Exhibiting Slavery: The Caribbean Postmodern Novel as Museum

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. This law was named after its sponsor, Christiane Taubira, the deputy from French Guiana. The French name of the committee is Comité pour la Mémoire de l’Esclavage. 2. Bal, introduction to Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer, eds., Acts of Memory, vii. 3. Glissant eventually became fascinated by the figure of the runaway slave, or maroon, and returns to it explicitly in his novel Quatrième siècle, among other works. 4. “Chirac Names Slavery Memorial Day,” BBC News, January 30, 2006, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4662442.stm. 5. Naipaul, The Middle Passage, 66. 6. Naipaul, A Way in the World, 30. 7. Faith Davis Ruffins of the Smithsonian Museum interprets these acts as indicative of a move toward “racial reconciliation” in “Revisiting the Old Plantation ,” 420. 8. Preziosi, “Brain of the Earth’s Body,” 83. 9. Alpers, “Museum as a Way of Seeing,” 27. 10. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Objects of Ethnography,” 387–88. 11. Karp, “Culture and Representation,” 14. 12. Carbonell, ed., Museum Studies, 7. 13. Ibid., 8. 14. For a description and analysis of Wilson’s installation, see Corrin, ed., Mining the Museum. 15. The exhibition Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Protector , My Love ran at the Whitney Museum from October 11, 2007, to February 3, 2008. The official Web site is still functional (http://www.whitney.org/www/ exhibition/kara_walker/index.html). 16. Weil, Making Museums Matter, 212. 17. Ibid., 202. 178 Notes to Introduction 18. More information on the Museum Management Program is available at http://www.nps.gov/history/museum/whoweare.htm. 19. Witcomb, Re-imagining the Museum, 13. 20. Kratz and Karp, “Introduction,” 5. 21. Ruffins, “Revisiting the Old Plantation,” 404. 22. UNESCO funded Andrew Hurley’s translation of Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá’s novel La renuncia del héroe Baltasar (published as The Renunciation) as one of its “Collection of Representative Works.” 23. The PBS online virtual museum can be found at http://www.pbs.org/ wnet/slavery/teachers/virtual.html. 1. Books as National (Literary) History Museums 1. Puerto Rico’s fondness and nostalgia for colonial times are unusual sentiments in the Caribbean and Latin America, where Columbus is now more commonly regarded as a colonial tyrant, and his act of “discovery” is seen by many as a genocide of native peoples. The official Web site for the Museum of the Americas is http://www.prtc.net/musame/frame.htm. 2. Belcher, Exhibitions in Museums, 63. 3. In August 2008, I went to the Museum of the Americas in Old San Juan accompanied by my toddler son, William Carlos, and my aunt, Alma Blanco, who has lived her entire life in Puerto Rico and is well acquainted with Ricardo Alegría’s scholarly reputation. Neither she nor any other member of my family had ever heard of this museum or of the Museo de Nuestra Raíz Africana. The three of us spent a few hours together in the African Heritage exhibition. During our visit, a few people came in and saw the exhibition, but no one other than my aunt and I spoke at all, making it hard for me to ascertain whether they were local museum visitors or tourists. My aunt and I had engaged the attendants in conversation in our native Puerto Rican Spanish, while I spoke English to my two-year-old son, who eventually grew tired of looking around. Thus, while my personal observation of the museum and its exhibitions yielded little in the way of audience analysis, the afternoon we spent there made for some interesting intergenerational bonding. 4. Quasi-official institutions face considerable obstacles as they try to serve an educational role. Their funding and their success depend upon the goodwill and generosity of the well-to-do, and yet their self-declared mission is to inform and educate those people with less access to, and investment in, literature and the fine arts. While their explicitly didactic mission cannot be dismissed too quickly, particularly in the specific context of the Puerto Rican myth of origin that tends to eclipse or efface the contribution of African slaves to the shaping of the island’s culture and traditions, the limited reach of the museum as a cultural institution is a topic for analysis. The museum’s reverent approach to history is in keeping with the expectations of its two largest constituencies, the cruise ship industry and the local schools, both of which expect this institution to [18.219.236...