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A844 - Preparatory Reading

Book:

Boswell, D. & Evans, J. (Eds.) (1999) Representing The Nation: A Reader Oxford, Routledge

DEALING WITH THIS ANTHOLOGY AS PREPARATION.

What are the books key themes and narratives?

I think reading the complete set of essays within this would not be a good means of preparation.

1.      It is the Reader of a Cultural and Media Studies OU MA course from 1999.

2.      Whilst obviously full of great stuff, the best preparation I felt was just to have a nodding acquaintance with the content titles and have read the Introduction & section introductions, since this carries the kind of master narrative of the course from which it derives. This master narrative will not necessarily be that of A844 but I wanted to be aware of it.

3.      The key themes are in the section titles:

4.      They are:

a.      Culture, community, nation p. 9ff.

b.      Representing the past as heritage and consuming that heritage 109ff.

c.      Museums as classificatory systems & their prehistories 233ff.

d.      Museums and cultural management 363ff.

How does it reflect on A843 themes?

Section 4c & d rehearse, even with some of the same voices (Duncan & Wallach, Clifford) the Block material on institutions, although there is more about links to monumentalism and nation in dealing with museums and some greater awareness of class fears related to display and exhibition. Education is a focused theme based on taxonomies. The 2^nd section looks as though it points us to the use of museums as places of co-operative and collaborative learning (‘intercultural encounter 369) rather than top-down varieties. Some of the ‘geographies material in Block 4 would be consumed in 4a & b.

How do I predict that it might foreshadow A844 themes?

The master narrative of the book is reliant on Benedict Anderson – see link below (1, 13) and it may (sob!) be the case that the coverage of this is a sufficient knowledge of that book. However, some key terms are interpreted usefully. The nation is analysed as ‘a symbolic community’ (hence ‘imagined’). The job of meaning-making that transforms nation and community into meanings is ‘culture’ (1, 2). Culture is reduced to ‘images’ and narratives (2). Hence there is a link here to images section of A844. There is a concern with making-meaning by creating ‘myths of origin’ (4) as in Schama.

There is a discussion of art-history that locates it as an academic discourse limited by its histories and taxonomies (especially periodisation & style) in line with the ideological limitations of other bourgeois academic discourses (7).

The danger of such myths is their unified perspective and teleological direction. The answer in these essays is I believe hinted to be seeing ‘histories’ (including of art) as multiple not unitary (13, 113). The fear of mass or subaltern interest in museums is their potential alternative reading of history (turned into fear of display) and this is manifest in class and race bias (237 exhibitionary complex & 237 racism of the Chicago Exposition).

How does the book relate to the analysis of art and architecture?

Any other points!

Through key terms which bridge those discussions – nation, monumentalism, notion of heroism, art as national policy (365) and changing role of market in state function (368).

The key message is that meanings (images and narratives) potentially taken away from the art gallery will not assume the hegemony of one meaning imposed by enculturation in a discipline such as art history (369) and this will need to be confronted as a debate still with us – though this book derives from 1999.