In her forthcoming book, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (UNC Press, 2011), Dr. Karen Cox examines the cultural origins of the concept of the romanticized South. She discussed her work in a recent visit to the Center for the Humanities at Temple University.
In her presentation, Cox traced the emergence of the image of the antebellum Southern ideal through the popular culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, finding its origins in northern cities. The locus of American advertising and cultural production, the North is where the romanticized notion of the Old South was created and popularized. Cox described the emergence of a distinct southern typology in popular culture from the 1880s to World War II which supported this image of the South. Characters like the mammy and the uncle, and the chivalrous aristocrat farmer and the southern belle, coupled with images of white-columned mansions and King Cotton established an idyllic and imaginary portrait of the antebellum American South. These images appeared and were repeated through the literature (Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind), print advertising (the Aunt Jemima and Maxwell House brands), film (D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation), radio (the radio minstrelsy of Amos N’ Andy, Maxwell House Showboat, and the Aunt Jemima radio show), and popular music (“coon songs” and “back to Dixie” songs of the era) of the period.
This Southern imaginary was a product successfully sold, not only to Southerners but to Americans generally. They reinforced and shaped heroic notions of Southern history and self, but also Northern perceptions of the region as exotic and other. Further, the creation of an alternative historical narrative through advertisements, et al. tided up one of the messiest (putting it mildly) periods in American history.
How does Dr. Karen Cox’s scholarship enhance our understanding of museums? The way in which popular culture shapes perception is at the core of Cox’s discussion of the (re)creation of the South, and perhaps most relevant to a discussion of museums. In what ways do these institutions mediate our experience? How do they shape our understanding of objects and/or the past?
In her book Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill suggests that, from inception, the museum-going experience has been a heavily mediated one. A viewpoint is always present, whether it is that of the prince, merchant, institution, or state. In each of these instances, the choices made by those in power inform how value is assigned, the presentation of objects, and their context in relation to other valued objects. In the modern museum, it is often the curator (or curators) who decides what will be displayed for the viewer, and how it will be presented. A narrative is constructed which reflects the ideology and tastes (aesthetic and intellectual) of the dominant culture, and given authority through the institution. Knowledge is shaped by social, economic, and political forces in the larger culture, and in turn it shapes society through the transmission of these culturally sanctioned narratives.
Why is this important? In The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, authors Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen sift through the survey data collected during a landmark study examining the ways in which ordinary people interact with the past. Looking at the national sample, 57 percent of total respondents had visited a museum or historic site in the past twelve months. More importantly, museums where identified as the most trustworthy source of information about the past. In interviews with respondents, Rosenzweig and Thelen discovered that ”respondents felt there was nothing between them and the reality of the past.” Their perception of the trustworthiness of museums was rooted in the belief that they were objective places, their artifacts presented without manipulation or agenda.
What Cox’s work illustrates is the power of culture to shape our perception of the past – the way in which ideas and concepts are rendered credible through repetition, ubiquity, and positive consumer response. It shows us that we must always be aware of the mediation of our experiences. An awareness of this power is essential to any critical examination of museums.
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