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

Abstract

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.