Museums and the cultural politics of displaying the nation to the world

Abstract

Focusing on the way nationalist imperatives and cosmopolitan ambitions fold into each other in the making of museum spaces in seven cities across the globe, Artifacts and Allegiances provides an intriguing comparative narrative of museum practices which takes into account the broader differences in social, demographic and historical contexts. Based primarily on interviews with museum professionals, academics and policymakers, the approach favours the production of meanings and representations from above, as opposed to the telling of stories from below. A consideration of multiple readings, appropriations and contestations across different scales would afford us a more dynamic view of the cultural politics that animate the ways in which museums display the nation to the world and draw the world into the nation.