Historical Studies Program, Art History and Visual Culture Program, Anthropology Program, and American and Indigenous Studies Program Present
Troubling Heritage: Contemporary Museums and the Terrain of the Civil War in a Southern City
Monday, October 21, 2013
RKC 103
Richmond Virginia, erstwhile capital of the Confederacy, is a city that memorialized in its built landscape the ideology of the “Lost Cause.” This lecture will provide a preliminary sketch for the ways that local history and art museums with national stature have responded and continue to respond to this troubling heritage as they try to create a more salutary urban imagined community. These museums are leaders in a wider movement among US cities of a certain size to explicitly link cultural development to urban renewal. As such they must attract a national audience while not alienating local communities which, for their part, are often polarized along all too familiar racial and ideological lines. Eric Gable is a professor of anthropology at the University of Mary Washington. He is a managing editor for the journal Museum and Society and the associate editor for book reviews for American Ethnologist.
For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].
Location: RKC 103