Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display
ISBN: 9780520961456
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Visual Culture;

In this diligent international study, Levitt (The Transnational Villagers), a professor of sociology at Wellesley, uses a series of case studies to evaluate how museums are adapting to the new global environment, which is marked by rapid immigration and social change. Levitt sets up some revealing comparisons among institutions. While she finds that Sweden's museums, such as the Etnografiska Museet in Stockholm, create global narratives, even addressing issues like human trafficking, the National Museum of Denmark selectively uses global history to celebrate Danishness and sidelines the experience of immigrants. Levitt shows how Singapore's Asian Civilizations Museum and Qatar's Museum of Islamic Art have helped to thrust these countries onto the world stage as cosmopolitan societies, even though certain political freedoms are still very much wanting. Throughout, Levitt draws on extensive interviews with museum curators and directors, situates each museum into its historical and political context, and weighs its strategies of exhibition and interpretation. While China is conspicuously absent, this remains an illuminating study that will be of interest to academics and museum professionals working in the field today. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Peggy Levitt is Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College and a Senior Research Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University, where she codirects the Transnational Studies Initiative. In 2015, she is a Robert Schuman Fellow at the European University Institute. Her books include Books, Bodies, and Bronzes: Comparative Sites of Global Citizenship Creation, Religion on the Edge, God Needs No Passport , The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation , and The Transnational Villagers .