ABSTRACT
National Museums is the first book to explore the national museum as a cultural institution in a range of contrasting national contexts. Composed of new studies of countries that rarely make a showing in the English-language studies of museums, this book reveals how these national museums have been used to create a sense of national self, place the nation in the arts, deal with the consequences of political change, remake difficult pasts, and confront those issues of nationalism, ethnicity and multiculturalism which have come to the fore in national politics in recent decades.
National Museums combines research from both leading and new researchers in the fields of history, museum studies, cultural studies, sociology, history of art, media studies, science and technology studies, and anthropology. It is an interrogation of the origins, purpose, organisation, politics, narratives and philosophies of national museums.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part 1|66 pages
Introductions and Reflections
chapter 2|26 pages
Explaining National Museums
part 2|138 pages
Origins and Ideologies
chapter 4|19 pages
Loading Guns with Patriotic Love
chapter 5|17 pages
Narrative and Imagination
chapter 8|13 pages
Producing an Art History of the Nation
part 3|150 pages
Museology and Participation
chapter 16|18 pages
Same Exhibitions, Different Labels?
chapter 19|12 pages
The Dutch National Historical Museum
chapter 20|14 pages
Who Authors the Nation?
chapter 21|16 pages
Recounting History
part 4|111 pages
Ourselves and Others