Global Museum: Antwerp's opportunity

How does one design a global museum?  Any museum that is not a website, needs to contain its collection within a building and make sure to secure funding from a specific political entity, which usually means attracting the right kind of influential audience.

The new MAS in Antwerp has all the holdings of a museum about globalization and its history, but it has not put them all together into a coherent form. The MAS holds diverse collections brought together from many smaller museums.  The topics range from paintings and porcelain, the history of Antwerp, anthropological artifacts from tribal peoples in the Pacific, African and the Americas, the history of shipping, traditional folk culture in Flanders. 

How did the MAS end up with this hodge-podge?  It does not take too much imagination to realize that the content of these collections reflects the interests of Antwerp's ruling elite during the nineteenth-century. Some of the upper class wanted to demonstrated their refined taste by collecting European decorative arts, others were filled with civic pride and another group traveled the world.  All three could be spun together into a narrative of globalization.  If Antwerp were not such a major port, we would hardly have found a collection of Indonesian and African masks in the MAS.  Why not link the presence of these collections with Antwerp's colonial and global economic history? 

As the exhibits now stand, the history of the city is told compellingly in terms of the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Golden Age as art historians sometimes still call it.  This historical narrative structures the most coherent and exciting part of the MAS, but with a broader and longer view, the history of Antwerp would easily be placed within the context of colonialism and the spread of European capitalism across the globe.  The curators have all read Ferdinand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein. Thus, it would not be so difficult to link Antwerp's history within the Spanish Empire and the later nineteenth-century anthropological collections.  But such a curatorial approach would require presenting Antwerp as more than just the gorgeous sacrificial victim of the Eighty Years War.  It would require the museum to address the question of nationalism, Flemish, and as well French and German.  It is not so hard to see how one group of nineteenth-century collectors would become fascinated with African art, while another would focus intensely on Flemish village life.   Domestic ethnography is the nationalist response to colonial expansion.  Finally, the museum's vast collection on Antwerp shipping provides the obvious link between all the other collections.  

Why not turn the museum into an investigation of Antwerp's global past?   The answer surely has everything to do with Belgium's awkward political present.   The conflicts between Walloons and Flemings are so exhausting that most Belgians just discreetly refer to them for fear of unleashing yet another ideological cavalcade.    This reticence, this desire not to wade into the broader terms of Belgian political history, stymies museums such as the MAS who are obliged to present more than their local heritage. 

Global Encyclopedia

Globalization operates as an encyclopedic form of knowledge of which the internet is of course the ideal media. With globalization, we all get to rove around uncovering and learning tidy bits of knowledge from faraway places without putting them into any grand historical context.

We get to talk about one or two moments in history, connect them through a network and then draw some striking conclusion about a different previously unrelated matter. The kind of dialectical juxtaposition Walter Benjamin nurtured in his Arcades Project, where the commodities sold in nineteenth-century Parisian side streets revealed something about the rise of Hitler, is now acceptable across the globe, so long as one has a theoretical model that allows us to make an article about Kojak reruns in Thailand explain post-Vietnam War economic relations in South East Asia.

The other side of encyclopedic knowledge is the potential for fakery. You don’t have to be an elaborate forgery to assert knowledge. You just merely need to have read an article or two on the subject. Expertise feeds the encyclopedia. Without some scholars who know the particular field, you would not have a convincing article on Wikipedia, but once the article is on the internet, there is room for endless circulation and appropriation. We can claim knowledge of Shanghai city planning while sitting in Illinois.

Eighteenth-century Europe was full of such armchair experts. Everyone who could read devoured travel literature about places far from Europe. Immanuel Kant lectured for years on anthropology without having left his hometown. Christian Wolff could generate treatises on a host of subjects not just one or two. Being learned meant knowing a lot about many things. We are again floating into such an encyclopedic phase. It is refreshingly interdisciplinary. We all get to hold forth like a contemporary English professor, who can teach a seminar on Hitchcock or Kafka. We get to spin historical connections like a German philosopher of old, compare Chinese history to Egyptian in 22 deft pages.

As an old Medievalist once told my multilingual friend—you’re either brilliant or a fraud. Alas the majority of us will just be panting to keep up.

Translating Globalizations

Once upon a time foreign language departments were small monadic re-creations of the homeland. If you walked down the hall of a French department, everyone spoke French. As a matter of course, you switched into the language as you entered the office space of the department. German departments did the same, they held department meetings in German, they hung around the mail room speaking German, classes were of course in German. If you saw each other in the supermarket, you spoke German. This had the great advantage of giving students the opportunity to practice their language skills, it also intimidated the younger folks and sealed the department culture off, creating an unusual cohesion inside the department that was distinct from the rest of the university.

Now the situation is quite changed. Foreign language departments can not carry on isolated in their own cultures. Translation, not of literary classics, but of basic cultural assumptions is constantly required. We are compelled as foreign language teachers to mediate between the US and other cultures, and not just the language we teach, but it seems increasingly that Europe as a whole has become a strange place to Americans, and so an Italian professor might easily have a wider function than representing just his or her own culture.

Germans have been making this transition for a while. When I teach German history, it really becomes a course in the formation of Europe from the Roman Empire onward. This has a lot to do with being a"good German," that post Nazi, old-Nato ethos of showing that Germans will in future work cooperatively with other Europeans, rather than taking over their countries.

Now, though, it also has this extra charge of explaining the post-Communist unification of Europe as well. There are many different varieties of globalization, and increasingly foreign language departments are required to translate one globalization into another. How do the European interconnections translate into the American mode of making global links? Obviously there are profound differences. The US model is driven enormously by military interventions whereas the European is more mercantile, more deliberative.

The Loss of Strangeness

What's missing from the current American assumption about the global and its Englishness, is the wonder at difference, at the strange ways of another civilization, that there could be some completely different manner for people to treat each other and distinctly different values about books, marriage, religion, war, health than our single universally applied assumptions. I miss the care one needs to take while entering a new culture.

Now, there may be moments when caution is required, but behind any quiet first steps into a strange city, there lies implicit a fundamental sense that back home is superior.

Only the most stubborn fanaticism is treated as outside the global, and while it needs to be treated cautiously, it is never seen as a respectful alternative, never the sense that in this other society things are done differently for good reasons.

Whereas in the nineteenth century for an American to visit France or Russia, it meant to enter into a "new world" that one could not dismiss as backward. They were parallel societies.

The out-dated notion of civilizations, in the plural, meant that there were a goodly number, not a very many but more than a handful, of different ways to organize life.

Now the assumption is that one global norms exists which has many variations, most of which are measured in relation to some imagined standard of advanced modernity.

Even up until the end of the Cold War, there was the cautious respect for the limit of Western civilization. Now there are just pockets of intransigence.