Dinosaurs, Racial Anxiety, and Curatorial Intervention: Whiteness and Performative Historiography in the Museum

• Authors: Scott Magelssen

Title variants

PL

Dinozaury, rasowy niepokój i kuratorskie interwencje: Białość i performatywna historiografia w muzeum

Abstracts

PL

Esej dowodzi, że inscenizowane spotkania zwiedzających wystawy z dioramicznymi ekspozycjami skamieniałości dinozaurów w muzeach nauki i historii naturalnej zostały zaprojektowane tak, by wyzyskać i performatywnie urzeczywistnić lęk białych przed egzotycznym Innym. Wykorzystywano w tym celu te same koncepcje – zwłaszcza podtrzymywaną przez ostatnie stulecia ideę przetrwania najsilniejszych – za pomocą których reprezentuje się inne historyczne zagrożenia bezpieczeństwa i czystości białych, symbolizowane przez prymitywnych „dzikich" z amerykańskiego zachodu, Afryki Subsaharyjskiej, Amazonii i innych dziewiczych pustkowi. Dinozaury jako inni stały się w kulturze popularnej substytutem białych lęków i niepokojów związanych z urasowionym Innym. Autor bada wczesne dioramiczne ekspozycje dinozaurów w nowojorskim American Museum of Natural History oraz obrazy przypisywane artystom takim jak Charles R. Knight, by dowieść, że historiograficzna manipulacja czasem, przestrzenią i materią, umożliwiona i uprawomocniona przez umieszczenie w centrum białego podmiotu jako protagonisty, zdefiniowała sposób, w jaki rozumiemy dinozaury i ustrukturyzowała naszą relację z nimi jako obiektami (pre)historycznymi. Odsłonięcie dróg, jakimi rasistowskie motywy, na przykład poczucie kruchości białych, wpłynęły na praktyki historiograficzne w ekspozycjach dinozaurów, otwiera możliwość analizy roli rasistowskich ideologii w formowaniu się nowoczesności, która określa nasze metody badań naukowych.

EN

This essay argues that the staged encounters between museum visitors and dioramic display of dinosaur fossils in natural history and science museum spaces have been designed to capitalize on and performatively reify white anxiety about the exotic other using the same practices reserved for representing other historic threats to white safety and purity, such as primitive “savages” indigenous to the American West, sub-Saharan Africa, the Amazon, and other untamed wildernesses through survival-of-the-fittest tropes persisting over the last century. Dinosaur others in popular culture have served as surrogates for white fears and anxieties about the racial other. The author examines early dioramic displays of dinosaurs at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and conjectural paintings by artists like Charles R. Knight to argue that the historiographic manipulation of time, space, and matter, enabled and legitimized by a centering of the white subject as protagonist, has defined how we understand dinosaurs and has structured our relationship with them as (pre)historical objects. Exposing the ways in which racist tropes like white precarity have informed historiographical practices in dinosaur exhibits offers a tool for interrogating how racist ideologies have permeated the formations of modernity that inform our modes of inquiry.

Keywords

PL

dinozaury; muzea; historiografia; niepewność białych; biała rasa jako rama widzenia; Henry Fairfield Osborn; Charles R. Knight

EN

dinosaurs; museums; historiography; white precarity; white racial frame; Henry Fairfield Osborn; Charles R. Knight

• Publisher: Polska Akademia Nauk. Instytut Sztuki PAN
• Journal: Pamiętnik Teatralny
• Year: 2021
• Volume: 70
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 101-120

Dates

published

2021

Contributors

author

Scott Magelssen

• University of Washington

• https://orcid.org/0000000226221181

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Identifiers

DOI

10.36744/pt.984

Biblioteka Nauki

32083632