Visitors’ discursive responses to hegemonic and alternative museum narratives: a case study of Le Modèle Noir

ABSTRACT

Recent reflection on the role of museums and galleries has focused on their socially situated nature; and that as a social construct, co-produced with its audiences, heritage is in part discursively constituted. This has included acknowledgement that the inherited discourse is hegemonic and exclusive of divergent narratives, leading to moves to create alternatives to contest it, which include temporary exhibitions. These provide a potentially democratic space for discursive incursions freed from the constraints of the permanent museum. But they are also spatially and temporally peripheral, occupying a discursive space outside the standard visit. This raises questions as to whether, once the exhibition is over, the alternative will be subsumed once more. This article explores this issue using a dataset of TripAdvisor reviews to analyse the discursive responses of visitors to temporary and permanent collections, using the Musée d’Orsay's 2019 exhibition Le Modèle Noir as a case study. Analysis shows that Le Modèle Noir reviews exhibit greater discursive fragmentation, reveal a relative lack of appeals to collective identity, and do not connect the exhibition with the permanent collection. Potential implications of this for initiatives that seek to counter the hegemonic narrative are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Exhibitions
• museum
• TripAdvisor
• hegemony
• heritage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use ‘narrative’ to refer to collective narrative (Rowe et al., 2002, p. 98) inscribing macro-histories or overarching stories resulting from ‘authorised heritage discourse’ (Smith, 2006), the ‘interpretive frameworks which present a dominant version of history, silencing the experiences and values of others in the process’ (Hanks et al., 2012, p. xx); or ‘alternative narratives’ that seek to contest these.

2 In the English results, therefore, the comparison is not between two distinct sets of individual reviewers, but between two distinct sets of data coded as ‘permanent’ or ‘LMN’: thus one review may contribute content to both datasets.

3 e.g. ‘French masterpieces renamed after black subjects in new exhibition’ (Guardian 2019), ‘Paris museum renames masterpieces after black subjects’ (france24.com).

4 It may also point to a socially awkward reticence to mention race at all. Jameson notes that only one of 111 TripAdvisor reviews of Black Harlem tours mentions the words ‘racist’ or ‘segregation’, despite their being mentioned in the tours (Jameson, 2017).

5 The terms in French (from the LMN secondary dataset) are not included in the graph since there are no French reviews in the general dataset, but are comparable to the English in sentiment, ‘belle’, ‘magnifique’ and ‘riche’ being most common. To include only words used more than once, all adjectives used in more than 4% of each sample are shown.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Laura Hodsdon

Dr Laura Hodsdon is Research Fellow and Programme Lead of the Creative Industries Futures research centre, Falmouth University. Following a PhD in Classical Literature from the University of Leeds, she spent several years as a researcher and policy advisor at the University of Oxford. She has been at Falmouth University since 2018, leading various research projects on social justice through lenses of place, space, narrative and heritage; including as Project Leader and UK Principal Investigator of a Joint Programming Initiative on Cultural Heritage-funded consortium project: Re-voicing cultural landscapes: narratives, perspectives, and performances of marginalised intangible cultural heritage.