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Abstract
This article draws on Walter Benjamin's insights about collecting to consider how the curatorial approach in the Women's Jail museum figures former inmates as collectors who haunt a scene of memory that productively mediates the gaze. In compelling viewers to see how particular women recollect incarceration, this place of diverse and distinct memories invites a new mode of connection with visitors—kinship—that avoids problems associated with both identification and affect in museum exhibits.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the Drake Center for the Humanities and the Urban Communication Foundation for material support enabling extended research trips to South Africa, and also Dylan Rollo, Marilyn DeLaure, Stace Treat, Gordon Coonfield, Donovan Conley, Valeria Fabj, Greg Dickinson, and the anonymous reviewer for support and assistance during the writing and revision of this manuscript. This article is dedicated to Inez McAlister Faber, from whom the author inherited her desire to write and to collect the writings of others. The author's adopted name (a name shared by her spouse and children) is a living memorial to her life and works.
Notes
Gerard Corsane details the organizational and legal process that is bringing about dramatic changes in museum culture in South Africa, a project that began before the election of 1994 and continued in an effort to make museums “more representative, inclusive, and relevant for all South Africans” (“Transforming Museums” 6). Crain Soudien notes that postapartheid South Africa launched a “new identity project” through museums designed to counter the thousands of existing state monuments that many citizens associate with the previous regime and with White supremacy (208).
Serving as a critical public forum was a key objective identified for Robben Island Museum during the planning process (Corsane, “Using Ecomuseum” 408). Rooksana Omar sees this function of museums as essential in postcolonial South Africa (55).
Marx's concern here echoes Hannah Arendt's (Eichmann in Jerusalem) insights about the role that the daily actions of average subjects—made familiar in the phrase “the banality of evil”—play in naturalizing brutal ideologies.
The Mapping Memory workshops included both male and female former inmates and generated materials used in the Number Four men's prison exhibits, as well as those in the Women's Jail. Although a full consideration of Number Four is beyond the scope this article, my initial impressions are that its association with famous male figures (such as Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi) brings it closer to the pattern critics have noted of South African public memory projects: focusing on great (male) heroes of the struggle against apartheid.
Although the Women's Jail continues to collect memories from visitors and host temporary installations, the permanent exhibitions (advertised to tourists on the Web site at http://www.constitutionhill.org.za/exhibitions/permanent-exhibitions/) are the solitary confinement cells and Map and Memory Exhibition, created from the memories of former inmates through the workshop process. I have focused my analysis on key features of these permanent exhibits.
This description can still be found on the Web site of the organization charged with development of Constitution Hill (http://www.jda.org.za/developments/constitution-hill/exhibitions), but it also appears repeatedly, with little revision, in local press coverage of the event.
Although the “spectral voices” Joshua Gunn describes in his essay on 9/11 operate quite differently than the recorded sounds, images, and words at the Three Women exhibit, elements of the air of mourning he describes are applicable to this exhibit, as is his rendering of the “ontological dualism” haunting performance. The split between the representations and bodies of the three women is stretched even further in this case by the spatial-temporal distances separating the young inmates and the ghostly figures of the absent narrators made present in this inaugural performative event.
The display includes this slang term in a quote attributed to Theresa Swanepoel, identified as a White wardress in 1980.
The literature on the silencing of female voices and the failure to represent women's experiences in public memory projects is extensive. Focused attention to this topic and relevant case studies can be found in Biesecker; Evans; Hodgkin and Radstone; Kim; Miller; Muzaini and Yeoh; Porter; and Saikia.
Coombes finds the political promise of such exhibits in the Women's Jail to rest in the “metonymic curatorial strategy” that avoids “narcissistic empathy” (“The Gender of Memory” 454). However, critics warn of the risk of metonymizing distinct subjects into social categories and scholars of visual rhetoric have linked metonymy to racist appeals (Richardson and Wodak) and—drawing on Kenneth Burke's distinction between synecdoche as a trope of representation and metonymy as a trope of reduction—have argued that synecdochal representation is preferable to a metonymic reduction associated with racist logics (Brummett 242). Interestingly, it is the ability to use fragments in synecdochal rather than metonymic ways that Burghard Baltrusch (drawing on observations about Benjamin's writing made by both Paul de Mann and Jacques Derrida) has found in the “aesthetic resistance” characterizing Benjamin's translations of literary works, a method he finds to be nonessentializing (125). Recognizing that collections of fragments can represent in ways that aesthetically resist reductive (and essentialist) logic is important for considering how the exhibits in the Women's Jail operate to translate experience into memory and memory into display.
I owe this insight to Deborah Hawhee, whose remarkable work on the athletic body in Ancient Greece prompted me to reconsider the many assumptions on which the concept of the “male gaze” rests.
As Dianne Chisholm observes, an important distinction between collection and consumption emerges in several of Benjamin's writings, one in which “the meaning of collection transcends mere possession” (216).
The Women's Jail is also the location of the Commission for Gender Equality and has been a popular venue for feminist political events.
The book Mapping Memory: Former Prisoners Tell Their Stories (Segal, van den Berg, and Madikida) documents the workshops used to create the exhibits in both the Women's Jail and Number Four (the men's prison). It is available in the Constitution Hill gift shop and features photographs of former inmates taking relatives and close friends through the exhibits, as well as commentary and reactions from those who are sharing memories with their loved ones in this way.
Critics have been attempting to find and name particular types of identification, empathy, or affect that enable connection but do not collapse difference or appropriate the traumatic experiences of others. For a detailed review of the problems and proposals associated with these concepts in the context of visual culture, see “On the Subject of Trauma” in Jill Bennett's Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (1–21).