Transforming Museums: Mounting Queen Victoria in a Democratic South Africa (review)

This is an engaging account of the major political and social changes that museums have had to face in South Africa with the transition from apartheid to democracy. Museums in the twentieth century were institutional exemplars of nation-building and the making of citizenship. In South Africa, these characteristics made them acutely visible markers of the changes that took place in the 1990s with the unraveling of white minority domination and the institutional and ideological apparatuses that underpinned it. This unraveling raised fundamental issues of representation in the question of how to transform these museum structures in content and formats that would address and relate to nonwhite audiences, who had long been physically excluded and ideologically alienated from such institutions. Steven C. Dubin has visited South Africa regularly since the 1990s, and, as a professional art historian, is an interested observer and commentator on these processes of change, enhanced by an impressively large number of interviews with different protagonists within these museum worlds. In the process, he offers much interesting and valuable information on the fault lines underlying changes within the museum that raise questions about the making of displays and representations, localized and national collective identities, and memories—or rather, the active processes of remembering, with its contested relationships between the past and the present for different constituencies in South Africa. It is such issues that these museums have had to engage with head-on in the forging of a newly democratized and accountable consensus on the role of museums within a short period of time. As a survey, this book holds up a mirror to some of these issues, and indeed dilemmas, that are posed to museum professionals in South Africa, but they have a wider relevance where the paradigms of national and regional museums are being reshaped within a postcolonial and globalized environment, in which the accumulation of material culture and their positionings as vehicles of representation are held to account in terms of acquisition, display, and audiences addressed. Steven C. Dubin centers his book on these themes, utilizing an eclectic number of qualitatively different museum examples. These include national museums, such as the South African Museum, which presents cultural and natural history; iconic sites of the recent changes in the South African nation-state, such as Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, which Dubin contrasts with the Voortrekker Monument, attesting the transition of Afrikaner identity from political dominance to a now localized context; the national and local art galleries, such as the Johannesburg Art Gallery and the Tatham Art gallery; and community-oriented projects, such as the Hector Pieterson Museum, commemorating the student uprisings at Soweto in 1976. In offering salient comparisons and contrasts among museums, Dubin draws out the complex struggles of museum institutions to exhibit in ways that relate to and inevitably shape the new configurations and repertoires of collective memory. These new modes of representation are shaped by the dependence of museums on the support of a changed South African polity, critical of their past roles during the apartheid era. Adding to the cultural and political mix is the diversity of audiences that are a fragmented product of the apartheid era and the rapidly changing social and political landscape. Dubin is highly effective in presenting this kaleidoscope of change and possibilities in postapartheid South Africa; however, the engaging and vivid authorial tone that he adopts perhaps captures less well the complexities of that past. In the main body of the text, there is no clear delineation of the ways in which nonwhite South Africans were classified into a racialized array of categories by the apartheid state—legal criteria that it deployed to underpin its imposition of inequalities. Dubin's textual strategy relies on personalized narratives to sketch out its discursive formations, set up by an endnote (number 60, p. 272) in the first chapter to outline his formal positioning, a note that should perhaps be in the main text. These narratives make...