ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the 2019 exhibitions Home: A Suburban Obsession and Plantation Voices. Both exhibitions were held at the Queensland State Library in Brisbane and both relied heavily on the persuasive power of photographic archives. Home explored the history of Queensland suburbia from the 1910s to the present; Plantation Voices recounted the labour trade of South Sea Islanders in the late nineteenth century and their subsequent struggle for cultural and political recognition. Both exhibitions celebrated subaltern working-class identities: Home aimed to give voice to ‘the hopes and dreams of every day Queenslanders who made the country’ while Plantation Voices acknowledged ‘the human stories behind the repatriation, repression and reclamation of Australian South Sea Islanders’.
Using a plethora of participatory devices and celebrating vernacular material culture, both exhibitions epitomise the ‘performative model of education’ that, according to Dipesh Chakrabarty, reflects the multiculturalism of late democracies. However, despite their democratic impulse, Home and Plantation Voices tended to defuse the tensions of class and racial politics. By narrating these two working-class stories separately, I argue, the Museum inadvertently reified working-class identities; it emphasised race at the expense of class and obliterated the intersectional dimension of these categories. In fact, none of the ‘ordinary’ Queenslanders interviewed in Home were indigenous or black; likewise, Plantation Voices devoted scant attention to the relation between South Sea Islanders and the white people who were employed in Queensland farms and mines. Consequently, the Museum discouraged the construction of solidarities and alliances between white and non-white working-class groups. In light of these observations, these case studies prompt us to rethink Chakrabarty’s analysis of the role of museums in late democracies, considering the ideological limits of photographic exhibitions that aim to write working-class history.
