The literature
The literature on this subject is wide and various, and steadily growing. The essays, articles, action plans and so on vary in terms of their level of sophistication, their scope and their purpose, and their influence on policy-making and practice.
The critical review that follows is not intended to be definitive or canonical, or to be used as a substitute for reading the original material: the aim is to give an indicative selection of publications that have contributed to this ongoing debate. The literature available contains many suggestions for the way ahead, and details examples of both good and unsuccessful theory and practice.
Both Holding up the Mirror: Addressing cultural diversity in London’s museums (2) and Reflections: Mapping cultural diversity in London’s local authority museum collections (3) note the importance of collections in representing London’s diversity. Key issues highlighted by the latter with regard to collecting policies and practice in 28 London museums include:
- Collections’ documentation, and variable and incomplete records and catalogues/finding aids are a significant problem in many of London’s museums. A lack of knowledge by curators of their own collections is a major barrier to taking forward diversity work;
- Collections, exhibitions and activities often fail to reflect the diverse backgrounds and cultures and communities London’s museums now serve;
- Virtually all the museums responding to the Reflections survey assumed that only those collections that specifically reflect minority ethnic communities themselves would be relevant to them. (4)
The recommendations relating to collections in Holding up the Mirror are that the successor body to London Museums Agency – now established as Archives, Libraries, Museums London – should:
- Work with London’s museum sector to develop new collecting strategies
- Support a coordinated approach to collecting, where museums work closely together to identify possible acquisitions and share such acquisitions
- Develop creative ways of using existing collections to explore issues around local change, sense of place and community identity
One of the benchmark exhibitions of recent years with regard to ‘race’, ethnicity and nationality in cultural diversity was The Peopling of London: Fifteen Thousand Years of Settlement from Overseas which opened at the Museum of London in 1993. As its title suggests, the focus was on the stories of the peoples who had come to conquer, live and work in London over thousands of years making it the global, cosmopolitan capital it is today.
Some museum professionals resist the idea that they and their institutions serve as actual or potential, active or passive, agents of social change. But as Nick Merriman – one of the organisers of The Peopling of London – and others have pointed out, museums do not exist in a vacuum, somehow outside of society. Merriman points to the context within which The Peopling of London exhibition was developed:
'…the onset of deep recession amongst the Western industrialized countries, which in turn led to unemployment, increased poverty [and to] the perennial selection of immigrants as scapegoats. Perusal of the rhetoric of racist groups made it clear that much of their message was predicated on the notion that – in Britain at least – there had been a homogeneous white population prior to 1945, bound together by a common history and set of values, and that after 1945 this homogeneity had been overlain by the introduction of – in their terms – alien non-white populations with different histories, values and cultural backgrounds who did not belong to Britain and were the source of many of the nation’s current woes.' (5)
In the context of racist and xenophobic rhetoric based on an abuse of historical fact, the Museum of London, as a mediator and keeper of the history of Britain, was bound to set itself on a collision course with those whose ideology promoted a mythical, inaccurate history of Britain in general and London in particular.
Although it may be argued that the primary function of the museum is not to counter obnoxious political views by setting the record straight on the history of migration, it is surely a function, as Merriman puts it, ‘to challenge such abuses of history’.
The team that put together the exhibition consulted with Museum of London colleagues and with members of the various communities, especially where some exhibits or objects appeared to be contentious. This issue of contentiousness takes us into a difficult area.
Many of the objects or documents that have been produced over the last several hundred years and which relate to the history of particularly African, Asian or Jewish peoples, and people with disabilities, would be deemed offensive by today’s standards. How is that material to be handled without distorting the historical truth and reality of attitudes to those communities?
There is no single answer to this question but most of the reports and publications that have addressed diversity and museum collections and exhibitions point to community consultation as an essential part of the developmental work required to secure widespread ownership and buy-in by communities. This strategy would apply whether the material related to ethnicity, disability, faith or sexuality.
However, there are limits to the amount of consultation that may be carried out, and there are often contradictory views held by different sections of the communities who feel it is their concern. What is important here is that the people who put the exhibition together have a clear understanding and knowledge of the material they are dealing with and its implications, so that they are not caught on the back foot.
In her essay ‘Academic and public domains: when is a dagger a sword?’ curator Dr Nima Poovaya Smith highlights the fact that what is acceptable in academic discourse may be rather more controversial when discussed in the public domain. She argues that:
'The academic domain is often far removed from the cut and thrust of ordinary life. This gulf is doubly reinforced in a European context when the culture in question is non-Western. The latter has its own reality and operational dynamics of which academic analyses often do not take sufficient cognisance. This refusal or inability to recognize these dynamics perhaps explains the inbuilt obsolescence of most orientalist research.' (6)
The 19th century paradigm of categorisation seems still to be the dominant organising framework for collections. Is that still appropriate in the 21st century? Poovaya Smith cites a number of instances where she was in the position in effect of negotiating the public representation of objects, texts and images that hold a specific position in Sikhism: a position unrelated to European organising frameworks.
Recognising that as an academic and a curator, she has a duty to promote rigorous historical analysis, as well as a commitment to understanding the role of individual and collective subjectivity in the interpretation and mediation of exhibits, Poovaya Smith presents us with a frank account of some of the curatorial dilemmas she encountered.
Often, curators find it difficult to see themselves in the role of negotiator since they have a belief in the objective truth which should be self-evident to all. It seems that every aspect of their training and codes of professional practice as well as a generally empirically-based education leads them to be wary about what might be characterised as relativism.
Poovaya Smith gives an example regarding the different shades of meaning attached to a dagger and a sword, and how the lack of understanding of such a distinction in Sikh tradition can undermine an entire programme’s effectiveness in reaching out to communities. (7)
Whilst it is important to be inclusive and to try and mainstream as much as possible, it is also important to understand the complexity underpinning these broad categories relating to communities of interest, and to target specific imbalances in provision. Arguably, this targeting is easier to achieve in some areas than others, given the will and the understanding. For example, in her research into the collections of social history museums and their representation of gay and lesbian presence, Angela Vanegas notes that the general perception is that ‘objects have no intrinsic sexuality’.
Unless an object is explicitly linked to gay individuals or communities as with Gay Pride badges, users and/or creators of, and visitors to museum collections are assumed to be heterosexual. This makes the contextualisation of objects quite crucial to understanding them. As Vanegas notes, ‘The history of objects has to be recorded or their meaning is lost.’ Further, just as geo-political and national groups can be misread by consistently viewing them as ‘other’, so can gay men and lesbian women be seen as another variety of exotica. When asked what objects they held in their collections that related to gay communities, some curators responded that they
'…had material that could possibly be interpreted as lesbian and gay, and then mentioned items such as body-piercing jewellery or AIDS ephemera. The underlying message seemed to be that, because lesbians and gay men are defined by their sexuality, they can only be represented objects relating to sex, an approach that denies other aspects of gay and lesbian culture.' (8)
There are important points to note from Vanegas’ brief account of this project. As with ‘race’ and ethnicity, and disability, sexuality is just one aspect of social identity. Thus ‘Lesbians talk about being a nurse as well as having babies by artificial insemination, gay men about acupuncture as well as gay activism.’ (9)
Vanegas notes that,
'Museums, because they are perceived as delivering an authoritative account of history, can play a unique role in promoting inclusion. To the heterosexual majority, they can say “here it is, the material evidence before your very eyes”. To gay men and lesbians, they can say ‘your lives count’.' (10)
This area of work requires particular sensitivity since people have very different ideas and experiences regarding coming out, homophobia and so on. The project described by Vanegas and undertaken by Croydon Museum with gay men and lesbian women sought to depict a fully rounded representation of people’s lives with some historical context in order to demonstrate that homosexuality was not simply a contemporary experience.
The idea that paying attention to the representation of cultural diversity in our cultural institutions is special pleading for minority groups that has only emerged over the last 50 or so years is pervasive, and often promoted by the media as ‘political correctness gone mad’. Museums could do much more to counter this view by reviewing what they have in their collections and reinterpreting some of the material. This is one of the points that emerges from Annie Delin’s essay ‘Buried in the Footnotes’.
The approach taken by curators who see gay men and lesbians as linked inextricably to sexual pathology via a focus on AIDS and HIV resonates with the position outlined by Delin with regard to images of disability. Based on her correspondence with museums about the representation of people with disabilities, Delin notes the prevalence of imagery of medical phenomena, surgery, cures and so on, in museum collections:
'…during my research, the enthusiasm with which curators proposed such items and collections as representative of disabled life evidences one of the principal controversies of modern debate – the medical model of disability. To assume there is a ‘natural link’ between these collections and disability…devalues the equally ‘natural’ (if less frequently recorded) link between disability and, say, creativity, practical endeavour or family contribution.' (11)
As Delin notes, ‘In the absence of positive representation of disabled people in museum collections, or of supporting bibliographical knowledge about individuals, museums may therefore be perpetuating the unacceptable – and yet by failing to show such images they contribute further to the invisibility of disabled characters in history.’ (12)
Not all images of disability are depicted in a negative way – Admiral Lord Nelson defended his country with one eye and one arm. But because of his exceptional accomplishments, he is rarely thought of as someone with a disability. Thus, paradoxically, Nelson’s exceptionalism ‘normalises’ him and places him firmly in the mainstream where he is rarely identified as a hero with multiple disabilities.
Why does this matter and what is the role of the museum in this situation? First, it is important for people to be able to see themselves as part of a continually unfolding historical narrative that validates their existence and their experiences, and enables them to participate in the interpretation and making of history. Important too, is the understanding of the context of people’s lives with regard to the discrimination they face.
Just as when considering how the impact of incomplete versions of the history of migration to Britain may serve to fuel racism and xenophobia, we should think about the impact of the absence or incomplete presence of people with disabilities on the public’s attitude towards disability. For those who are disabled, only ever to see representations of with people disabilities as freaks, dehumanised or pathologised is dispiriting to say the least.
The exclusion of people with disabilities from historical records except in a few and – by today’s standards – demeaning categories implicitly legitimises the staring and ridicule, discrimination and in some cases, hatred that disabled people endure. Another issue, especially acute for disabled people and ethnic minorities – and alluded to in the Vanegas essay – is that the varied texture of life is not captured by crude categorisations, or by portraying individuals and groups solely as victims.
Drawing on his experience at the National Portrait Gallery, Roger Hargreaves points out that the needs of people with disabilities and their carers should be addressed as part of mainstream gallery provision. (13) Approximately 14% of the population of the UK has a disability of some kind and taking into account friends, relatives and carers, a significant proportion of the population is affected by disability issues. Especially when taking into account people with mental illnesses, there is a wide variety of forms of disabilities making it problematic to refer to a unified category.
Just as with ethnicity and nationality, gender and sexuality, the range of experiences that people with disabilities have is impossible to sum up except in anything other than general terms.
In this brief review, I have outlined some of the key issues that relate primarily to the representation of underserved communities within museum collections. Improving the diversity of those working in and governing museums and their collections is an important issue too and is an implicit part of the context for this essay but not its main focus.
It will be important, however to track initiatives such as GAIN, Diversify, Decibel, and Inspire, all of which aim to widen the range of people working in and governing our cultural institutions. (14) Significant changes in the make up of the workforce and governance of London’s museums will be a crucial indicator of the success or otherwise of equalities strategies. (15)
See essay pages: