LESLIE WITZ
The first impetus for this chapter was the symposium of selected professional practitioners of world history convened under the auspices of the World History Network and the World History Association in Boston in 2006. Given calls to move World History out of its dominant location in the US academy and the ever-present crisis over what constitutes its field of study, the symposium’s organizers set a seemingly ambitious task to define a disciplinary “research agenda.” It became clear, though, that what was being sought was not a statement of consensus or direction, but rather a series of indications that research, writing and institutional organization of world history as a field might possibly take up (Christian et al.: 2–3, 12–13). For all this hesitancy there was an underlying prospect for world history that was continually evoked and sought: expansion of the field of practitioners, the archive and research themes. The general trend was always towards accumulative possibilities, to make “room for” and take “stock of different approaches to world history” within and outside the academy, leading perhaps to an “International Historiography Research Cluster” and an extension of the spatial and temporal scales of research. With such expansion there was the expectation that “interdisciplinary challenges” would open up, “novel insights” would materialize and “comparative themes” emerge (Christian et al.: 12–15). In effect, the priorities of world history research that were articulated were ones of creating abundance as a vehicle to revitalize the field and face disciplinary challenges.
In participating in these proceedings I felt like a little bit of a charlatan. Although I had taught world history in the 1990s at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa, in a first-year course entitled “The Making of the Modern World,” my major area of research and teaching had turned to public history. In my short presentation, “World heritage and the challenges to world history,” I tried to bring these concerns together by arguing for analyses of the different ways and means by which world heritage is produced, how notions of “world” come to be constituted in the public domain, and how claims to universality are made. But the more I reflected on my own presentation and listened to others the greater my sense of unease that the prospect of “unlimited accumulation” was being presented as a model to “compensate for lack” (Rogoff 2002: 64). These processes of accumulation and incorporation were no guarantees of developing pathways that would inaugurate new and different pasts. How could I rethink a meeting between public history and world history that would not replicate this problem? This chapter is an attempt to set up such a meeting where it may be possible to enable movement away from a framework of accrual. I attempt to unlock the “world” and “history” from their moorings, and rather than seeking to situate them spatially, place them in a state of permanent tension by opening up a set of engagements around public pasts. This is not to stake a claim for a public history of world history that concerns itself with popularization, audiences and inclusion, but rather to question framings and methodologies, “clearing the ground” (Lalu 2008: 277) to reformulate the constitutions of world histories. The “world” of these histories neither denotes global linkages nor is it an ever-expanding incorporative spatial domain but refers to sites of appropriation and association in a range of productive settings where meanings are generated, transmitted, altered and contested. What becomes significant in this state of instability is how worlds and their pasts come “to be defined and re-defined … negotiated, circulated and contested” in and between public and academic locales (Witz and Rassool 2008:15).
Defending History
Perhaps a way to begin proposing such a meeting is to think through, admittedly from an outsider’s perspective, the uneasy relationships which both public history and world history have with the category of history as a “professional” pursuit, particularly within the US academy. Public history in the United States primarily has concerned itself with issues of audiences and accessibility, of taking the methods and results of research beyond the confines of universities. With history defined through “outreach,” what has come under scrutiny from within the discipline are whether the methodology and a commitment to striving for objectivity can be retained when the key interest is with audiences. The initiation of public history programs at universities, establishing the National Council on Public History, and the founding of a journal, The Public Historian, are all endeavors to claim public history as a serious, professional pursuit (Stanton 2006: 8–13). World history seems to have faced similar challenges. The overall objective is to develop a “wide-angle historical lens,” that investigates “large-scale historical processes” and seeks to connect the local to the global.1As with public history, many of its concerns have been with history beyond the academy, particularly in high schools, where survey courses that used to be categorized as “Western Civilization” are taught. It is as a result of this association with survey courses at high schools, community colleges and universities, with a constant seeking for linkages and relationships across vast regions, and sometimes a lack of intense, in-depth archival research, the supposed hallmarks of “real” history, that world history is placed in a very uneasy relationship with the academy and causes great anxiety about its objectives (Maracas 2006: 203–205). The World History Association, graduate programs in world history and the Journal of World History have over the last 20 years all sought to stake a claim for world history as an academic, respectable, specific field of research and analysis.
These assertions of professional pursuit have gone beyond the institutional terrain into insisting that historical methodologies remain the foundations of these enterprises. In public history this has been articulated to distinguish it from a category labeled as “heritage,” where it is claimed that many who entered the latter field gave up “their search for objective truth,” “surrendered their claims of expertise” and transferred “responsibility from the profession to the marketplace for determining whose version of history is most ‘real.’” According to the president of the National Council on Public History in 2006, Robert Weible (2006: 14–15), while public history was a “movement” that concerned itself with making history meaningful outside the bounds of the academy, it had to adhere to the principles of “professional scrutiny,” and present a past reality that was as dispassionate as possible. As “historians with a purpose” the public historians had to constantly maintain the dual objectives of public service and professional responsibility.
Weible’s position on service and responsibility is not necessarily one on which there is consensus. Many public historians prefer to employ Michael Frisch’s (1990) concept of “shared authority,” where, to varying degrees, audiences, communities and organizations contribute with professionally trained historians in the construction of histories and meanings in the public domain. Sometimes this may lead to more meaningful engagements where there are constant struggles and negotiations over the temporal and spatial alignments of history in the intersections between the academy and a variety of stakeholders. But what still remains in place is a historian/audience dichotomy, where it is the historians who represent themselves as searching for “complexity” and “ambiguity,” in contrast to those who seek singular and monolithic narratives for their audiences. The latter are attributed to forces like the heritage industry, globalization, multiculturalism, national states, political interests and tourist imperatives, where seemingly easy fits and simplistic narratives are generated to accord with specific interests (Walkowitz and Knauer 2009). So “the distinctions remain firmly in place. The public of this public history is already constituted, and the purpose of public history is to ‘thicken,’ ‘deepen’ and critically expand what is perceived as a thin, mythic, romanticized sentimental past at local levels from a professionally derived source.” In effect, “the ‘sharing of authority’ is the production of authority” (Minkley et al. 2009: 18–19).
Similarly for many world historians in the academy it is the collection and interpretation of evidence that is held as sacrosanct in sustaining what is designated as the “profession.” Most vociferously articulated by Jerry Bentley (2008: 137–139), the editor of theJournal of World History, at stake is something he calls “a continuing obligation” by world historians “to base their work on the best available historical evidence.” He sees it as the “task for all historians,” as they seek to expand their regional and temporal frameworks, to strike a “balance between the interests of historical meaning and professional demands for historical precision.” While recognizing that world history can, and indeed should, encourage a variety of different perspectives, starting points, theoretical frameworks and objects of focus, the appeal to “foster and facilitate the articulation of multiple perspectives on the global past” is firmly located in advancing and increasing “the value of professional history” that “opens itself to examination and criticism from all angles” (Bentley 2005: 76). Meanings, connections and frameworks would be placed within the methodologies of history as a profession in order to form what Bentley calls the “canon of world history.”2
There are several calls for world history to move away from universalizing frameworks that subsume locality and its knowledges. Bentley, alert to such critiques, has suggested an “ecumenical world history” where expansive temporal and spatial scales, rather than presenting a “totalizing metanarrative,” can provide important historical contexts and cross-cultural understandings. A major concern is how, and indeed whether, academic historians can present interpretive pasts in different frameworks that do not coincide with the sometimes linear and circumscribed “Western” temporal and spatial models. Joseph Miller (2005) has argued for a multicentered approach to history that would destabilize “Western” models of society and progress that are often presented as universal. “My ‘world history,’” writes Miller, would bring together “meaningful worlds in a multi-centric history of balanced, engaged autonomous strivings and misunderstandings.” The starting point for this history would be the particular locality and “personal biographies of the people who made – and continue to make – history happen in Africa (or anywhere else!).” It would then proceed to build “multiple histories” by showing the “diverse strategies” which “drew on the broader contexts, or proceeded innocently of them while nonetheless being part of them.” Dirlik (2005: 409) takes this a step further to argue that given the existence of different notions of the world and history, the only way to do world history is to do historiography. This is not merely a historiography of “taking stock” (Christian et al. 2008: 13) as a component of world history but an account of “different conceptualizations of the world” and importantly “different ways of conceiving the past.”
Bentley’s suggestion of ecumenical world history, Miller’s call for history that is centered at a multiplicity of sites, and, to a lesser extent, Dirlik’s notion of world history as historiography, remain very much reliant upon assertions of history as profession with a series of distinct modes of operation. Bentley’s (2005: 78) ecumenical world history is one that relies upon an “empirical narrative” that constructs “empirical realities of global human experience.” Miller’s invocation of different knowledges is one for better and more nuanced disciplinary history that has as its starting point local knowledges and histories. In effect, for Miller, this is history that does not need the appellation of “world” to signify its operation of seeking multiple, specific, diverging and converging contexts. In Dirlik’s (2005: 410) call for world history as historiography, there is a much greater sense of presenting a disciplinary challenge that goes beyond the “who, where, when” (and I would add the why). Instead it takes shifting and different spatializations and temporalities seriously, argues for their historicization and accounts for “processes of commonality and difference, unity and fragmentation, and patterns in motion of homogeneity and heterogeneity.” Yet, what this operation of historicization would entail, beyond changes over time, is not clearly spelt out by Dirlik. It is almost as if there is a historical context in waiting that needs to be made available in order to destabilize and question prevalent explanatory frameworks that use categories of time and space as if they are immutable. In this project it is “the evidence of the past in all its prolific variation including variation over the meaning of the world and of history” that is advocated as world history’s recovery project. This, though, is not a call for history that will smooth the contradictions. Instead it would help elucidate how the past becomes usable, showing changes in modes of action and representation (Dirlik 1999: 30).
World history and public history therefore meet each other as constantly attempting to secure and mark their space as academic pursuits by adhering to professional standards. What tends to be elided in staking these claims, though, is a concern over one of the most powerful settings where the world is made, the discipline of history. This is where claims to authority are asserted through rules of evidence, the structures of narration and the invocation of precedent (sometimes called historiography). Although almost always presented as tentative and constantly approaching (but never finding) realities, these operations provide the security for history-as-discipline, seemingly located beyond the operations of power. Yet, as many postcolonial critics have pointed out, these processes of knowledge formation do not only emerge from histories of violence and subjection (particularly of colonialism), but sustain a methodological structuring that continues to draw upon its modes of silencing and speaking as authoritative. A much more cautious and less programmatic response would possibly be to seek ways to disavow the foundational narratives of history, continually interrogate how its disciplinarity is constituted, examine how history creates its events, subjects, contexts and worlds, and critique the forms of power that both maintain and are maintained by the discipline. In effect, this would mean doing not less history but “more histories of concepts, discourses, representations, narratives and formations of subjectivities” (Lalu 2009: 258–259). One way to try and accomplish this would be to set up a different type of meeting between world history and public history that instead of seeking to secure their respective positions presents the possibilities of constantly challenging the structures, modalities, authorities and limits of the discipline.
Revisiting Public History
To set up this meeting I want to return to public history and take a somewhat different approach. Instead of twinning professional/public with responsibility/service I want to suggest a notion of public history that always questions expertise and thinks of public, not as audience, but as existing “only by virtue of address.” One important aspect of making public discourse is that in order to constantly reconstitute itself it has to develop a poetic that “must characterize the world in which it attempts to circulate and it must attempt to realize that world through address” (Warner 2002: 87, 113–114). With audiences not self-evident, the key issue for public historians is not how to convey knowledge to the public but rather how to redefine one’s practice in a field where one’s “expertise … is constantly being challenged, shaped and re-shaped” and “the mystique of scientific knowledge” (Rassool 2006: 307) is under severe pressure.
With Ciraj Rassool, I have argued that this notion, of engagement with publics as a series of transactions “where knowledge is negotiated and mediated,” forces us to “rethink of our practices as historians and history educators” (Witz and Rassool 2008: 11–12). A productive concept to employ for these knowledge transactions is the idea of “museum frictions” proposed by Kratz and Karp (2006: 2) to explain contestations both within and outside the institutional bounds of the museum and how these impact upon each other. These frictions, they maintain, occur when “disparate communities, interests, goals and perspectives … produce debates, tensions, collaborations, [and] conflicts of many sorts.” Following this, Rassool and I have noted that a similar set of contests arise with historical practices as “claims to knowledge are asserted, substantiated and articulated across an ever increasing wider-range of communities and institutions.” These “ongoing negotiations where different and competing narratives, claims and priorities come up against each other” we refer to as “history frictions.” In effect “the historian has constantly to negotiate and mediate between histories across a range of disparate domains, genres and interests to … ‘make history’” (Witz and Rassool 2008: 12–13).
It is from this vantage of engaged contested public history that I suggest that a starting point for a meeting between public history and world history might be a consideration of histories where plurality is all-important. This is not the same as different interpretations of events past but rather that history practiced in academic settings is only one of many “multiple locations of historical knowledge” (Cohen 1994: 23) where different methodologies are used to process a range of pasts with their own genres of knowledge formation. Public inscriptions of and upon the landscape of pasts are means of producing history rather than sources of evidence for past events. In all these different locations one can then begin to examine how these different histories generate “representations and attribute value,” through “notions of what the world is or should be” (Lidchi 1997: 160). The tasks of this meeting with public history would be then to think through the “politics of representation” where there are “debates about how particular topics, perspectives, and images become prominent, how their depictions are formed and interpreted, and the social relations and inequalities reproduced through representational practices, including their institutional settings” (Kratz 2002: 220).
Although the word “world” is used here in the same sense as public rather than a spatial and/or temporal location, bringing the idea of world as an unstable, constantly addressed and readdressed public to “world history” may perhaps be a way to initiate the type of meeting I am proposing. Sometimes this may be a world that does make associations with assertions to universal, global, and international meanings and values. At other times that world may be one that is much more circumscribed but at the same time claims a wider imaginary unity called “the public” (Warner 2002: 114–117). To examine and analyze “world history” would therefore entail a consideration of the representation and circulation of public address to selected pasts as history.
But these movements and representations of worlds and their pasts do not emerge of their own accord. This opens up for exploration how these different sites of history-making are constituted, their various codes and conventions and how they articulate with each other so that “in approaching the ‘production of history’ one is also approaching history as production” (Cohen 1994: 23). Control, limitations, structuring, excisions, conventions and past histories are all significant components of the production of history. This would include
the organizing sociologies of historicizing projects and events, including commemoration, the structuring of frames of record-keeping, the culturally specific glossing of texts, the deployment of powerfully nuanced vocabularies, the confronting of patterns and forces underlying interpretation, the workings of audience in managing and responding to presentations of historical knowledge, and the contentions and struggles which evoke and produce texts and which also produce historical literatures. (Cohen, 1994: 245)
Rather than presenting a narrative that seeks linkages and associations, and instead highlighting the different versions or fragments of histories, there is an emphasis on the looking for the unresolved, for history as uncertainty rather than points of closure and convergence (Cohen 2005: 246). To take a meeting with public history seriously is to look at ways it can open up more debates about the representations of pasts, and to study the different ways and means by which world histories are produced and competing knowledge claims are asserted.
Two “Backward Hamlets”
In suggesting representation, production, circulation and the making of space as place as concerns of a world history beyond accrual and inclusivity, I want to take up two examples that are usually not considered as sites that are “worth serious consideration” and may be depicted as “backward hamlet[s].”3 The first pertains to the site which tops the list of major internet search engines when one looks for “museums world history.” It leads one to the foothills of the Appalachian mountain range in the southern United States in the northeast of the state of Alabama, where in the small town of Anniston is the only named Museum of World History. Secondly, I want to examine the township of Lwandle, South Africa, where one of the country’s newest museums, a museum of migrant labor, is situated. Both of these localities have barely made it into the annals of written history and even then they hardly feature. In the case of Anniston there is little beyond a PhD dissertation, a personal reminiscence, a nostalgic assemblage of annotated photographs, a centennial commemorative album, the local newspaper’s 125th anniversary publication and a social and economic history of Anniston’s early years. A few recent journal articles on the museum, housing project reports, a master’s thesis and two ethnographic studies, one dealing with childhood and another on personal safety and criminality, comprise the sum total of the formal historical writings on Lwandle. I want to propose that the museums in Anniston and Lwandle provide illustrative devices to begin thinking through how places and their histories come to be constituted and reconstituted in and along a variety of routes into pasts, where power and knowledge are mediated and where there are constant reappropriations of places and memories (Crashaw and Urry 1997: 177–179).
Adjacent to a former military base in the 185-acre John B. Lagarde Interpretive Park in Anniston, Alabama, the visitor is invited to go to the Museum of World History and “take a trip back in time … [and] around the world” to “view ancient treasures and objects” (Berman Museum 2007). A notice at the entrance to the museum gives an account of origins, explaining how the “6,000 plus piece collection of objects of art and artefacts” were acquired by Colonel Farley Berman and his wife, Germaine, from the 1940s. Colonel Berman, the notice goes on to say, “wished to remain mysterious about how he acquired the collection. Some pieces he suggested might have made their way into his bedroll after World War Two. Others, he liked to say, simply appeared in his home.” Inside, the museum largely frames its displays through military history, where exhibitions of uniforms, guns, knives and armor enable a world history that is in effect an aesthetic of technology. Probably the museum’s main attraction is a set of artifacts related to Adolf Hitler: a personally autographed photograph of Adolf Hitler, a bust of Hitler, Hitler’s plans for the invasion of Britain, and Hitler’s silver tea service. The context of history that is provided for all these artifacts is one of wonder and curiosity, and perhaps astonishment that they are located in this museum. It would nonetheless be inaccurate to cast the displays in the museum entirely as reifying military technology as central to the making of world history. Most notably in the “American West” exhibition, which one enters on the ground floor, a social history is the mechanism for dispelling romantic myths of expansion. Whereas the rest of the museum relies on objects displayed on walls, in cases and on stands, here dioramas, photographs, artifacts and elaborate explanatory labels are the vehicles used to establish a version of the American West that is gender-sensitive, attempts to present the ways of lives of different social and cultural groupings, and lays bare the extreme violence of encounters in westward expansion. Although there are still several display cases with guns in the “American West” in Anniston, the use of a very different type of exhibitionary technology seeks to represent inclusivity.
Less than 100 meters away, in the Anniston Museum of Natural History, another type of world history is on display. The “wilds of Africa, the wonders of the North American Wilderness and the mysteries of 2300 year old mummies” based on the collection of the local textile merchant, H. Severn Reager, and mammal collector, John Lagarde, are offered as vehicles of interpretation, leading to an understanding of relationships between “humankind and the natural environment.”4 In contrast to the Museum of World History, the exhibitions are explicitly much more didactic, experiential and make much greater use of an exhibitionary technique that emphasizes locality, explanatory text and recreated environments. Caves, trees, rocks, gravel and simulated earth tremors all form part of what the museum calls “NatureSpace.”
But what is not featured in the world histories on display in what the city of Anniston’s publicity department presents as “two world class museums” (City of Anniston 2010) are moments in the town’s local pasts that have featured in national histories. The first relates to a broader national narrative of civil rights and the firebombing, on May 14, 1961, of a bus of Freedom Riders, who were testing the new federal laws forbidding segregation on transport between states, by a “white mob” on the outskirts of the city. The second occurred in the 1980s when the Monsanto Corporation contaminated the local river system with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), waste from a local manufacturing plant. Some 20 years later a class action suit was settled with $300 million paid out to the plaintiffs for the deleterious health effects caused by the plant.
Although not featured in the museums of Anniston, these events have been incorporated into local and national pasts. With the “burning bus,” the city and the Alabama Historical Commission were initially reluctant to give the site of destruction an official marker, claiming that the incident took place outside the boundaries of the city and that there was no way to identify the exact location of the event, as road construction had subsequently occurred (Spears 2009). It was through the sponsorship of a black college fraternity who worked with the privately funded Alabama Historical Association that a marker was placed on the site in 2007. The text on the board concludes with words that “the incident served to strengthen the resolve of the civil rights movement.” Similarly, environmental activists have sought to highlight the ways that inhabitants of Anniston both were affected by and fought against industrial pollution. Archived under the heading “Anniston PCB/Lead Site – Anniston, AL,” the US Environmental Protection Agency on its website (2010) provides a set of documents on the case that in effect provide a virtual memorial marker of how Anniston’s image was altered from the “Model City of the New South” to “Toxic Town U.S.A.” Earthfirst rates the PCB poisoning in Anniston as number 7 in its “America’s top ten worst man made environmental disasters” (Rogers 2010). And in a special hearing on Anniston in the Committee on Appropriations of the US Senate held on April 19, 2002, David Barker, the president of Community Against Pollution (Anniston, Alabama), invoked his somewhat outdated knowledge of world history to stake a claim for compensation for the effects of PCBs:.”You understand that Anniston is not in South Africa, Rhodesia, or some other totalitarian country, that we are Americans, and we live in Anniston, Alabama, and all we want to do is live a normal life” (Committee on Appropriations 2003).
It would be relatively easy to situate the two events described above into world histories of the environment, transnational struggles for human rights and the making of race, for instance. Indeed, the “burning bus” has already been incorporated into world histories, through texts and images that “solicit our gaze” (Warner 2002: 87–89) and constitute a public of concern for rights that appear as universal. It has made it into the South African Grade 12 school curriculum in the section on the civil rights movement in the USA, where the Freedom Riders are discussed (SA History Online 2010). Such an inclusion is indicative of a dramatic shift in the way school history has been conceptualized in post-apartheid South Africa. One of the key practices in the school curriculum had been a division into two sections, South African and General History (or European History), with the former emphasizing the “advance” of “Western civilization” as an alibi for conquest, and the latter a world history that was produced as a lesson in “civilization.” (See Simo, this volume.) In the new school curriculum this division has fallen away and South Africa is placed in a world history that deals with topics such as the Cold War, independence movements in Africa, and civil society protest in the 1960s and 1970s. It is in the last mentioned topic, where strategies of civil disobedience and nonviolent protest are discussed, that Anniston appears. In world history from South Africa, the photograph of smoke bellowing out of the bus is placed to show violent conservative reactions to nonviolent protests, which in turn makes it easier to put in place a post-anti-apartheid national narrative of repression and resistance.
Yet neither the burning bus nor the industrial pollution find a position in the histories of the world in Anniston’s local museums. These museums are simultaneously sites that, through their collections, provide a map of the world, and, in their exhibitions, corridors and passageways, take visitors through “conceptual paths” of representation (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 132). Their claims to knowledge of the world are through acquisition and then appropriation into the classificatory and exhibitionary modes of the museum. In a world made primarily through objects that claim these institutions as serious authorities of collection and display, pasts that rely upon evocations of memory in pursuance of what are presented as moral universal obligations are largely bypassed. The museums’ fiction is an uncritical acceptance of the “representational power of ordering and classification,” where history is presented as a scientific pursuit counterposed to a memorial strategy of visual commemoration (Sherman 1995: 51–52). An ethical rendering of pasts does, though, start to appear in the global history of nature on display in Anniston, where a utopian future and a long gone past of adaptation is counterposed to a dystopian present. The category of natural history in the museum is partially wrenched from its nineteenth-century origins, where the reference was the collection and display of species, to one that embraces an identity of nature being endangered, and asserts ecological concerns and a green consciousness of equilibrium (Yanni 2005: 157).
If there is a divergence in the making of commemorative and museum pasts in Anniston, in South Africa in the late twentieth century these histories came together as a large number of new museums were constructed with the primary objective of displaying, recollecting and teaching about aspects of the violence and suffering of the system of apartheid. One of these institutions, the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, some 40 kilometers from Cape Town, has worked since 2000 to install a narrative of Lwandle as a primary example of apartheid’s effects. Lwandle was established in 1958 entirely as a hostel labor compound for single male migrant workers in the municipal services of the seaside resort of Strand and the growing fruit and canning industry in the region. The number of people living in Lwandle increased dramatically in the 1980s as a result of limited reforms and increasing poverty in rural areas. Because it was marked as a “black spot” in a region designated for people classified as “white,” the apartheid government decided to close down Lwandle. This process, though, had not taken place by the time of South Africa’s first elections based on universal adult franchise in 1994. The inception of a Government of National Unity, headed by the African National Congress, altered Lwandle’s future and the hostel compounds were reconstructed as family homes. And, in an extraordinary moment, as the hostels were reconfigured the executive of the local municipality decided to support a proposal to establish a museum in Lwandle.
The Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, opened on May 1, 2000, has become the primary vehicle for revisualizing Lwandle and its history. Its collection and displays include reproductions of pass books (the identity document through which the lives of Africans in urban areas were controlled), a beach sign indicating segregated facilities, artifacts used by migrant laborers, photographs of people and street scenes in Lwandle and selected photographs used to depict migrant labor, from poverty in the rural areas to influx control and resistance (Mgijima and Buthelezi 2006: 801–804). Lwandle was made visible by placing its residents into a visual history that conformed to a new post-apartheid national narrative of repression and resistance. The family houses and the establishment of the museum proclaimed the changing political scenario as the culmination of these “national” struggles, where now Lwandle was being installed as a significant example of the operations of apartheid and those who fought against and ultimately defeated it.
At the same time as it made a local/national past for Lwandle, the museum also engaged with different world histories, sometimes embracing them and at other times displaying a great deal of ambivalence. Most enthusiastically the museum inserts Lwandle’s past into an international discourse of human rights as a site of conscience which, like similar sites worldwide, actively uses history “to promote humanitarian and democratic values.” (International Coalition of Sites of Conscience 2010). Hostel 33, the one remaining hostel that was not converted into a house, has been used as an artifact by the museum to recall memories of apartheid and the migrant labor system (Mgijima and Buthelezi 2006: 799).
Effectively Hostel 33 performs the role of a “memorial museum.” These are museums that usually use a specific site of repression and/or torture and/or massacre to evoke memories of suffering in the past. They are explicitly political, they provide historical interpretations within a “moral framework,” and their defining characteristic is that they “function as a memorial.” Although their collections are typically small, their greatest assets are “the stories entrusted to them and the confidence imparted to them by survivors, family members, and their descendants, who use them as both spaces of private mourning and public memory” (Williams 2007: 8, 184). It is by locating these stories into a wider circuit of internationalized memorialization that Lwandle’s pasts become exemplars of worldwide human rights abuses. Linking to a location selected and designated as a typical example of “historical crimes against humanity,” the museum, much like the Museums of Occupation in Estonia, Memory Park in Argentina and the genocide memorial centers in Rwanda, is a site of political activism, attempting to establish a community of survivors, and ongoing educational programs that assert a moral legacy through making past–present linkages. These world histories do not maintain any façade of neutral detachment (Williams 2007: 21).
But the museum has become part of another set of world histories. From the very beginning one of its primary concerns was to become a tourist attraction in Cape Town, and it had to confront world histories emerging from an industry that relies upon and sustains images of the colonial enterprise that often paved the way for opening up “primitive” and “exotic” destinations. The promotion of South Africa as a place of exploration, where one encounters wildlife and ethnic indigeneity in comfortable, secure surroundings, draws precisely upon these metaphors of exploration and uncritically celebrates the development of colonial modernity (Rassool and Witz 1996). Placed in an extremely vulnerable position, with little or no possibility of funding on the immediate horizon, the museum, when it first opened, found that it “had to dance to the tune of tourism.” In a “shift” the museum moved “from a preservationist to tourist rhetoric” and partly positioned itself into this internationalized knowledge system as an ethnically situated Xhosa place (Mgijima and Buthelezi 2006: 800).
While international tourism (as an industry) might continue offering a “safe haven” for “marketing a troubled history that glorifies colonial adventure and a repudiated anthropology of primitivism” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 136), the Lwandle Museum has been negotiating ways to alter the foundational images and narratives of tourism and at the same time develop new notions of a public citizenry through the construction of a new set of public pasts. The exhibitions in the old community hall have continually attempted to challenge stereotypical notions of the people of Lwandle that rely upon depictions of an essential rural timeless Africanness in an urban setting, often cast as ethnicity. A walking tour through the township organized by the museum became a visit to people’s homes, not to see and gaze upon people, but to talk with and hear stories about their lives and histories. And the lives of people in Hostel 33 have become a focal point of the tour, conjoining histories with selected and crafted artifacts, making it possible for the museum to imagine, image and represent lives for visitors.
In the development of a historical narrative that makes use of histories as a methodology towards constructing and performing lives, the museum is placing Lwandle in the ever-growing field of international heritage tourism. Heritage has become one of the main ways in which “location becomes a destination” through signifying “hereness,” by adding value, creating pastness, elaborating difference and invoking a virtual experience (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 150–176). The performance of history through Hostel 33 parallels similar modes of history production through heritage tourism. One of the most prominent of these has been in the southern United States, and Alabama in particular, where African-American heritage tourism and the possibilities of associated culture-led urban regeneration has provided a major impetus for establishing civil rights memorial sites and museums (Brundage 2005: 304–313; Eskew 2006: 41–42). So, in Anniston an association of business and heritage interests in the town, under the title of the Spirit of Anniston, whose work has mainly been around a Main Street revitalization program, has begun to embrace the Freedom Riders/Burning Bus memorial project. It has been suggesting that the site become part of an Alabama Civil Rights Trail that would attract tourists as part of “low hanging fruit” (a means to keep visitors in Anniston as long as possible) (Bean 2009; McGhee 2009).
Conclusion
Appearing as somewhat “out-of-the-way places” it would seem that Lwandle and Anniston would have to either remain consigned to the margins of world history or else be recovered and placed within a larger past of linkages, associations, routes and economies, setting up a series of “local–global interconnections.” (See Gerritsen, this volume.) Yet neither core nor margin is a stable spatial and temporal entity, and what might seem to be “local commentaries” are always involved in “wider negotiations of meaning and power” with more localized “stakes and specificities” in the making of histories (Tsing 1993: 9). What a meeting of world and public history would suggest, therefore, is not one of placement, accumulation or including “social history” or “the people without history” (Wolf 1982) into world history. It instead might enable one to reflect upon and investigate the paradoxes around how notions of “the world” come to be constituted in the public domain through circuits of international tourism, processes of museumization, activist politics, movements that assert global or universal values, and changing and competing sets of local knowledges. To varying degrees these all come into play in Anniston and Lwandle in the ways that differing local and world histories are claimed, evoked and contested. Contradictions emerge between and within the locality and the universal, suggesting questions about what constitutes history, historical time and the space of history. These instabilities of category, time, place and identity offer potential histories of what Scott (2004: 263–267) has called the production of “discontinuity” and “differentiation.” A meeting between public history and world history may open up for examination how spaces come to be constituted, made, remade and moved into different types of worlds of public address. It can provide possibilities for interrogating existing frameworks and assumptions about how localities are represented and produced, and the manner in which different circuits of knowledge production conflict and coalesce.
Notes
1 Patrick Manning, panelist at roundtable session, New Directions in World History Morocco, 14th annual conference of the World History Association, Al Akhawayn University, Ifrane, Morocco, June 27–29, 2005. Notes taken by author.
2 Jerry Bentley, panelist at roundtable session, New Directions in World History.
3 Email correspondence between the author and the editor of the Journal of World History, Jan. 25, 2010.
4 Anniston Museum of Natural History, postcard, collage of animals, Anniston, 2007; Anniston Museum of Natural History, “Mission statement,” photograph of exhibition by L. Witz, April 2007.
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