Ethnic past and Ethnic now: The representation of memory in ethnic museum websites

Abstract

This article investigates how ethnic museum websites in the United States use visual and textual resources to communicate their ideas of memory, past, and ethnic identity. Public relations practitioners as cultural intermediaries create such websites to foster identification between the cultural institutions and their stakeholders. By using social semiotic theory and content analysis, the article demonstrates how museums act as a medium for representing collective memory and, therefore, construct identities that are not static, but in a constant process of adaptation according to different contexts. This study of 43 websites concludes that ethnic museum websites pursue either nostalgic or present-time message strategies to represent cultural memory: the ethnic past and the ethnic now. The ethnic past aims to display an idealized past that is fixed and forever gone. In contrast, the ethnic now uses culturally identifiable features to convey movement, fluidity, transformation, reinterpretation, and the re-invention of ethnic identity. The research contributes to public relations scholarship about identity messages used by cultural intermediaries.