La nación exhibida, la historia en el "shopping"

Memoria y representación en el Museo de Robben Island

Abstract

The nation exhibited, history as shopping. Memory and representation in the Robben Island Museum. In the wake of postcolonial politics of “commemoration”, the representational models of national “public pasts” have been foundational: museums, monuments, anonymous memorials to the nation’s martyrs, all devices that lead not only to the identification of those who should be remembered, but also to the redefinition of the subject who remembers, and why he/she remembers. Following from this, I will focus on the analysis of some of the possible representative readings projected by a peculiar case among the artefacts of displacement in postcolonial commemoration: the Robben Island Museum in South Africa. The former maximum security prison where Nelson Mandela spent 18 of his almost 27 years in prison was re-created as an official museum by the South African State in 1997. From that moment on, it has been the metonymical artifact of the post-apartheid “new nation”, the official symbol of the historical narrative, “new history”. Robben Island is a part of the national mandate in the cosmopolitan era. It is introduced in a context of transnational capitalism, the poetics of which dictate that “all that the State fixes as a collective remembrance” cannot escape commitments to globalization and neoliberal mandates. With a history of consecutive appropriations by different collectivities in South Africa, the museum is inserted into the national pedagogy with notable obliterations. It reproduces with profound silences the gestures of exclusion and omission, stories of difference that imprint, over the solemnity of the remembered trauma, representational costs in order to project a sense of “harmony within diversity”, of “historical unity”, of the “rainbow nation”, or of the “African renaissance”. And in the midst of the acts of silencing, the symbolic appropriations transform the island and the museum into a parody of social reclamations, the ironic gesture of the non-narrated –or partially narrated– subaltern, refracted in the story. These contradictory and interdependent processes of multiple representations and diverse political logics are what I will attempt to analyze in this article.