ABSTRACT
In discussing the Coalition for the Truth about Africa (CFTA), I want to emphasize theoretical issues such as performance, power, resistance, and process. These concepts are useful for understanding people as agents or subjects in their own history. In a broad sense, anthropologists focus on performance in order to explain relationships between human action and the enduring social structure. What is the lasting impact, for example, when protestors demonstrate against the ROM and Into the Heart of Africa? The anthropology of performance stresses the productive aspect of such an encounter, focusing on how the protestors contested and redefined dominant symbols. 1 In this sense, culture is not a thing to be exhibited, but rather a “meaningful way of being in the world” (Kondo 1990: 300). Considering that museums are sites where images of the “self” and the “other” are articulated, it is not surprising that they can become focal points for struggles over defining the shape of public culture. It is no exaggeration to say that the protests of Into the Heart of Africa addressed large questions such as how public culture and knowledge are defined and controlled in a multicultural context like Toronto.
