Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display by Peggy Levitt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display by Peggy Levitt Scott Magelssen ARTIFACTS AND ALLEGIANCES: HOW MUSEUMS PUT THE NATION AND THE WORLD ON DISPLAY. By Peggy Levitt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015; pp. 268. Peggy Levitt writes out of a sense of concern. In a world “plagued by economic crisis, heightened ethnic and religious strife” in which “one out of every seven people is an internal or international migrant” (133, 142), more and more individuals face “declining social protection … outside the traditional nation-state framework” (133). Museums have, since their inception, seen themselves as civilizing and uplifting their populations, but as the world becomes increasingly global and transnational, Levitt finds bankrupt the traditional model of a national museum that organizes and stages a comprehensive vision of a stable and unified nation-state for its own citizens and the world. Institutions all over the globe are feeling the push to incorporate more cosmopolitan visions into their exhibits to keep apace with changing politics and human migration. Indeed, museums themselves are part and parcel of the new reality where national power is being decentered, as seen in a global museum industry increasingly built and programmed by a transnational class of curators and “starchitects,” such as I. M. Pei. Levitt begins by categorically refusing to offer a grand unifying theory of recent museum history; instead, she aims for a broad inventory of practices in a book accessible to readers from the museum profession to academia to her “ninety-five year old father” (12). Nevertheless, several central arguments and threads emerge in the introductory and concluding chapters. Based on her interviews and field research, a picture emerges in which museums are “messy arenas” (5), where cosmopolitanism and nationalism fall along a continuum and “mutually inform and transform one another” (3). Levitt posits that cultural institutions’ practices of responding to increased diversity are specific to the history and context of the cities within which they develop, what she terms their “cultural armature,” and that “[h]ow cities manage difference contributes to but is not always the same as how difference gets managed nationally” (3). How Boston and New York perform cosmopolitanism, for instance, might differ from the ways that other parts of the US negotiate the presence of others, whereas city-states like Singapore and Doha, Qatar, can basically be used interchangeably with their respective nations. Furthermore, in spite of perceived efforts toward progressive change, the nationalist and imperialist genealogies of a particular institution can thwart true democracy and egalitarianism (7). [End Page 440] The three chapters that comprise the body of Artifacts and Allegiances serve as a kind of loosely structured travelogue documenting Levitt’s case studies, described in the conclusion as giving “equal credit to what the hedgehog or the forest-seer contributes—a broader, thinner, but equally valuable snapshot that complements, rather than tak[ing] a backseat to, deeper, narrower, long-term approaches” (139). Chapter 1 describes museums in Scandinavia, such as the National Museum of Denmark in Copenhagen, the Nordiska Museet and Ethnografiska Museet in Stockholm, and the Museum of World Culture in Gothenberg. Chapter 2 looks to North American institutions like the Brooklyn Museum in New York City and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, while the third chapter focuses on museums in the Middle East and Asia, such as the National Museum of Qatar and the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and the Asian Civilizations Museum (ACM) in Singapore. Each chapter carefully situates its institutions within their city’s “cultural armature.” Levitt provides her Swedish examples, for instance, with a full backdrop of Sweden’s historic flux between medieval global superpower and a much less puissant though fairly well-to-do modern nation that, based on its robust cultural export industry, the rest of the West would never guess was one-fifth immigrant (34). On the flipside, in Singapore, while the ACM boasts a story of a diverse and hybrid nation connected to the global, what gets left out “is a discussion of the assumptions underlying the diversity management regime in place and the absence of human rights,” which “would challenge the government and the status quo...