts of the
political spectrum.

What specifically enraged and offended people? The proliferation of quotation marks around
words like ‘Dark Continent’ and ‘primitive’ could or should be read as intended both to signal
ironic distance and also to act as accurate citations. Of course, inverted commas or quotation
marks are a commonplace rhetorical technique in ‘new museological’ theorizing. But when the
context is not academic or museological, the interpretation of these ironizing quotation marks
may differ.

‘In dealing with issues as sensitive as cultural imperialism and racism, the use of irony is a
highly inappropriate luxury’.

One commentator felt that the failure of the ironies was the fault of an unsophisticated
audience.

Framing helps to delimit response, and when the exhibition took place, the city was facing
racial tensions over police shootings of black youths.

Here the irony was ‘misreading’. African Canadian children came away from the exhibition
with a negative impression of black history, with the idea that Africans did not know how to
wash their clothes or comb their hair before the whites arrived.

Irony has always been a trope that depends on context and on the identity and position of
both the ironist and the audience.

Where white Canadians might find the exhibit a self-searching, ironic examination of historical
intolerance, black Canadians saw the ‘painful detritus of savage exploitation and attempted
genocide’ and a perpetuation of racist attitudes of white superiority.

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Many commentators noted that the show seemed to be designed for and aimed at white,
educated, liberal-minded people with an interest in museums and anthropology.

The indirection and obliqueness of its irony in fact worked to render the exhibition’s position
ambiguous, and thereby also avoiding openly offending the missionary and military families
who had loaned and donated so much to the museum. (It is a postmodern possibility).

Collecting itself has become a major interest of postmodern museology. In collecting, the
historical relations of power in the work of acquisition are occulted. The catalogue of the
museum was a postmodern document that worked to show how the ‘relations of power
whereby one portion of humanity can select, value, and collect the pure products of others
need to be criticized and transformed’.

To be postcolonial, the exhibition would have had to present and then make a judgment about
the effects of colonization, not simply outline its intentions.

The only perspective offered was that of the colonizers. The objects arrived in the museum as
the result of Canadians’ participation in an act of conquest.

What from a postmodern perspective might be read as irony or ambiguity becomes, from a
postcolonial one, evasion.

It is this postmodern truism that has led museological theory to advocate more community
consultation and dialogue in the mounting of exhibitions.

Museums are finding other reflexive ways to deal with both the postmodern and the
postcolonial implications of collecting and exhibiting.

Visitors expectations about postmodern, politicized art exhibitions are never the same as those
about anthropological or historical ones.

Part of the heritage of modernity is that museums are places of special authority and respect,
and therefore have special cultural responsibilities that come with their institutional positions
of cultural and educational power within the communities in which they exist.

According to Michael Baxandall, ‘an exhibition is a social occasion involving at least three
active terms’- makers of objects, exhibitors of those objects, and viewers.

It was difficult for some members of the white English Canadian community to see that past as
‘part of the present’. They were ‘horrified by the Canadian participation in this history’.