Containers of Diasporic Memory

This chapter examines the factors that have been proposed as determinants when, where, and why democratization happens. Several of these factors are synthesized into a broader framework that describes human empowerment as an evolutionary force channelling the intentions and strategies of actors towards democratic outcomes. The chapter first provides an overview of the nature and origin of democracy before discussing how democracy and democratization are affected by social divisions and distributional equality as well as modernization, international conflicts, regime alliances, elite pacts, mass mobilization, state repression, colonial legacies, religious traditions, and institutional configurations. The chapter concludes by presenting a typology of democratization processes, which includes responsive democratization, enlightened democratization, opportunistic democratization, and imposed democratization.

This chapter examines the factors that have been proposed as determinants when, where, and why democratization happens. Several of these factors are synthesized into a broader framework that describes human empowerment as an evolutionary force channelling the intentions and strategies of actors towards democratic outcomes. The chapter first provides an overview of the nature and origin of democracy before discussing how democracy and democratization are affected by social divisions and distributional equality as well as modernization, international conflicts, regime alliances, elite pacts, mass mobilization, state repression, colonial legacies, religious traditions, and institutional configurations. The chapter concludes by presenting a typology of democratization processes, which includes responsive democratization, enlightened democratization, opportunistic democratization, and imposed democratization.

This thesis examines processes at play in the knowledge production in the interdisciplinary academic community, as well as the dissemination directed towards the general public, at the Museum of Archaeology at the University of Stavanger. It does so by examining what takes place during meetings at the museum’s outdoor knowledge arenas. My study is located at the intersection between archaeology, museology, and cultural studies/culture history. I highlight recent perspectives on audience, knowledge, and place by the use of analytical terms such as knowledge production, meeting place, involvement, memory, narration, visitors and site museum. The study has been conducted using qualitative methods such as participatory observations, interviews, and visual analyses. In the analysis, encounters between actors in connection with the university museum’s archaeological excavations are presented through my own confessional and impressionist tales, which are based on observations, conversations, and interviews with museum staff. I have conducted an ethnographic analysis of what occurs in knowledge production in a museal context. My study has uncovered a distinct museo-archeological form of knowledge production. The unique characteristic of the actors’ archaeological fieldwork is the frequency and diversity of interpretations connected to place, time, and experiences. The actors retain these interpretations from the field in the form of stories or memories from the work with archaeological structures, or through a selection of significant site elements. The museum experts have multidisciplinary meetings through walking tours of the sites. External actors contribute local knowledge to the project and provide a new understanding of specific places in the local community. The knowledge is transferred through active dissemination on the part of the archaeologists and creates the basis for collaboration and the development of new methods. Imaginary time travel occurs in encounters between archaeologists and the public. The public is directly or indirectly included in the museum’s knowledge production, as a part of the guided tour narrative, through activities or improvised forms of presentation. The archaeological excavations at the university museum are a part of the museum’s museal processes and are temporary places for scientific knowledge production. The sites are converted into meeting places for the production, transfer, and development of knowledge, in which the actors’ interaction is place- specific. External actors are members of the public who transfer, explore and take part in producing knowledge about the places being excavated by the university museum. Co-operation with the museum’s professional staff is a type of involvement that changes the local population or museum visitors into amateur archaeologists or fellow museo- archaeological researchers. In museal outdoor spaces, members of the public become discoverers, through becoming involved in an ongoing museo-archaeological knowledge production process. As such, imaginary time travel is not limited to activities in permanent museum institutions but is also tied to guided tour narratives and excavation activities, as parts of a temporary form of museum dissemination. The guests are presented with and involved in interpretations that are accessible in this museum without walls. The university museum’s excavation sites are converted into temporary site museums. This opens up for the public’s own experience and understanding of the past, at the same time as such encounters involve the public in knowledge co-production. Members of the public become co-creators or co-producers in a co-production museum. The university museum’s excavation sites enable another way of involving the public in a ‘museum without cabinets’ than that which can be offered through its permanent exhibitions. A museum space without cabinets is formed. The museum gains an outdoor knowledge arena that functions as a post- museum (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000), offering openness, co-operation, knowledge sharing and the actualisation of places and stories.

The Virtual Outreach Program at the Michigan State University Museum progressed through three stages of videoconference program development while taking museum resources on the virtual “road.” This chapter documents the shift from an experts-based model to one focused on learning content through object-based learning and dynamic inquiry in a collaborative community. Revisions in pedagogy, philosophy, and content are explored at each level and supported by the literature and best practice standards that shaped these changes. Throughout, the museum virtual field trip is presented as a partnership between the classroom, museum experts, and distance-learning providers, working together to create meaningful virtual learning experiences for K-12 students.

Lee Maracle’s (Sto:lō) “Yin Chin” and SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe have inaugurated a literary tradition of acknowledging and restoring Asian-Indigenous relations in the field of Asian Canadian studies. This study extends their intertextual conversation on the impact of racism and colonialism on Asian-Indigenous relations to consider the ways in which contemporary Asian Canadian settler citizens, migrants, and refugees may inherit not only the legacies of white supremacy, global capital, and settler colonialism but also the historical and ongoing relations of Sino-Indigenous indebtedness. Presenting an allegorical reading of Asian-Indigenous relations through scenes of settler/migrant/refugee indebtedness and gratitude represented in several Chinese Canadian literary texts, as well as Kim Thuy’s Ru, I argue that the literary tradition of Sino-Indigenous indebtedness has the capacity to generate a sense of mutuality and self-critique amongst all Asian Canadians to consider their role and responsibilities within the structures of settler colonialism, particularly within Asian migrant and refugee communities shaped by an enduring sense of gratitude towards the state for being granted a new life on colonized lands.

Resumo A partir de uma perspectiva teórica e empírica, o artigo analisa uma experiência em arte/educação desenvolvida com estudantes da rede pública de ensino na cidade de Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, no Museu Universitário de Arte - MUnA. De abordagem qualitativa e de caráter descritivo e interpretativo, a pesquisa constatou que o contato com museu de arte possibilita ao estudante não apenas ampliar o seu conhecimento de mundo, mas enriquecer sua formação cultural e melhorar a sua capacidade de expressão, além de possibilitar aos estudantes uma melhor interação com o meio social em que vivem. O conhecimento em arte é um aprendizado que começa na observação de uma obra de arte, da sua leitura e da prática artística. As leituras e comportamentos que cada estudante tem ao apreciar uma obra de arte estão relacionados à sua experiência com diferentes manifestações artísticas. É indispensável que escolas, professores de arte e ações educativas em museus sejam importantes mediadores para a produção do conhecimento em arte aos estudantes. Construir esse conhecimento a partir do acesso constante a esses espaços artísticos e educacionais, além do desenvolvimento de atividades artísticas nesses espaços, possibilita ao estudante elevar a sua compreensão da cultura nacional. Verificamos, ainda, que os estudantes produziram trabalhos artísticos significativos durante a ação educativa no museu, o que contribuiu para que ampliassem sua experiência com a arte.

Elfriede (Kezia) Regina Knauer (1926–2010) Joan R. Mertens The death of Elfriede (Kezia) Regina Knauer, on June 7, 2010, represents the loss of yet another European intellectual who settled in America and, in an encouraging environment, published the fruits of her exceptional knowledge and experience. Kezia's distinction lay in her probing eye that was directly wired to the information stored in her brain. That repository of knowledge seemed endlessly expandable and was enhanced by an excellent memory. Kezia saw, knew—and shared. Born on July 3, 1926, in Leverkusen, Germany, she, her twin sister Sybille, and three other siblings were brought up, as she writes, "by almost intimidatingly intellectual parents."1 She recounted that in their home, beside the toilet, there was a small bookcase with a curtain covering, among other volumes, the works of Sigmund Freud. Kezia's father, Julius Overhoff, a businessman, and his wife Edith, not only provided models for their children but also cultivated similarly accomplished friends. Kezia singled out Carl Hentze, whose knowledge of Chinese art and philology early on widened her horizons beyond Europe. Between the ages of six and nineteen (1932–1945, bracketing the years of Hitler's Germany), Kezia and her family were centered primarily in Frankfurt, which took a heavy toll on their lives and, of course, the children's education. After the American liberation, Kezia enrolled in the University of Frankfurt in 1945. There she obtained her Ph.D. in 1951, writing a dissertation on pre-Christian apsidal buildings in Greece and Italy, with Guido von Kaschnitz-Weinberg as her advisor. Although she specialized in classical studies, she always commented with particular enthusiasm on her association with the Frobenius Institute, named after the ethnologist Leo Frobenius. This experience added anthropological methodology as well as exposure to African culture to her scholarly resources. In November 1948, moreover, Kezia met Georg Nicolaus Knauer, a student of classical philology who received his Ph.D. at Hamburg University in 1952 with a dissertation on the Confessions of Saint Augustine. Kezia and Nico Knauer married in 1951. Kezia's postwar years in Frankfurt marked the beginning of her career and adult life. One further element, essential to both, became possible at this time, the opportunity to travel. Between 1948 and 1950, Kezia began extended trips to museums and monuments in France, England, and Italy with her twin sister, Sybille, who became a noted Etruscologist and the wife of Denys Haynes, Keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum. After a brief interlude in Munich, during which Kezia bore a son and studied Arabic, the Knauers settled in West Berlin between [End Page 537] 1954 and 1975. Nico Knauer began as Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at the Free University, Berlin. Kezia served twice in the 1960s as assistant in the department of Greek and Roman Antiquities of the State Museums in West Berlin working with Adolf Greifenhagen. The Knauers traveled widely to the United States and in Mediterranean countries, for which Kezia now studied modern Greek and Turkish. Beginning in the mid-1960s, they became politically engaged, seeking especially to stem left-wing radicalism in the German educational system. The Knauers' departure from Berlin in 1975 to settle permanently in Philadelphia closed a period in Kezia's life that had been overshadowed, if not determined, by German political events. The thirty-five years in the United States, with Nico Knauer as Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, brought the opportunities to pursue research without constraints, to travel, to engage in far-flung scholarly exchanges with colleagues and students, often when she presented her investigations at scholarly gatherings. A glance at Kezia's bibliography makes the point statistically.2 Of the seventy-six books and articles that appeared in her lifetime, fifteen were published during the German years, all the remainder thereafter. Kezia's only formal position in Philadelphia was as consulting scholar in the Mediterranean section at Penn's University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology—and scholar she was. Beginning in the later 1970s, her articles continued investigations of Greek and Roman subjects—Greek vase-painting, Roman wall-painting, the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius...

In 1978, in its seventh issue, October published the travel diaries written by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., who would go on to become the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, during his two-month sojourn in Russia in 1927–28. They were accompanied by a note from Barr's wife, Margaret Scolari Barr, who had made the documents available, and an introduction written by Jere Abbott, an art historian and former director of the Smith College Museum of Art who had returned to his family's textile business in Maine. Abbott and Barr had made the journey together, traveling from London in October 1927 to Holland and Germany (including a four-day visit to the Bauhaus) and then, on Christmas Day 1927, over the border into Soviet Russia. Abbott, as Margaret Barr had noted, kept his own journal on the trip. Abbott's, if anything, was more detailed and expansive in documenting its author's observations and perceptions of Soviet cultural life at this pivotal moment; and his perspective offers both a complement and counterpoint to Barr's. Russia after the revolution was largely uncharted territory for Anglophone cultural commentary: This, in combination with the two men's deep interest in and knowledge of contemporary art, makes their journals rare documents of the Soviet cultural terrain in the late 1920s. We present Abbott's diaries here, thirty-five years after the publication of Barr's, with thanks to the generous cooperation of the Smith College Museum of Art, where they are now held.

Canada's 'multicultural' and 'diverse' identity has surely effected artists' lives and careers. Taking the Iranian artist as case study, this project aims to explore the ways in which migration has affected the work of the artist. The focus of this paper is to investigate how Iranian artists are navigating the Canadian artistic landscape. The process includes the analyzation of their works through three main lenses: politics of movement and space, issues of representation, as well as intersectional feminisms and the examination of the autonomy of the Iranian Canadian woman artist. Private interviews have been conducted to gain deeper insight on the experiences of migration as endured by the Iranian Canadian artists. This thesis seeks to investigate the spaces that diasporic artists occupy. Further, it can be realized that the artists analyzed are finding their voices while also standing in solidarity with other underrepresented artists.

An attempt to put an Asian woman on Canada's $100 bill in 2012 unleashed enormous controversy. The racism and xenophobia that answered this symbolic move toward inclusiveness revealed the nation's trumpeted commitment to multiculturalism as a lie. It also showed how multiple minor publics as well as the dominant public responded to the ongoing issue of race in Canada. This book delves into the ways cultural conversations minimize race's relevance even as violent expressions and structural forms of racism continue to occur. The book turns to literary texts, artistic works, and media debates to highlight the struggles of minor publics with social intimacy. Its insightful engagement with everyday conversations as well as artistic expressions that invoke the figure of the Asian enables the book to reveal the affective dimensions of racialized publics. It also extends ongoing critical conversations within Asian Canadian and Asian American studies about Orientalism, diasporic memory, racialized citizenship, and migration and human rights.

This article provides a comparative analysis of Howie Tsui’sCelestials of Saltwater City(2011) and Ali Kazimi’sFair Play(2014), two art installations that centre the histories of different Asian Canadian communities (Chinese Canadian and South Asian Canadian, respectively), but are underscored by paralleled experiences of racism, exclusion, and indenture. I bring these works together to propose a rethinking of Asian Canadian art history through Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih’s concept of minor transnationalism, a framework which helps map historical formations of “Asian Canadian” that rupture dominant cultural discourse. By comparing the ways in which Asian Canadian artists tell their own stories, drawing attention to narrative and aesthetic resonances not always immediately apparent, minor transnationalism brings into critical focus the subjective connections and experiences of diaspora that are already present but have been obscured through processes of historical erasure and settler colonial nation-building.

Despite its pedigree as a 2002 awards contender, Shekhar Kapur’s The Four Feathers became one of the biggest critical and box-office failures in Hollywood history. In choosing an adaptation of A. E. W. Mason’s 1902 novel to probe the legacy of colonialism, Kapur situates his political concerns within the tradition of the late-Victorian adventure fiction that was vital to maintaining the colonial project’s fundamental role in the British imagination. Yet, the novel’s six previous film adaptations also provide Kapur the opportunity to expose the pervasiveness of imperial ideologies in the wake of World War I through his critique of the Empire Cinema genre for which Zoltan Korda’s 1939 version of Mason’s novel serves as a touchstone. Kapur extends the imperial politics of Mason’s novel beyond its setting in the Sudan and into other postcolonial national contexts through subverting genre conventions and working on a Hollywood project with other diasporic artists, including Iranian screenwriter Hossein Amini, Beninian actor Djimon Hounsou, and Australian actor Heath Ledger. As a result, the adaptation interrogates the shared mechanisms of imperial discourse while comparing the totality of British rule to the global reach of Hollywood from a variety of national perspectives.

The retention of sacred artifacts against the will of source countries, particularly ex-colonies, represents a form of social and cultural control that facilitates and exacerbates political and economic inequities between nations. Since independence, generations of Nigerian artists have engaged in various forms of recuperation of pre-colonial aesthetics through the adoption of postcolonial modernist visual tactics to negotiate a sense of self-determination and to recover an autonomous postcolonial national identity. Contemporary artists in Nigeria, particularly in Benin and throughout the diaspora have employed a range of aesthetic political practices to disrupt the legacies of colonialism still pervasive within their industries and communities. Through the creation of subversive artwork which attempts to think beyond the framework of western benevolence embedded in the project of restitution, some have made efforts to resist hegemonic influences within the global contemporary art world. The tactics of decolonial resistance that some Nigerian and diasporic artists have employed suggest a strategic redeployment of an aesthetic tradition that simultaneously advocates for the reclaiming of a black radical indigenous history and full realization of Nigerian cultural autonomous potentialities, while also envisioning a future situated within a global cosmopolitan framework – what I refer to as cosmopolitan repair. Such forms of cultural production constitute a critical component of the recent resurgence of decolonial activism that has swept the global art world which, at its core, poses a resistance to extractive capitalism in the Global South.

Analysts make much of the diversity of Southeast Asia's political regimes. However, the region also displays a mounting preponderance of pseudoand fuller democracies, as well as a common mode of transition where fuller democratization has taken place. This analysis argues that these "intermediate" regime categories can be partly ascribed to common, though countervailing factors of colonial legacies, structural forces, some faint cultural residues, and new globalized influences. Next, it explores the conditions in which changes may take place from pseudo-democracy to more fully democratic outcomes. Analysis turns finally to the ways in which despite this weakening of leadership, elites regain enough vitality that while transitions may go forward, they have been able to collaborate in limiting the quality of the new democracies that have emerged.

Knowledge and its production is informed by the availability of and access to existing knowledge infrastructures. Historically, both the production of knowledge and knowledge infrastructures have been dominated and dictated by western1 schools of thoughts that elided, erased, neglected, and negated the existence of multiple epistemologies. This paper explores ways to understand the depth and breadth of global colonial legacies and epistemic coloniality—and locate the pathways out in the archives. Using South Asian Canadian Digital Archive (https://sacda.ca) as a case study, the paper questions ways to rethink, redefine, and refine the methodologies of traditional archives to enable spaces for open and inclusive scholarship. It further frames SACDA (1897 to present) as an open tool for building multilingual knowledge infrastructures and to bring the larger community into the process of collective knowledge mobilization, creation, and dissemination.