Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

From the Editor

2012; Wiley; Volume: 55; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.2151-6952.2012.00147.x

2151-6952

Zahava D. Doering,

This issue begins with David Fleming’s thought provoking recounting of the origins of the Federation of International Human Rights Museums (FIHRM), a story that forms the background to this special issue of Curator: The Museum Journal on human rights. He invites us to join FIHRM and the museums it represents in harnessing the power of museums to fight for human rights. Other articles here are drawn from talks and papers given at FIHRM’s second annual conference, held last October in Liverpool, U.K. They tell stories from New Zealand (Jasmine Tunstall), Vietnam (Van Nguyen Thi Bich), Malawi (Mike Gondwe), and South Africa (Bonita Bennett). These articles vividly address issues of gender inequity, HIV/AIDS, and the dislocation, marginalization, and dehumanization of people and cultures. The conference, which I attended, made it clear that addressing human rights is not—and should not be—the work of isolated museums focused on that topic. Rather, all of our museums, even those working in other subject-matter silos, need to confront issues of racial prejudice and segregation, hunger, and inequity or inequality. Canadians Jennifer A. Orange and Jennifer J. Carter spell out this message, and some of its implications for museum practice, in another conference-based article. Not all of the articles originated at the 2011 FIHRM conference. Lonnie G. Bunch, III, founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Institution and a member of FIHRM’s International Council, gave us permission to print his moving speech from the museum’s ground breaking ceremony last February. Janet Kamien’s “Sites of Memory: Argentina” and Phillip Seitz’s “No More White History” were the result of editors’ correspondence with the authors about “sites of memory.” Both Lonnie and Phillip remind us that divisive racial issues can neither be forgotten nor buried, while Janet’s personal account of visits to sites honoring the victims of state-sponsored terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s echoes a warning we heard from Ken Walibora Waliaula about a nation’s remembering and disremembering (purposive forgetting) in the previous issue of Curator: The Museum Journal (volume 55 issue 2, pages 113–127). Daniel Friedberg and Diana Alderoqui Pinus had already completed a revision of their article “The Peace Labyrinth: An Interactive Exhibition on Conflict Resolution,” as we began gathering this issue. We heard of Patrik Steorn’s work through Nancy Proctor, our digital editor, and Patrik rose to the challenge of a tight deadline. Theano Moussouri, books editor, and Kate Flinner, editorial assistant, matched reviewers and books on topics relevant to our theme, with interesting results. One memory from the FIHRM conference stands out among many humbling experiences. The conference was held at the International Slavery Museum, at whose entrance stands a sculpture titled Freedom! It was constructed from empty cans, car parts, rusted springs, and other objects found in the slums of Haiti’s capital by a group of Haitian artists, Andre Eugene, Jean-Herard Celeur, and (Guyodo) Frantz Jacques, affiliated with the Atis Rezistans movement in Port-au-Prince. Mario Benjamin, an internationally known Haitian artist, served as artistic director for the sculpture project. The sculpture represents Haitians’ continuing struggle for freedom and human rights and was commissioned on the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade five years ago. I found it to be a powerful reminder that the work we do in museums is grounded in ethical traditions, not just aesthetic or scholarly ones—traditions that lead directly to the values of inclusivity and community. We have the capacity to touch people’s lives in remarkably powerful ways and even help some of them change their sense of themselves. But in order to do that, we need to see our jobs as something more than simply displaying and interpreting. We need a vision of activism. The public appears ready to participate in that vision with us. In assembling this issue, I have tried to convey my belief that museums and those who lead them can make people their practice—can help their users, and even casual visitors, see that change is necessary, and infuse them with the hope that it can be accomplished. The editors and authors welcome your comments on this special issue at http://www.curatorjournal.org.