Museum as medicine? Healing and heritage in Indigenous fiction from North America and New Zealand

来自北美和新西兰的小说作家将博物馆想象成“文物”的坟墓（Grace, 1975），负责“错误教育”（Taylor, 2010），“殖民统治的纪念碑”（Vizenor, 1998），以及土著文化表达可以“笑”的空间[…]，“哀号”和“歌唱”他们的要求被听到（King, 2013）。然而，对博物馆创造性表现的批判性关注主要来自视觉艺术学者和博物馆从业者。该项目旨在解决土著小说中对博物馆空间的表现缺乏批判性参与的问题，并探索这些表现如何通过文化实践的回收、叙事控制和物质文物的恢复与“治愈”殖民历史的愿望联系起来。研究问题：鉴于这一差距，我在（后）殖民和土著文化理论的框架内提出了一种比较文本分析，以回答四个主要的研究问题：通过文本支持、复杂和扩展遗产来治愈的野心是如何实现的？如何在文本中调用“恢复”的隐喻来传达社区记忆和物质恢复的过程？这些文本在多大程度上与欧洲西方的精心策划和保护遗产叙事模式相结合，他们为历史的传承想象了哪些替代方案？为了发展以欧洲为中心的博物馆理解，从土著的“知识制造和记忆”实践中学习有什么潜力？虽然考虑博物馆在（后）殖民文化愈合过程中所扮演的角色似乎更适合博物馆研究方法，但文本分析可以独特地想象我想探索的替代方案。使用从（后）殖民研究和土著的感叹词中得出的框架，这些都困扰着这一领域的历史假设，我想建立一种批判性的方法，这种方法有可能塑造非殖民化的材料和认识论项目。通过对文本使（后）殖民治疗复杂化的方式的分析，我想考虑“医学”一词在土著语境中的潜在丰富性，扩展欧美对医学作为治疗疾病的理解，而不是考虑存在，记忆和想象未来的力量。在批判性地审视这一定义时，我想询问文本如何将遗产（在博物馆内外）想象成一种药物，并追溯这些想象在多大程度上可以转化为生存策略。查德威克·艾伦（Chadwick Allen）将土著文本置于彼此之间的对话中，以追踪不同的自我表现模式（Allen, 2012），我希望对不同领域和背景下当代土著小说的复杂性有一个层次的理解。这种方法也建立在丹尼尔·希斯·贾斯特（Daniel Heath Justice）最近对目前被称为北美的土著文字的调查基础上（Justice, 2018）。Justice对多种传统的比较是对Allen在其他地方提到的一种“主动”比较阅读方法的呼唤，我将在我的方法中努力遵循（Allen, 2014）。最终，通过将文化差异文本置于对话中，我的目标是绘制出土著作家对博物馆空间的表达和想象的多样性，并追踪想象（后）殖民遗产的共同点和文化特定策略。

Fiction writers from across North America and Aotearoa/New Zealand have imagined museums as tombs for 'relics' (Grace, 1975), responsible for 'mis-educat[ion]' (Taylor, 2010), 'monuments of colonial dominance' (Vizenor, 1998) and as spaces where Indigenous cultural expressions can 'laugh[...]', 'wail' and 'sing' their demand to be heard (King, 2013). However critical attention to the creative representation of museums has largely come from visual arts scholars and museum practitioners. This project aims to address the absence of critical engagement with how museum-spaces are represented in Indigenous fiction and explore how these representations connect to the desire to "heal" colonial histories through the reclamation of cultural practice(s), narrative control and the recovery of material artefacts.Research questionsIn light of this gap I propose a comparative textual analysis within a framework drawn from (post)colonial and Indigenous cultural theory in order to answer four main research questions:In what ways are ambitions towards healing through heritage supported, complicated and expanded by the texts?How is the metaphor of "recovery" invoked across the texts to convey both a process of community remembrance and material restitution?How far do the texts engage with Eurowestern models of curated and conserved heritage narratives and what alternatives do they imagine for the passing on of history?What potential is there to learn from Indigenous practices of 'knowledge-making and remembrance' (Lonetree, 2012) in order to evolve Eurocentric understandings of the museum?MethodologyWhilst considerations of the role museums play in processes of (post)colonial cultural healing seem more suited to a museum studies method, textual analysis can uniquely imagine alternatives that I want to explore. Using a framework drawn from both (post)colonial studies and Indigenous interjections that trouble the historic assumptions of this field, I want to establish a critical method that has the potential to shape the material and epistemological project of decolonization.Through an analysis of the ways in which texts complicate (post)colonial healing, I want to consider the potential richness of the term "medicine" in Indigenous contexts, expanding Euro-American understandings of medicine as a curative treatment for disease and instead considering the power of presence, remembrance and imagining the future. In critically examining this definition, I want to interrogate how the texts imagine heritage (in and outside of the museum) as a kind of medicine and trace to what extent these imaginings can be translated into strategies for survivance.The strengths of comparisonIn following Chadwick Allen's provocation to place Indigenous texts in conversation with one another in order to trace distinct and divergent patterns of self-representation (Allen, 2012), I hope to gain a layered understanding of the complexity of contemporary Indigenous fiction across different spheres and contexts. This approach also builds on Daniel Heath Justice's recent survey of Indigenous writings from across what is currently known as North America (Justice, 2018). Justice's comparison of multiple traditions is a call to what Allen refers to elsewhere as a method of 'active' comparative reading that I will endeavour to follow in my approach (Allen, 2014). Ultimately, in placing culturally divergent texts in dialogue, I aim to map the diversity of Indigenous writers' articulations and imaginings of the museum-space and trace both common ground and culturally specific strategies for imagining (post)colonial heritage.