NEWS
14 Obiter Dicta
Interrupted
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purposefully in order to challenge the law, bring the
legal issues to court, and progress their rights through
the constitution. It’s also interesting that there may
be a second path, outside the Constitution and within
the community itself, that can at least advance the
cultural narratives on how our communities should
look like rather than how they’re imposed on us by
the structures of our society.
S: Part of what I’m saying is that it’s not only the constitution that pulls on these inheritances of sovereignty and the Western liberal individual. I think part
of the problem is our delimitation of community and
our thinking about who is in and who is out. I draw
on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy in this regard. Nancy
argues that every time we draw a border around community, or any other absolute for that matter, anytime
we make this solid, circular boundary and say this is
a thing on the inside and it is absolutely autonomous,
we are telling a lie about that thing. What happens
is that every time we draw that border, it is always
exposed to that which is outside of it. It is always in
relation. So whenever we say, “Here is the absolutely
autonomous individual or nation or community,”
whether it is a romanticized indigenous community
or a romanticized left multitude or a nation state, any
of those things, we’re always telling a lie about that
structure, about its autonomy, its sovereignty.
What I am also arguing is that, it is a challenge to
un-think that inheritance of sovereignty. What the
museum can do (and what a constitution cannot) is
interrupt those notions of community found in constitutions and romantic left and right-leaning vanguardist projects. I don’t see this as a descent into
postmodern abstraction, but a very political question
about how we rethink being together in the world,
especially in order to interrogate colonial legacies.
M: In your article on time, constitutionalism, and
museums, you mention how the students often got
confused or didn’t know what was going on. You
wrote that it was an example of how the universalistic
structure of the museum fails in its attempt to try to
tell a linear version of time. Can you expand on that?
t humbs down
Professors who continue to teach substantive
material in the last lecture.
S: Absolutely. I’m glad you brought that up. I had a
very good mentor who asked me after my visit to the
museum, what surprised me. She encouraged me in
my research to think about what stood out, instead
of reverting to my expected narratives. What I found
were these stories about confusion and frustration.
Staff at the British Museum were so intent and focused
on their program and project—imparting education
on these students—and became very frustrated when
students didn’t understand what was going on or
didn’t get the meaning of the activity. I used that as an
example to show even though the museum attempts
to tell a very strong and steady story about itself, it
cannot actually hegemonically totalize the world.
It is important to be very careful about projecting
our own narratives about these things. I was trying to
be attentive to that. In this case, students were supposed to come up with these astrolabes and understand how they work. They didn’t know what was
going on; and it was quite funny, but like I said, the
staff were quite exasperated.
How I fit that into my own work, into my larger
argument, is to say that these kinds of narratives are
non-totalizing, unable to suffocate the plurality of
the world because there are always things that poke
through and interrupt it. However, I argue that it’s
not just enough to romanticize those moments. We
need to not only think about this, but act. Again,
drawing on Nancy, there is an urgent task to actually
write the interruption on community and not only
rely on these potential moments.
This is where I turn to the possibility of countermonumental memorializing practices at the museum,
using the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South
Africa. That museum makes a real concerted effort to
interrupt community. I talk about their adult educational programs and the ways they take very seriously
the need to interrogate the notions of race, gender,
community, the notion of what decolonization and
the anti-apartheid city look like because they feel
very strongly that the paradigms and the concepts
with which they think about those problems today
are inherited from colonialism and apartheid. If the
racial structure, the very way we understand race, is
inherited by the apartheid structure and we’re trying
to decolonize, and we’re still using those same concepts—there’s a problem. They take as their political project the interruption and interrogation of all
those things. And that, I argue, is the kind of museum
practice I want to herald—not the kind of practice that
attempts to smooth and cohere and tell a particular liberal or neoliberal story about the community.
These counter-monumental memorializing practices
can help interrupt those inherited conceptions of
community.
M: I guess you can say history is alive then, or museums try to make it alive as an ongoing project, instead
of just flattening it over.
ê In September 1864, British North American politicians met in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island to discuss the
possibility of a union. Photo credit: