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Museums of the Arabian Peninsula Historical Developments and Contemporary Discourses

2024-02-14 , Edited By Sarina Wakefield

Museums of the Arabian Peninsula offers new insights into the history and development of museums within the region. Recognising and engaging with varied approaches to museum development and practice, the book offers in-depth critical analyses from a range of viewpoints and disciplines. Drawing on regional and international scholarship, the book provides a critical and detailed analysis of museum and heritage institutions in Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Yemen. Questioning and engaging with issues related to the institutionalisation of cultural heritage, contributors provide original analyses of current practice and challenges within the region. Considering how these challenges connect to broader issues within the international context, the book offers the opportunity to examine how museums are actively produced and consumed from both the inside and the outside. This critical analysis also enables debates to emerge that question the appropriateness of existing models and methods and provide suggestions for future research and practice. Museums of the Arabian Peninsula offers fresh perspectives that reveal how Gulf museums operate from local, regional and transnational perspectives. The volume will be a key reference point for academics and students working in the fields of museum and heritage studies, anthropology, cultural studies, history, politics and Gulf and Middle East Studies.

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Siam's foreign relations in the reign of King Mongkut, 1851-1868

2024-01-03 , Neon Snidvongs.

The International Studies Center (ISC) wishes to express its deep appreciation to the family of the late Thanpuying Neon Snidvongs, through her nephew Dr. Anond Snidvongs, for permitting the ISC to publish for the first time her doctoral thesis “The Development of Siamese Relations with Britain and France in the Reign of Maha Mongkut, 1851-1868”, under the title “Siam’s Foreign Relations in the Reign of King Mongkut, 1851-1868”, as another volume in the ISC’s series of books on diplomatic history. Following the practice with theses that the ISC has published, editorial changes were made only when necessary or prudent in order to keep the book as close as possible to the original thesis submitted to The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in 1960. The original spelling of personal and place names have also been retained. The conclusion of the Bowring Treaty with Great Britain in 1855, at the beginning of the reign of King Mongkut (Rama IV), ushered in the new era of Siam’s (as Thailand was then known) relations with Western nations. Under the Bowring and the “Bowring-type” Treaties, Siam relinquished its autonomy in judicial and fiscal matters to these Western countries. But what had begun as purely commercial relations soon took on a more political nature. The change was due mainly to the impetuous entrance of France into Indo-China, following the establishment of a French colony at the mouth of the Mekong River in 1862. Subsequent colonial expansion caused further problems for Siam. Consequently, Siam’s foreign policy was highlighted by its efforts to maintain independence in the face of encroaching colonial powers. In Thanpuying Neon’s work, Siam’s policies in dealing with Britain and France were examined in detail, based on Siamese, British and French archival materials, which had not yet been analysed extensively by that time. Her meticulous use of these archival materials gave us a tantalizing glimpse into the negotiations and diplomatic relations between Siam and the two major powers, the process as well as the characters involved. Her work clearly showed how Siam was able to adjust to the changing circumstances and how King Mongkut contributed to the formation of Siam’s foreign policy. The ISC believes that this work is crucial to the understanding of modern Thai diplomacy and hopes that readers will find it a useful source material on the subject of Siam’s foreign relations.

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Legacies of an imperial city the Museum of London 1976-2007

2024-01-03 , Samuel Aylett.

This comprehensive history of the Museum of London traces the ways that the relationship between Britain and its imperial past has changed over the course of three decades, providing a holistic approach to galleries’ shifts from Victorian nostalgia to equitable representations. At its 1976 opening, the Museum of London differed from other museums in its treatment of empire and colonialism as central to its galleries. In response to the public’s evolving social and political attitudes, the museum’s 1993–1994 ‘The Peopling of London’ exhibition marked a new approach in creating inclusive displays, which explore the impact of immigration and multiculturalism on British history. Through photos, planning documents, and archival research, this book analyses museums’ role in enacting change in the public’s understanding of history, and this book is the first to critically engage with the Museum of London’s theme of empire, particularly in consideration of recent exhibitions. Legacies of an Imperial City is a useful resource for academics and researchers of postcolonial history and museum studies, as well as any student of urban history.

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Exhibiting the Past

2024-01-02 , KIRK A. DENTON

During the Mao era, China’s museums served an explicit and uniform propaganda function, underlining official Party history, eulogizing revolutionary heroes, and contributing to nation building and socialist construction. With the implementation of the post-Mao modernization program in the late 1970s and 1980s and the advent of globalization and market reforms in the 1990s, China underwent a radical social and economic transformation that has led to a vastly more heterogeneous culture and polity. Yet China is dominated by a single Leninist party that continues to rely heavily on its revolutionary heritage to generate political legitimacy. With its messages of collectivism, self-sacrifice, and class struggle, that heritage is increasingly at odds with Chinese society and with the state’s own neoliberal ideology of rapid-paced development, glorification of the market, and entrepreneurship. In this ambiguous political environment, museums and their curators must negotiate between revolutionary ideology and new kinds of historical narratives that reflect and highlight a neoliberal present. In Exhibiting the Past, Kirk Denton analyzes types of museums and exhibitionary spaces, from revolutionary history museums, military museums, and memorials to martyrs to museums dedicated to literature, ethnic minorities, and local history. He discusses red tourism—a state sponsored program developed in 2003 as a new form of patriotic education designed to make revolutionary history come alive—and urban planning exhibition halls, which project utopian visions of China’s future that are rooted in new conceptions of the past. Denton’s method is narratological in the sense that he analyzes the stories museums tell about the past and the political and ideological implications of those stories. Focusing on “official” exhibitionary culture rather than alternative or counter memory, Denton reinserts the state back into the discussion of postsocialist culture because of its centrality to that culture and to show that state discourse in China is neither monolithic nor unchanging. The book considers the variety of ways state museums are responding to the dramatic social, technological, and cultural changes China has experienced over the past three decades.

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The Landscape of Historical Memory

2024-01-02 , Kirk A. Denton

The divide between East Asia’s “Blue Camp” (Nationalist Party) and “Green Camp” (Democratic Progressive Party) has stirred considerable debate about how we should remember Cold War politics in East Asia. Recently, that conversation has been focused on museums. The Landscape of Historical Memory contributes to this ongoing dialogue by analyzing not only the presence of the Blue Camp and the Green Camp in Taiwan’s museums but also the state of these museums over the past three decades. The book also considers political involvement in the establishment, architectural design, and historical narratives of museums within the contexts of museums focused on archaeology, history, war, literature, ethnology, and ecosystems; martyrs’ shrines; and memorial halls. By examining the political narratives that surround Taiwan’s museums, The Landscape of Historical Memory offers readers a compelling exploration of how culture, history, and memory shape identities in Taiwan’s postcolonial landscape, the place of museums in a neoliberal economic climate, and the politics of historical memory in an emergent democracy.

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The Birth of the Museum

1995 , Tony Bennett

In a series of richly detailed case studies from Britian, Australia and North America, Tony Bennett investigates how nineteenth- and twentieth-century museums, fairs and exhibitions have organized their collections, and their visitors. Discussing the historical development of museums alongside that of the fair and the international exhibition, Bennett sheds new light upon the relationship between modern forms of official and popular culture. Using Foucaltian perspectives The Birth of the Museum explores how the public museum should be understood not just as a place of instruction, but as a reformatory of manners in which a wide range of regulated social routines and performances take place. This invigorating study enriches and challenges the understanding of the museum, and places it at the centre of modern relations between culture and government. For students of museum, cultural and sociology studies, this will be an asset to their reading list.