Exhibiting Nation: Multicultural Nationalism (and Its Limits) in Canada's Museums by Caitlin Gordon-Walker (review)

In her introduction to Exhibiting Nation: Multicultural Nationalism (and Its Limits) in Canada's Museums, Caitlin Gordon-Walker describes visiting the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria and walking through the "Old Town" – a life-sized replica of urban living in the Victorian era. As a child, she visited these quaint cobblestoned streets, peeking into shops and private residences scented with cinnamon. Revisiting as an adult, Gordon-Walker encounters an addition – the recreation of a dimly lit Chinatown on the edge of the cityscape. Curators intended that museum visitors (assumed to be non-Chinese) felt "out of place" in the Chinatown to highlight the era's racial segregation. Gordon-Walker, however, is discomforted by her sense that the exhibit reproduces Orientalist stereotypes. This "fieldnote" is an effective opening to a book that probes the logic and politics of Canadian multiculturalism in museums. Focusing on the Royal British Columbia Museum (RBCM) in Victoria, the Royal Albert Museum (RAM) in Edmonton, and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, Gordon-Walker weaves together an analysis of multiculturalism, exhibition development, and display strategies. Her central argument is that museums reproduce Canadian multiculturalism, which celebrates diversity as long as it does not disrupt state authority and unity. Consequently, stories, objects, and images that complicate the official narrative of benevolence are avoided.

Gordon-Walker employs metaphors of the feast, the spectacle, and borders to emphasize different expressions of multiculturalism by museums. The feast, with its communality, hospitality, and hierarchies, is related to the Old Town displays. The RAM's effort to collect and display contemporary Edmonton is analysed as spectacle; the ROM is analysed in terms of borders and how it maps Canada and the world. Gordon-Walker also argues that museums are both "disciplinary and dialogical." While museums "reproduce a hegemonic understanding of national identity," they also "challenge these understandings and provide opportunities for visitors to articulate their own interpretations of the nation and of difference." The author's alternative reading of the Chinatown display is a prime example.

In the RBCM, displays mask difficult issues such as poverty and colonialism and, instead, emphasize a "simpler, gentler, and cleaner" past, while celebrating the progress of the frontier colony. Gordon-Walker suggests that the museum could include "more diverse and quarrelsome voices … to instigate more dynamic interactions and dialogues." At the RAM, she focuses on multiculturalism's claim to recognize all cultures equally. This is problematic for several reasons, not least of which is the practical impossibility of "representational completeness" and the prioritizing of visible markers of cultural difference. Fascinating in this chapter are Gordon-Caitlin's interviews with Linda Tzang (curator of the Cultural Communities Program) and David Goa (curator of Folk Life, 1970s-2003). Tzang introduces objects that trouble the museum's assumptions about culture, such as a skirt that looks Mexican but was donated by the members of a Russian family who were refugees in Mexico before immigrating to Edmonton. Reflecting on his oral history work, Goa is emphatic about avoiding "pimping" and "making use of somebody in some way because they're exotic." A temporary exhibit curated by Tzang entitled "Chop Suey on the Prairies: A Reflection on Chinese Restaurants in Alberta," which was held at the RAM in 2010, demonstrates how restaurant menus can tell complex stories about cultural contact and translation. The richest material in Exhibiting Nation documents examples of disruption and experimentation in museums, such as this one.

In Toronto, at the ROM, Gordon-Walker argues the physical partition of the "First Peoples Gallery "from the "Canada" gallery separates Canada from its colonial past. In the era following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, this is an important observation. Exhibiting Nation would benefit from a sustained analysis of how museums represent, or ignore, intersections of multiculturalism and colonialism.

Exhibiting Nation is a dense book. It begins with a comprehensive literature review of multiculturalism, but the reader is seventy pages in before an in-depth analysis of...