Memory, media, and museum audience’s discourse of remembering

ABSTRACT

This study joins a prolific line of critical research on collective memory in relation to museums as ‘sites of memory’. It takes the political relations between museums and memory as the background against which audience production of discourses of remembering is analyzed. Collective memory is approached not as a passive ‘retainer’ of information, but as sets of public mnemonic practices which transpire in specific material and semiotic settings. The analysis is comparative and takes place in two Jewish history museums in the US and Israel. It begins by ethnographically studying museums’ memory media, whereby discourse is produced and displayed. Then, the rhetorical currency of collective memory discourse is identified, illustrating that museum audiences’ discourses of remembering are dynamic remediations that break with institutional formats (annals/records/logs) and establish audiences’ voice and subjectivity. Centrally, the analysis of more complex texts offers a tripartite typology of audiences’ discoursal strategies: (1) Establishing addressivity, which concerns audiences’ self-positioning or whether they reflect on the museum’s historic narration or ‘step into’ it by directly conversing with historical figures; (2) Re-citing, which concerns acts of importing texts into the museums’ discourse, creating new intertextualities and charging both the museum discourse and the cited texts with new meanings; (3) Re-timing, which concerns indexing different mythical, religious, and national timeframes, which serve to embed the time of the museum visit. The study concludes by critically noting the scarcity of subversive visitor discourse in museums, and the vitality of collective ethnonational memory in Israel compared to transnational/cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory studies
• museums
• visitors
• visitor discourse
• collective memory
• Jewish history
• history
• Holocaust
• commemoration

Acknowledgment

I am deeply thankful to CDS’s two anonymous Reviewers, and the Editor, for their insightful comments – discussions, really – which helped me rearticulate my positions on a topic of peculiar difficulty. The article is dedicated to my daughters: Noa, who likes (loves) museums, and Yael, who dislikes (hates) them.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Chaim Noy is Associate Professor in the Department of Tourism Studies, Ashkelon Academic College, Israel. His research foci concerns discourse, semiotics, and media and materiality, as approached in the fields of Media and Communication Studies and Linguistic Anthropology. In the last decade Noy’s studies centered on media ecology and audience participatory discourse in museums. His recent book, Thank You for Dying for Our Country: Commemorative Texts and Performances in Jerusalem (Oxford University Press, 2015), examines visitors’ writing practices and discourse in a visitor book in a national commemoration site in Jerusalem, and his recent articles have appeared in the journals Communication, Culture & Critique, Discourse, Context & Media, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and Discourse & Communication. Postal address: 1/a Shalom Yehuda St., Jerusalem 93395, Israel.

ORCID

Chaim Noy http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2801-9120

Notes

1 Arriving at accurate figures of visitors who write or read in the books is tricky, mainly because many simply do not reach the location of the platforms. At the AHM, visitors often stop short before reaching the innermost halls, and at the FHM they sometimes visit only the second floor (the temporary exhibitions) or the third floor (intended for talks and presentations). Still, my observations in these and other museums indicate that approximately 10% of the visitors read the books (compared with 20% as reported in Macdonald, 2005), and about a half of this figure or less write in them (Noy, 2015).

2 Transcription note. Forward slash sign [/] indicates a line break, a backward slash [\] indicates the use of forward slash sign, and square brackets indicate paratextual features and comments I added. I use [surname] to replace visitors’ surnames for reasons of anonymity (in cases where visitors’ anonymity might be compromised). Italicized words indicate words that were originally written in Hebrew (otherwise texts were written in English).

3 Ulpan classes are intensive Hebrew learning classes, and ‘J-m’ is shorthand for ‘Jerusalem.’ The date is written according to the Jewish calendar (the year 5766 is indicated in Hebrew letters).

4 Mount Scopus is a location in north-east Jerusalem.