Gaelic Gotham”: Decontextualizing the Diaspora

“GAELIC GOTHAM”: DECONTEXTUALIZING THE DIASPORA ALLEN FELDMAN PUBLIC MEMORY AND SOCIAL MEMORY Social memory is not a pre-existing objective thing with which one can make deposits and withdrawals like a bank account. It is constructed and reconstructed with gaps and zones of silence and invisibility. The collective capacity to remember, to preserve, social and cultural experience is mediated by many factors, such as material resources, institutional power, and the stigmatization of experience and identity. Material artifacts can be bearers of social memories; they turn into archeological sitesand accumulate stratigraphies of meanings as they are shifted from one context to another . Museum exhibits rip artifacts out of one context and place them into another that claims provenance and definitional authority. Collections of material artifacts can embody entire selective narratives while disembodying other stories. Exhibitions of historical experience are constructions of public memory and the irony in this is that in the very process of assembling public memory things are forgotten and erased. This is how institutional memory functions. The construction of public memory is an eminently political act, and thus always susceptible to contestation where diverse meanings , different readings of displayed objects can be attached to the same exhibit . Thus, public exhibits have their archaeologies, their secret museums of absence and silence, that it is always our obligation to excavate. If we understand the museum exhibit not as a passive reflection of culture and memory but as the creation of culture and memory then we contribute to, and enhance this process by adding to and reframing what has already been commemorated by official display: think of the Vietnam War memorial. Official memory installs public zones of perceptual amnesia which privatize and thus incarcerate alternate historical memory. Contrapuntal GAELIC GOTHAM: DECONTEXTUALIZING THE DIASPORA 189 memories, sensory experience and stories can be located in the scattered wreckage of the inadmissable: lost biographies, memories, words, pains and faces. This implies that the capacity of memory and experience to achieve collective representation in public culture, is unevenly distributed within systems of economic, racial, ethnic, gender, sexual and cultural inequity. Many museums are currently facing a crisis in method and self reflexivity ; for decades they objectified and represented cultures that were either dead and in the remote past, or geographically distant and thus external to established communication and public discourse networks. Now, members of depicted cultures and societies, such as Native Americans, have acquired a cultural literacy that allows them to answer back to the museum display, to attach their own alternative historical experiences to the exhibit and to voice their own reactions to how their culture is being depicted. This new dialogical context means that museums have to think hard about how and what they display, and have to recognize that the public education dynamics of museum exhibition now extends back to the planning and design process itself. The stakeholders in cultural and historical representation have been expanded beyond the museum staff, the donors, its trustees and enrolled membership. “Gaelic Gotham” is an exhibit that offers us many artifacts that are good to think about, but not necessarily in the way the exhibit would like us to think about them. These objects have their silences, their hidden stratigraphies which the exhibit does little in the way of helping the viewer to access. One silenced layer of that exhibit archaeology is the original design formulated by Marion Casey. Casey proposed an interpretive framework focusing on the difference or slippage between the construction of Irish-American ethnicity in the public sphere and the private practice of Irish identity and culture. For Casey the Irish, as postcolonial survivors, were cultural code switchers, agile in negotiating the dominant society with its clichés, prejudices and stigmas and yet able to retain a diverging yet coherent ethnicity in those social spaces where dominant nativist ideologies did not prevail, such as Gaelic speaking, pub life, and the performance of traditional Irish music. For Casey this public/private dichotomy was a mixed blessing. The public culture of Irishness, such as the St. Patrick’s day parade, was crucial to the securing of economic and political legitimacy in New York, while the private sphere enabled the replication of indigenous Irish cultural practice...