Diversitet og museale heterotopier: om naturalisering og nationalisering af kulturel diversitet i migrantnationer

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In old nation states as the Scandinavian a current agenda is to bring cultural diversity into the museums in order to break up the mono-cultural (whether national or local) narrative, and as such to undermine the formation and solidification of nation-states that the proliferation of museums in the nineteenth century was undoubtedly closely bound up with. Especially migration has in the twenty-first century challenged the traditional grand narratives of national heritage and unity materialized in museums. However, when turning to settler- or migrant-nations this agenda is turned upside down. Discussing examples from museums in New York and Sydney and their way of dealing with migrant identities and indigenous people, the paper argues that also cultural diversity can be naturalized, normalized, or even nationalized as cultural heritage. In this alternative grand narrative indigenous people risk ending up as an anomaly or internal ‘other’. These complex dynamics of cultural diversity and musealising practices are finally discussed in the perspective of the foucauldian notion of heterotopias.
Original languageDanish
JournalNordisk Museologi
Volume2012
Issue number2
Pages (from-to)33-46
Number of pages13
ISSN1103-8152
Publication statusPublished - 2012

ID: 44197784