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• Acknowledgments List of Museums Visited List of Abbreviations Introduction: Desegregating the Past
• 1. Memory Entrepreneurs: History in the Making
• 2. The Curated Past: Remembering the Collective
• 3. Managing Collective Representations
• 4. Memory Deviants: Breaking the Collective Conclusion: Museumification of Memory Notes Selected Bibliography Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

At the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, visitors confront the past upon arrival. They must decide whether to enter the museum through a door marked "whites" or another marked "non-whites." Inside, along with text, they encounter hanging nooses and other reminders of apartheid-era atrocities. In the United States, museum exhibitions about racial violence and segregation are mostly confined to black history museums, with national history museums sidelining such difficult material. Even the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture is dedicated not to violent histories of racial domination but to a more generalized narrative about black identity and culture. The scale at which violent racial pasts have been incorporated into South African national historical narratives is lacking in the U.S. Desegregating the Past considers why this is the case, tracking the production and display of historical representations of racial pasts at museums in both countries and what it reveals about underlying social anxieties, unsettled emotions, and aspirations surrounding contemporary social fault lines around race. Robyn Autry consults museum archives, conducts interviews with staff, and recounts the public and private battles fought over the creation and content of history museums. Despite vast differences in the development of South African and U.S. society, Autry finds a common set of ideological, political, economic, and institutional dilemmas arising out of the selective reconstruction of the past. Museums have played a major role in shaping public memory, at times recognizing and at other times blurring the ongoing influence of historical crimes. The narratives museums produce to engage with difficult, violent histories expose present anxieties concerning identity, (mis)recognition, and ongoing conflict.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Introduction: Making history memorable--
• 1. Translating the past: Apartheid monuments in post-apartheid South Africa--
• 2. Robben Island: Site of memory / Site of nation--
• 3. Mixed histories: District six--
• 4. New histories for old: Museological strategies--
• 5. New histories for old: The place of "ethnicity" in the "New" South Africa--
• 6. New subjectivities for the new Nation-- Epilogue: Changing places.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

The democratic election of Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa in 1994 marked the demise of apartheid and the beginning of a new struggle to define the nation's past. "History After Apartheid" analyzes how, in the midst of the momentous shift to an inclusive democracy, South Africa's visual and material culture represented the past while at the same time contributing to the very process of social transformation. Considering attempts to invent and recover historical icons and narratives, art historian Annie E Coombes examines how strategies for embodying different models of historical knowledge and experience are negotiated in public culture - in monuments, museums and contemporary fine art. "History After Apartheid" explores the dilemmas posed by a wide range of visual and material culture including key South African heritage sites.How prominent should Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress be in the museum at the infamous political prison on Robben Island? How should the post-apartheid government deal with the Voortrekker Monument mythologizing the Boer Trek of 1838? Coombes highlights the contradictory investment in these sites among competing constituencies and the tensions involved in the rush to produce new histories for the 'new' South Africa. She reveals how artists and museum officials struggled to adequately represent painful and difficult histories ignored or disavowed under apartheid - including slavery, homelessness and the attempted destruction of KhoiSan hunter-gatherers. Describing how contemporary South African artists address historical memory and the ambiguities uncovered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Coombes illuminates a body of work dedicated to the struggle to simultaneously remember the past and move forward into the future.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

• Acknowledgments List of Museums Visited List of Abbreviations Introduction: Desegregating the Past
• 1. Memory Entrepreneurs: History in the Making
• 2. The Curated Past: Remembering the Collective
• 3. Managing Collective Representations
• 4. Memory Deviants: Breaking the Collective Conclusion: Museumification of Memory Notes Selected Bibliography Index.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

At the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg, South Africa, visitors confront the past upon arrival. They must decide whether to enter the museum through a door marked "whites" or another marked "non-whites." Inside, along with text, they encounter hanging nooses and other reminders of apartheid-era atrocities. In the United States, museum exhibitions about racial violence and segregation are mostly confined to black history museums, with national history museums sidelining such difficult material. Even the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture is dedicated not to violent histories of racial domination but to a more generalized narrative about black identity and culture. The scale at which violent racial pasts have been incorporated into South African national historical narratives is lacking in the U.S. Desegregating the Past considers why this is the case, tracking the production and display of historical representations of racial pasts at museums in both countries and what it reveals about underlying social anxieties, unsettled emotions, and aspirations surrounding contemporary social fault lines around race. Robyn Autry consults museum archives, conducts interviews with staff, and recounts the public and private battles fought over the creation and content of history museums. Despite vast differences in the development of South African and U.S. society, Autry finds a common set of ideological, political, economic, and institutional dilemmas arising out of the selective reconstruction of the past. Museums have played a major role in shaping public memory, at times recognizing and at other times blurring the ongoing influence of historical crimes. The narratives museums produce to engage with difficult, violent histories expose present anxieties concerning identity, (mis)recognition, and ongoing conflict.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)