Thompson: Trump’s attempt to control the Smithsonian is an attempt to control the narrative of America

Another sign of division, ignorance and decline…

…Mr. Trump accused the nation’s museums of becoming too “woke,” presumably under the Obama and Biden administrations. But the “New Museology” tradition has a longer trajectory and was rarely led by political elites. Beginning in the 1960s, cultural institutions were pushed by social movements to confront whose histories they highlight and whose they erase. What followed was not a top-down, coordinated political agenda, but rather a slow, uneven shift in the professional practice of curators, as civil society demanded a rethinking of what is considered part of the canon and a reckoning with what it means for cultural institutions to truly represent the nation and its complicated, often violent history. 

It is often said that history is written by the victors. In his 1995 book Silencing the Past, Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues that collective memory is not fixed; it is forged. National narratives are curated through a malleable process shaped as much by remembrance and reverence as erasure and forgetting. Over the past few decades, progressives have found ways to revise national stories to include those who were once marginalized and excluded. Conservatives now seek to do the same, but with the added force of the presidency, able to swiftly, decisively, unilaterally dismantle changes that were never truly hegemonic to begin with. 

Yet national museums, libraries, archives, and performing arts centres remain the capillaries of state power. They are neither the beginning nor the end of the cultural sphere, which has long been animated most auspiciously by those on the margins. As Richard Iton wrote in his 2008 book, In Search of the Black Fantastic, when the excluded were locked out of legislatures, banks and bureaucracies, they instead infiltrated and redefined the realm of popular culture, creating vibrant counter-publics that operate alongside, against, and often in subterfuge of the formal political sphere. 

There will always be efforts to control the narrative of the American nation – through curricula, history books, university campuses, museums, monuments, and even the names of mountains. Sometimes they will succeed, but never fully. When folks on the margins were written out of the official histories of the nation, we told our own stories in our own ways, and those stories survived to bear witness to a resurgence. Art lives in the realm of ideas, discourse, culture and identity: powerful, collective forces that cannot be eliminated by presidential decree. 

Source: Trump’s attempt to control the Smithsonian is an attempt to control the narrative of America