Along the museological grain: An exploration of the (geo)political inheritance in Isishweshwe Story: Material Women?

ABSTRACT

Ostensibly an exhibition on a beloved and widely used ‘South African’ cotton textile isishweshwe, the multi-year Isishweshwe Story: Material Women? exhibition at the Iziko Museums’ Slave Lodge in Cape Town, South Africa, provides an interesting portal through which to explore the manifestation, on the museological stage, of the geopolitics of South Africa as a regional actor. This article adopts a (geo)political lens through which to observe South Africa’s post-apartheid nation-making against the backdrop of historically hegemonic regional relations in Southern Africa. Through this discussion, my aim is to invigorate debates on the sociology of heritage and the public museum by shifting the attention away from the usual emphasis on the domestic politics of nation (re)imagining and transformation. Instead, I recast the debate on museums and heritage in transnational, regionalist terms, emphasising the persistence of geopolitical legacies wherein South Africa discursively collapses the boundaries between itself and its regional neighbours even where these are seemingly acknowledged. To this end, this article reorients the extensive scholarship on South African museums towards an interrogation of the subtle geopolitical dimensions of public museum exhibitions. It invites a focus on the politics and asymmetries of geography and how these intersect with and are (re)produced culturally on the museum platform.

KEYWORDS:

• museums
• nation
• exhibition analysis
• post-apartheid museum studies
• geopolitics

Note on contributor

Lebogang Mokwena is a doctoral student at The New School for Social Research, New York, USA.

Notes

1 On Google Arts and Culture, the exhibition is titled ‘Fabric, Fashion and Identity: The Story of Isishweshwe’. Google Arts and Culture is a repository of high-resolution artwork and artefact images sourced from the initiative’s partner museums across the world. <https://artsandculture.google.com/exhibit/fabric-fashion-and-identity-the-story-of-isishweshwe/PQJSfVGh0BzHKg>.

2 I use heritage to mean the contemporary appropriation of the past, its narratives and material remains, to serve the political, economic, social and cultural aims of the present.

3 From the exhibition plaque in Room three.

4 Artslink is an internet service provider that distributes South African arts, culture and entertainment news and hosts an annual directory of recurring national arts festivals and events. It does not generate its own content but relies on submissions from organisations and event organisers.

5 <https://insideguide.co.za>