The Politics of Display

by Macdonald,Sharon

• ISBN13: 9780415153256
• ISBN10: 0415153255
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-01-22
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

The Politics of Displaybrings together studies of contemporary and historical museum shows and challenges the notion that these exhibitions are politically exempt. For example, what does it mean when the Enola Gay, the aircraft which dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima, is displayed? The contributors to this volume chart the changing relationship between displays and their audience and analyzes the consequent shift in styles of representation towards interactive and multimedia displays. Examples are taken from exhibitions of science, technology and industry, anthropology, geology, natural history and medicine. Contributors include Steven W. Allison-Bunnell, Ken Arnold, Tony Bennett, Thomas F. Gieryn, Penelope Harvey, Sharon Macdonald and Tracy Lang Teslow.

Table of Contents

List of figures	vii	(2)
Notes on contributors	ix	(2)
Preface	xi
1 Exhibitions of power and powers of exhibition: an introduction to the politics of display	1	(24)
Sharon Macdonald
2 Speaking to the eyes: museums, legibility and the social order	25	(11)
Tony Bennett
3 The visibility of difference: nineteenth-century French anthropological collections	36	(17)
Nelia Dias
4 Reifying race: science and art in Races of Mankind at the Field Museum of Natural History	53	(24)
Tracy Lang Teslow
5 Making nature `real' again: natural history exhibits and public rhetorics of science at the Smithsonian Institution in the early 1960s	77	(21)
Steven W. Allison-Bunnell
6 On interactivity: consumers, citizens and culture	98	(20)
Andrew Barry
7 Supermarket science? Consumers and `the public understanding of science'	118	(21)
Sharon Macdonald
8 Nations on display: technology and culture in Expo '92	139	(20)
Penelope Harvey
9 Strangers in paradise: an encounter with fossil man at the Dutch Museum of Natural History	159	(14)
Mary Bouquet
10 Can science museums take history seriously?	173	(10)
Jim Bennett
11 Birth and Breeding: politics on display at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine	183	(14)
Ken Arnold
12 Balancing acts: science, Enola Gay and History Wars at the Smithsonian	197	(32)
Thomas F. Gieryn
Afterword: from war to debate?	229	(8)
Sharon Macdonald
Index	237