Exhibiting Voices: Reclaiming Authorship in the Post‐Cold War Nuclear Age

Abstract

Contemporary museums have long recognised the value of oral history as part of contextual displays, and as museum objects in their own right. Oral history can make objects and histories come to life and at the same time provoke new thoughts, feelings and ideas. By connecting past, present and future, oral history can be a powerful agent for identity formation and the shaping of a collective consciousness. Yet, within that premise there is tension. While oral history interviews are accounts of historical actions that occurred over time in the past, interviews themselves are real‐time events narrated as a type of verbal performance. Interdependent from its temporality as a process, interviews are also contingent in that they are vulnerable to the particularities of location, how they are historically situated in time, and the subjectivities of participants. Oral history has therefore been dismissed as an unreliable source of information. This paper argues that because of these contingencies, oral history should be considered an important form of historical thinking. Drawing from the writing of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin, especially his claim for the potential of contingency in oral discourse, it will bring into focus the potential of oral history to further dialogue between disparate groups and communities. One of the intrinsic glories of oral history is its potential to liberate thinking by opening up a gap between objects and their labels, revealing the full three‐dimensional humanity of historical action.