Desegregating the Past: The Public Life of Memory in the United States and South Africa

Robyn Autry

Published by Columbia University Press 2017

Desegregating the Past

The Public Life of Memory in the United States and South Africa

Robyn Autry

https://doi.org/10.7312/autr17758

Overview
Contents

About this book

Robyn Autry recounts the public and private battles fought over the creation and content of history museums. Despite vast differences in the development of South African and U.S. society, Autry finds a common set of ideological, political, economic, and institutional dilemmas arising out of the selective reconstruction of the past.

Author / Editor information

Robyn Autry is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at Wesleyan University. Her work has been published in Theory, Culture, and Society, Theory & Society, Contexts, and Museum & Society.

Reviews

Fath Davis Ruffins, Curator, National Museum of American History:
As both a historian and museum curator, I believe that Autry's sociological analysis of museums as institutions and as producers of collective memories is groundbreaking. Her extensive research in the United States and South Africa illuminates the difficulties of producing contemporary national narratives from the messy, contentious, and violent elements of both nation's pasts.

Ran Greenstein, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa:
Desegregating the Past is a remarkable study of how collective perceptions of the past are shaped and displayed through contestation between public and private memory agents. Set in a comparative context, Autry examines the formation of racial and national identities in the USA and South Africa, and the balance between discourses of victimhood, solidarity and resistance in deeply divided histories. It is an important contribution to our understanding of how conflict and resolution are presented and re-presented in different historical contexts.

Andrea Durbach, author of A Common Purpose: The Story of the Upington 25 and director of the Australian Human Rights Center at the University of Sydney:
As South Africa and America wrestle with simmering legacies of cruel, racist histories, Robyn Autry's bold and layered text investigates how representations of a divided past are reconstructed into an imagined, 'desegregated' present. Invoking the museum as her mode of exploration, Autry powerfully reveals the compound and competing imperatives – ideological, political, economic, institutional - that have informed the maintenance and creation of public sites of memory as two nations transcend and transform their collective narratives.

Alex Lichtenstein, Indiana University:
Although comparisons of the anti-apartheid and civil rights movements abound, until now no scholar has attended to the comparative place of these struggles in the collective memory of the allegedly 'post-racial' U.S. and in South Africa's 'Rainbow Nation.' Desegregating the Past brilliantly reveals the power and limits of museums to reckon with a troubled racial past, casting new light on how we publicly remember the struggles against apartheid and segregation—and by doing so, how we forget.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
List of Museums Visited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xi
List of Abbreviations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xv
Introduction: Desegregating the Past Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Memory Entrepreneurs: History in the Making Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
2. The Curated Past: Remembering the Collective Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	66
3. Managing Collective Representations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	107
4. Memory Deviants: Breaking the Collective Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	145
Conclusion: Museumification of Memory Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	186
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	197
Selected Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	239

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 272
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 25
- Other: 25 b&w photographs

eBook

Published: February 7, 2017
ISBN: 9780231542517