Museums have a broad mandate to curate and tell the official, state-sanctioned story of a collective and linear national history.Annabelle Gordon/Reuters
Debra Thompson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Earlier this week, U.S. President Donald Trump posted on social media that the Smithsonian institution, a complex of 21 museums, 14 education and research centres, and the National Zoo in Washington D.C., was “OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been – Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future.” This condemnation follows a letter he sent to the Smithsonian last week announcing a comprehensive internal review of the National Museums of American History, Natural History, African American History and Culture, the National Portrait Gallery, and other selected museums and exhibitions to ensure compliance with Executive Order 14253, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”
Museums, with their broad mandates to curate and tell the official, state-sanctioned story of a collective and linear national history, were bound to be a target sooner or later. In his seminal 1983 book on nationalism, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson identified museums, alongside maps and the census, as one of the key instruments at the state’s disposal for shaping national imaginaries. By cataloguing artifacts and arranging them into a coherent story of the past, museums curate complicated and contradictory histories into a single narrative that makes the emergence of the nation seem timeless and its progress inevitable.
To this most recent attempt to first condemn and then reframe and redirect critical cultural influences in American life, we could add many others. In February, Mr. Trump fired the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and installed himself as the new chair of a governing body comprised entirely of his own appointees. That same month, the National Archives and Records Management Agency’s head archivist, Colleen Shogan, was also fired and its senior staff pushed out by Trump appointees. In May, Mr. Trump fired the librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, because she and her work “did not fit the needs of the American people.” And executive order 14253 allowed the Secretary of the Interior to reinstate memorials, monuments, and statues that had been removed or changed after January, 2020, “to perpetuate a false reconstruction of American history.”
These are both political and symbolic moves. And, to a certain extent, making the contestation over national symbols a key strategy in the culture wars is taking a page out of the left’s playbook. The Trump administration is just doing it faster, with greater confidence and less consultation, with little regard for long-term consequences.
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Mr. Trump accused the nation’s museums of becoming too “woke,” presumably under the Obama and Biden administrations. But the “New Museology” tradition has a longer trajectory and was rarely led by political elites. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural institutions were pushed by social movements to confront whose histories they highlight and whose they erase. What followed was not a top-down, coordinated political agenda, but rather a slow, uneven shift in the professional practice of curators, as civil society demanded a rethinking of what is considered part of the canon and a reckoning with what it means for cultural institutions to truly represent the nation and its complicated, often violent history.
It is often said that history is written by the victors. In his 1995 book Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues that collective memory is not fixed; it is forged. National narratives are curated through a malleable process shaped as much by remembrance and reverence as erasure and forgetting. Over the past few decades, progressives have found ways to revise national stories to include those who were once marginalized and excluded. Conservatives now seek to do the same, but with the added force of the presidency, able to swiftly, decisively, unilaterally dismantle changes that were never truly hegemonic to begin with.
Yet national museums, libraries, archives, and performing arts centres remain the capillaries of state power. They are neither the beginning nor the end of the cultural sphere, which has long been animated most auspiciously by those on the margins. As Richard Iton wrote in his 2008 book, In Search of the Black Fantastic, when the excluded were locked out of legislatures, banks and bureaucracies, they instead infiltrated and redefined the realm of popular culture, creating vibrant counter-publics that operate alongside, against, and often in subterfuge of the formal political sphere.
There will always be efforts to control the narrative of the American nation – through curricula, history books, university campuses, museums, monuments, and even the names of mountains. Sometimes they will succeed, but never fully. When folks on the margins were written out of the official histories of the nation, we told our own stories in our own ways, and those stories survived to bear witness to a resurgence. Art lives in the realm of ideas, discourse, culture and identity: powerful, collective forces that cannot be eliminated by presidential decree.