Race for Sale: Narratives of Possession in Two "Ethnic" Museums

I

For Ngugi wa Thiong'o, East Africa's greatest writer and political thinker who lives in exile from the neocolonialist Kenyan state, the role of intellectuals among the once colonized peoples of the world demands that they work to "move the center" from Europe to their own centers. He dates the beginnings of such moves to the 1960s, when

the centre of the universe was moving from Europe [...,] when many countries, particularly in Asia and Africa, were demanding and asserting their right to define themselves and their relationship to the universe from their own centres in Africa and Asia. (1993:2)

This movement is complicated, not least because moving centers demands that previously colonized people undertake lengthy and sometimes painful "decolonization processes" in order to relocate to their own centers. At the same time, as Ngugi explains, "It [is] not a question of substituting one centre for the other. The problem [arises] only when people [try] to use the vision from any one centre and generalize it as the universal reality" (2). ¹

Both processes remain incomplete--both decolonizing minds occupied by the colonizers' various cultural presumptions and persuading those who occupy the Euro-center to allow for the existence of other, equally legitimate centers rather than simply extending their center outward until the whole world is sucked into a universalist void. Here I shall use two sites of contemporary cultural contestation, the Museum for African Art (formerly the Center for African Art) and the George Gustav Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian, to examine some aspects of both problems. I shall explore the Museum for African Art first, beginning with its texts, including catalogues produced both before and after the opening of the present Museum space. These include Perspectives: Angles on African Art (Baldwin et al. 1987), the record of the Center for African Art's traveling exhibit; ART/artifact: African Art in Anthropology Collections (Vogel 1988a); and the provocative catalogue of the subsequent exhibit, The Art of Collecting African Art (Vogel 1988b). I shall then look carefully at a publication that is both a catalogue and a critical work, Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art (Nooter Roberts and Vogel 1994), published to celebrate 10 years of exhibitions in conjunction with a 1992 symposium, "Africa By Design: Designing a Museum for the 21st Century." I shall conclude by touring a 1998 exhibition, African Faces, African Figures: The Arman Collection.

From the Museum for African Art I shall then move downtown, to one of this museum's sister institutions, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), which opened its Manhattan doors in 1994. The first two of the three linked inaugural exhibitions (Creation's Journey and All Roads Are Good) borrowed some of the same curatorial techniques employed by the pioneering African art museum. The second half of this essay compares the two museums by analyzing the Heye Center's inaugural exhibitions, its published texts as well as its constructed narrative. Throughout, I shall consider the extent to which these museums "move the center," from the overculture's national history of the United States, in one case, or from Europe to Africa, or even the African diaspora, in the other.

In recent years, museum curators and others have quite thoroughly deconstructed the once obscure practices of museum exhibitions so that their collective complicity in the "invention," celebration, and dissemination of national identities is by now well established. Others have theorized space and the ways in which museum space has been "produced," to use Henri Lefebvre's terms (1974), as a venue for what Aimé Césaire called "the [Europeans'] forgetting machine" (1972:9-10).

The racialized (and gendered) nature of such "exhibitionary complexes" (Bennett 1995) have also received considerable scholarly attention. I think, however, that two problems remain: first, museologists have not succeeded in moving the center, not least because their well...