In 1994, when the National Air and Space Museum announced plans to display the Enola Gay, the B-29 sent to destroy Hiroshima with an atomic bomb, the ensuing political uproar caught the museum's parent Smithsonian Institution entirely unprepared. As the largest such complex in the world, the Smithsonian cares for millions of objects and has displayed everything from George Washington's sword to moon rocks to Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. Why did this particular object arouse such controversy? From an insider's perspective, Robert C. Post's Who Owns America's Past? offers insight into the politics of display and the interpretation of history. Never before has a book about the Smithsonian detailed the recent and dramatic shift from collection-driven shows, with artifacts meant to speak for themselves, to concept-driven exhibitions, in which objects aim to tell a story, displayed like illustrations in a book. Even more recently, the trend is to show artifacts along with props, sound effects, and interactive elements in order to create an immersive environment. Rather than looking at history, visitors are invited to experience it. Who Owns America's Past? examines the different ways that the Smithsonian's exhibitions have been conceived and designed-whether to educate visitors, celebrate an important historical moment, or satisfy donor demands or partisan agendas. Combining information from hitherto-untapped archival sources, extensive interviews, a thorough review of the secondary literature, and considerable personal experience, Post gives the reader a behind-the-scenes view of disputes among curators, academics, and stakeholders that were sometimes private and at other times burst into headline news.

Museums of Language and the Display of Intangible Cultural Heritage presents essays by practitioners based in language museums around the world. Describing their history, mission, and modes of display, contributors demonstrate the important role intangible heritage can and should play in the museum. Arguing that languages are among our most precious forms of cultural heritage, the book also demonstrates that they are at risk of neglect, and of endangerment from globalisation and linguistic imperialism. Including case studies from across Europe, North America, Africa, and Asia, this book documents the vital work being done by museums to help preserve languages and make them objects of broad public interest. Divided into three sections, contributions to the book focus on one of three types of museums: museums of individual languages, museums of language groups - both geographic and structural - and museums of writing. The volume presents practical information alongside theoretical discussions and state-of-the-art commentaries concerning the representation of languages and their cultural nature. Museums of Language and the Display of Intangible Cultural Heritage is the first volume to address the subject of language museums and, as such, should be of interest to academics, researchers, and postgraduate students in the fields of museum and cultural heritage studies, applied linguistics, anthropology, tourism, and public education.

Cultural heritage is one of the most important tourism resources in the world. This book provides a comprehensive theoretical overview and applied knowledge of the issues, practices, current debates, concepts and management concerns associated with cultural heritage-based tourism. The second edition has been updated to include timely and emerging topics such as geopolitics, conflict, solidarity tourism, overtourism and climate change. It also expands on important areas such as environmental change, technology, social media, heritage economics, Indigenous knowledge and co-created experiences. This edition includes up-to-date data, statistics, references, case material, figures and pedagogical tools. It remains an important and accessible text for undergraduate and postgraduate students of cultural and heritage tourism, cultural resource management, and museum management.

The Routledge Companion to Automobile Heritage, Culture, and Preservation explores automotive heritage, its place in society, and the ways we might preserve and conserve it. Drawing on contributions from academics and practitioners around the world and comprising six sections, this volume carries the heritage discourse forward by exploring the complex and sometimes intricate place of automobiles within society. Taken as a whole, this book helps to shape how we think about automobile heritage and considers how that heritage explores a range of cultural, intellectual, emotional, and material elements well outside of the automobile body itself. Most importantly, perhaps, it questions how we might better acknowledge the importance of automotive heritage now and in the future. The Routledge Companion to Automobile Heritage, Culture, and Preservation is unique in that it juxtaposes theory with practice, academic approaches with practical experience, and recognizes that issues of preservation and conservation belong in a broad context. As such, this volume should be essential reading for both academics and practitioners with an interest in automobiles, cultural heritage, and preservation.

The Routledge International Handbook of New Digital Practices in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Heritage Sites presents a fascinating picture of the ways in which today's cultural institutions are undergoing a transformation through innovative applications of digital technology. With a strong focus on digital design practice, the volume captures the vital discourse between curators, exhibition designers, historians, heritage practitioners, technologists and interaction designers from around the world. Contributors interrogate how their projects are extending the traditional reach and engagement of institutions through digital designs that reconfigure the interplay between collections, public knowledge and civic society. Bringing together the experiences of some of today's most innovative cultural institutions and thinkers, the Handbook provides refreshingly new ideas and directions for the exciting digital challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. As such, it should be essential reading for academics, students, designers and professionals interested in the production of culture in the post-digital age.

In this volume, some of the leading figures in the field have been brought together to write on the roots of the historic preservation movement in the United States, ranging from New York to Santa Fe, Charleston to Chicago. Giving Preservation a History explores the long history of historic preservation: how preservation movements have taken a leading role in shaping American urban space and development; how historic preservation battles have reflected broader social forces; and what the changing nature of historic preservation means for efforts to preserve national, urban, and local heritage. The second edition adds several new essays addressing key developing areas in the field by major new voices. The new essays represent the broadening range of scholarship on historic preservation generated since the publication of the first edition, taking better account of the role of cultural diversity and difference within the field while exploring the connections between preservation and allied concerns such as environmental sustainability, LGBTQ and nonwhite identity, and economic development.

Encountering the Past within the Present: Modern Experiences of Time examines different encounters with the past from within the present - whether as commemoration, nostalgia, silence, ghostly haunting or combinations thereof. Taking its cue from Hannah Arendt's definition of the present as a time span lying between past and future, the author reflects on the old philosophical question of how to live the good life - not only with others who are physically with us but also with those whose presence is ghostly and liminal. While tradition may no longer command the same authority as it did in antiquity or the middle ages, individuals are by no means severed from the past. Rather, nostalgic longing for bygone times and traumatic preoccupation with painful historical events demonstrate the vitality of the past within the present. Divided into three parts, chapters examine ways in which the legacies of World War II, the Holocaust and communism have been remembered after 1945 and 1989. Maintaining a sustained reflection on the nexus of memory, modernity and time in tandem with ancient questions of responsibility for one another and the world, the volume contributes to the growing field of memory studies from a philosophical perspective. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory and philosophy with interests in collective memory and heritage.

Food Heritage and Nationalism in Europe contends that food is a fundamental element of heritage, and a particularly important one in times of crisis. Arguing that food, taste, cuisine and gastronomy are crucial markers of identity that are inherently connected to constructions of place, tradition and the past, the book demonstrates how they play a role in intangible, as well as tangible, heritage. Featuring contributions from experts working across Europe and beyond, and adopting a strong historical and transnational perspective, the book examines the various ways in which food can be understood and used as heritage. Including explorations of imperial spaces, migrations and diasporas; the role of commercialisation processes, and institutional practices within political and cultural domains, this volume considers all aspects of this complex issue. Arguing that the various European cuisines are the result of exchanges, hybridities and complex historical processes, Porciani and the chapter authors offer up a new way of deconstructing banal nationalism and of moving away from the idea of static identities. Suggesting a new and different approach to the idea of so-called national cuisines, Food Heritage and Nationalism in Europe will be a compelling read for academic audiences in museum and heritage studies, cultural and food studies, anthropology and history. Chapters 1,2,4,6 and 12 of this book are available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. They have been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

A strikingly original exploration of the profound impact of World War II on how we understand the art that survived it By the end of World War II an estimated one million artworks and 2.5 million books had been seized from their owners by Nazi forces; many were destroyed. The artworks and cultural artifacts that survived have traumatic, layered histories. This book traces the biographies of these objects-including paintings, sculpture, and Judaica-their rescue in the aftermath of the war, and their afterlives in museums and private collections and in our cultural understanding. In examining how this history affects the way we view these works, scholars discuss the moral and aesthetic implications of maintaining the association between the works and their place within the brutality of the Holocaust-or, conversely, the implications of ignoring this history. Afterlives offers a thought-provoking investigation of the unique ability of art and artifacts to bear witness to historical events. With rarely seen archival photographs and with contributions by the contemporary artists Maria Eichhorn, Hadar Gad, Dor Guez, and Lisa Oppenheim, this catalogue illuminates the study of a difficult and still-urgent subject, with many parallels to today's crises of art in war. Published in association with the Jewish Museum, New York Exhibition Schedule: Jewish Museum, New York (Opens August 2021)

Engaging Communities in Museums is designed for museum professionals who are hungry for information about how to design experiences in partnership with their communities. Providing an overview of the many ways that museums around the world have begun to listen more attentively to their audience, the book highlights the importance of listening to community and discusses the idea of relationship-building as an entry point to relevancy. Drawing on interviews and discussions with museum professionals around the world, as well as tangible, real-world examples, Allison showcases the many ways that museums, both large and small, are actively working with their communities and also provides a roadmap that demonstrates how museum professionals can listen more effectively to their audiences as they craft new experiences. The book also explores the fascinating nexus of community engagement and exhibit and experience development, thus taking museum professionals on a journey of discovery around community responsiveness and attention to audience. Engaging Communities in Museums provides a thorough comparison of development models from disparate venues, making the book a must-read for museum professionals who are looking for purpose and common-sense techniques that can guide their work with the communities that they serve. Students in museum studies courses will also find the text useful as a primer on community engagement in museums.

This book presents interdisciplinary scholarship on art and visual culture that explores disability in terms of lived experience. It will expand critical disability studies scholarship on representation and embodiment, which is theoretically rich, but lacking in attention to art. It is organized in five thematic parts: methodologies of access, agency, and ethics in cultural institutions; the politics and ethics of collaboration; embodied representations of artists with disabilities in the visual and performing arts; negotiating the outsider art label; and first-person reflections on disability and artmaking. This volume will be of interest to scholars who study disability studies, art history, art education, gender studies, museum studies, and visual culture.

Transporting readers from derelict homesteads to imperiled harbors, postindustrial ruins to Cold War test sites, Curated Decay presents an unparalleled provocation to conventional thinking on the conservation of cultural heritage. Caitlin DeSilvey proposes rethinking the care of certain vulnerable sites in terms of ecology and entropy, and explains how we must adopt an ethical stance that allows us to collaborate with-rather than defend against-natural processes. Curated Decay chronicles DeSilvey's travels to places where experiments in curated ruination and creative collapse are under way, or under consideration. It uses case studies from the United States, Europe, and elsewhere to explore how objects and structures produce meaning not only in their preservation and persistence, but also in their decay and disintegration. Through accessible and engaging discussion of specific places and their stories, it traces how cultural memory is generated in encounters with ephemeral artifacts and architectures. An interdisciplinary reframing of the concept of the ruin that combines historical and philosophical depth with attentive storytelling, Curated Decay represents the first attempt to apply new theories of materiality and ecology to the concerns of critical heritage studies.

Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past critically examines the production, consumption, and interpretation of photography across various heritage domains, from global image archives to the domestic arena of the family album. Through original ethnographic and archival research, the book sheds new light on the role photography has played in the emergence, expansion, and articulation of heritage in diverse sociocultural contexts. Drawing on wide-ranging experience across the heritage sector and two international case studies - Angkor in Cambodia and the town of Famagusta, Cyprus - the book makes a major contribution to our understanding of the role photography has played and continues to play in shaping experiences and conceptualisations of heritage. One of the core aims of the book is to problematise and potentially redirect the varied usages of photography within current practice, usages which remain woefully undertheorised, despite their often-central role in shaping heritage. Ultimately, by focusing attention on a hitherto underexamined aspect of the heritage phenomenon, namely its manifold interconnections with photography, this book provides fresh insight to the making and remaking of the past in the present, and the alternative heritages that might come into being around emergent photographic forms and approaches. Heritage, Photography, and the Affective Past uses photography as a method of enquiry as well as a tool of documentation. It will be of interest to scholars and students of heritage, photography, anthropology, museology, public archaeology, and tourism. The book will also be a valuable resource for heritage practitioners working around the globe.

Once seen as a collection of artifacts and ritual objects, African art now commands respect from museums and collectors. Bennetta Jules-Rosette and J.R. Osborn explore the reframing of African art through case studies of museums and galleries in the United States, Europe, and Africa. The authors take a three-pronged approach. Part One ranges from curiosity cabinets to virtual websites to offer a history of ethnographic and art museums and look at their organization and methods of reaching out to the public. In the second part, the authors examine museums as ecosystems and communities within communities, and they use semiotic methods to analyze images, signs, and symbols drawn from the experiences of curators and artists. The third part introduces innovative strategies for displaying, disseminating, and reclaiming African art. The authors also propose how to reinterpret the art inside and outside the museum and show ways of remixing the results. Drawing on extensive conversations with curators, collectors, and artists, African Art Reframed is an essential guide to building new exchanges and connections in the dynamic worlds of African and global art.

Science Museums in Transition: Unheard Voices considers how museums can adapt their exhibits, programs, and organizational structures to the diversity of ideas, people, and cultures that speak to modern science. This collection contains individual expressions by museum insiders addressing a range of particular perspectives - Native American, African American, Latinx, Islamic, Israeli, Danish, white North American. These reflections provide guidance to the museum community as to how their institutions can become more thoughtful, more welcoming to diverse audiences, and more cognizant of the ways that different people incorporate science into their daily lives. As a whole, the book emphasizes the need for museums to engage in dialogue with their visitors - not merely to present them with information - and to offer the opportunities to share experiences, exchange perspectives, and thereby advance science learning through a dynamic and collective process. Science Museums in Transition is intended to further discussion on how museums address the political and social ramifications of science and, as such, should be of great interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students working in the fields of museum studies, science, anthropology, education and history. It should also be essential reading for museum professionals around the globe.

In 1994, when the National Air and Space Museum announced plans to display the Enola Gay, the B-29 sent to destroy Hiroshima with an atomic bomb, the ensuing political uproar caught the museum's parent Smithsonian Institution entirely unprepared. As the largest such complex in the world, the Smithsonian cares for millions of objects and has displayed everything from George Washington's sword to moon rocks to Dorothy's ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. Why did this particular object arouse such controversy? From an insider's perspective, Robert C. Post's Who Owns America's Past? offers insight into the politics of display and the interpretation of history. Never before has a book about the Smithsonian detailed the recent and dramatic shift from collection-driven shows, with artifacts meant to speak for themselves, to concept-driven exhibitions, in which objects aim to tell a story, displayed like illustrations in a book. Even more recently, the trend is to show artifacts along with props, sound effects, and interactive elements in order to create an immersive environment. Rather than looking at history, visitors are invited to experience it. Who Owns America's Past? examines the different ways that the Smithsonian's exhibitions have been conceived and designed-whether to educate visitors, celebrate an important historical moment, or satisfy donor demands or partisan agendas. Combining information from hitherto-untapped archival sources, extensive interviews, a thorough review of the secondary literature, and considerable personal experience, Post gives the reader a behind-the-scenes view of disputes among curators, academics, and stakeholders that were sometimes private and at other times burst into headline news.

Over the past 50 years, Indigenous Australian theatre practice has emerged as a dynamic site for the discursive reflection of culture and tradition as well as colonial legacies, leveraging the power of storytelling to create and advocate contemporary fluid conceptions of Indigeneity. Performing Indigenous Identities on the Contemporary Australian Stage offers a window into the history and diversity of this vigorous practice. It introduces the reader to cornerstones of Indigenous Australian cultural frameworks and on this backdrop discusses a wealth of plays in light of their responses to contemporary Australian identity politics. The in-depth readings of two landmark theatre productions, Scott Rankin's Namatjira (2010) and Wesley Enoch & Anita Heiss' I Am Eora (2012), trace the artists' engagement with questions of community consolidation and national reconciliation, carefully considering the implications of their propositions for identity work arising from the translation of traditional ontologies into contemporary orientations. The analyses of the dramatic texts are incrementally enriched by a dense reflection of the production and reception contexts of the plays, providing an expanded framework for the critical consideration of contemporary postcolonial theatre practice that allows for a well-founded appreciation of the strengths yet also pointing to the limitations of current representative approaches on the Australian mainstage. This study will be of great interest to students and scholars of Postcolonial, Literary, Performance and Theatre Studies.

The urge for regional identity has not declined in the process of globalization. Rather, heritage is used to develop regional distinctiveness and to charge identities with a past. Particularly helpful for this aim are creation stories, Golden Ages or recent, shared traumas. Some themes such as the Roman era or the Second World War appear easier to appropriate than, for example, prehistory. This book assesses the role of heritage in the construction of regional identities in Western Europe. It contains case studies on early medieval heritage in Alsace and Euregio-Meuse Rhine, industrial heritage in the German Ruhr area and competing memories in the Arnhem-Nijmegen region in the Netherlands. It presents new insights into the process of heritage production on a regional level in relationship to processes of identity construction. The theoretical analysis of "heritage" and "regional identity" is innovative as these concepts were hardly analysed in relation to each other before. This book also offers insights into policy, tourism, spatial development and regional development to policymakers, politicians, designers and professionals in the heritage and tourism industries.

Encountering Nazi Tourism Sites explores how the terrible legacy of Nazi criminality is experienced by tourists, bridging the gap between cultural criminology and tourism studies to make a significant contribution to our understanding of how Nazi criminality is evoked and invoked in the landscape of modern Germany. This study is grounded in fieldwork encounters with memorials, museums and perpetrator sites across Germany and the Netherlands, including Berlin Holocaust memorials and museums, the Anne Frank House, the Wannsee House, Wewelsburg Castle and concentration camps. At the core of this research is a respect for each site's unique physical, architectural or curatorial form and how this enables insights into different aspects of the Holocaust. Chapters grapple with themes of authenticity, empathy, voyeurism and vicarious experience to better comprehend the possibilities and limits of affective encounters at these sites. This will be of great interest to upper level students and researchers of criminology, Holocaust studies, museology, tourism studies, memorialisation studies and the burgeoning field of 'difficult' heritage.

During the 20th-century, Spaniards and African-Americans shared significant cultural memories forged by the profound impact that various artistic and historical events had on each other. Addressing three crucial periods (the Harlem Renaissance and Jazz Age, the Spanish Civil War, and Franco's dictatorship), this collection of essays explores the transnational bond and the intercultural exchanges between these two communities, using race as a fundamental critical category. The study of travelogues, memoirs, documentaries, interviews, press coverage, comics, literary works, music, and performances by iconic figures such as Josephine Baker, Langston Hughes, and Ramon Gomez de la Serna, as well as the experiences of ordinary individuals such as African American nurse Salaria Kea, invite an examination of the ambiguities and paradoxes that underlie this relationship: among them, the questionable and, at times, surprising racial representations of blacks in Spanish avant-garde texts and in the press during the years of Franco's dictatorship; African Americans very unique view of the Spanish Civil War in light of their racial identity; and the oscillation between fascination and anxiety when these two communities look at each other.

"New Museum Theory and Practice" is an original collection of essays with a unique focus: the contested politics and ideologies of museum exhibition.
Contains 12 original essays that contribute to the field while creating a collective whole for course use.
Discusses theory through vivid examples and historical overviews.
Offers guidance on how to put theory into practice.
Covers a range of museums around the world: from art to history, anthropology to music, as well as historic houses, cultural centres, virtual sites, and commercial displays that use the conventions of the museum.
Authors come from the UK, Canada, the US, and Australia, and from a variety of fields that inform cultural studies.

This book examines the Reading Room of the British Museum using documentary, theoretical, historical, and literary source. Roomscape explores a specific site - the Reading Room of the British Museum - as a space of imaginative potential in relation to the emergence of modern women writers in Victorian and early 20th-century London. Drawing on archival materials, Roomscape is the first study to integrate documentary, historical, and literary sources to examine the significance of this space and its resources for women who wrote translations, poetry, and fiction. This book challenges an assessment of the Reading Room of the British Museum as a bastion of class and gender privilege, an image established by Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. Roomscape also questions the value of privacy and autonomy in constructions of female authorship. Rather than viewing reading and writing as solitary, Roomscape investigates the public, social, and spatial dimensions of literary production. The implications of this study reach into the current digital era and its transformations of practices of reading, writing, and archiving. Along with an appendix of notable readers at the British Museum from the last two centuries, the book contributes to scholarship on George Eliot, Amy Levy, Eleanor Marx, Clementina Black, Constance Black Garnett, Christina Rossetti, Mathilde Blind, and Virginia Woolf. It includes Appendix of Notable Readers at the British Museum from 1857-1930 (15 pp) as important resource for museum and library studies, and fresh material about translation work at the British Museum by Eleanor Marx (on Flaubert and Ibsen) and Constance Black Garnett (on Russian authors). It demonstrates the importance of library research for poets including Christina Rossetti, Mathilde Blind, and Amy Levy. It examines George Eliot's research at the British Museum for her historical novel Romola in relation to how this novel depicts reading, library collection, and gendered scholarship.. It offers a new reading of Virginia Woolf's researching in and writing about the British Museum and the London Library through her diaries, letters, and creative work. It includes a Coda that brings forward the story of the Round Reading Room from the mid-20th century, when A. S. Byatt, Isobel Armstrong, and Gillian Beer relied on this space in the early years of their careers, to the aftermath since the official closing in 1997 when the British Library moved to Euston Road. The fate of the Round Reading Room still hangs in the balance.

This book undertakes a critical reappraisal of Minimalism through an examination of three key painters: Robert Mangold, David Novros, and Jo Baer. By establishing their substantive engagements with Minimalist discourse, as well as their often overlooked artistic exchanges with their sculptor peers, it demonstrates that painting crucially informed the movement's development, serving not only as an object of critique but also as a crucible for its most central tenets. It also poses broader disciplinary implications as it historicizes and challenges Minimalism's "death of painting" critiques that have been so influential to theories of modernism and postmodernism in the visual arts.