This chapter samples signs of various cultural institutions, entertainment venues and media.

The conclusion discusses the significance of objects of prestige and their circulation in the Atlantic world during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and the rise of colonialism.

Chapter 1 identifies and analyzes the discourses that went into the “Indian Mona Lisa” trope. It qualifies the painting’s formal label, Portrait of Radha–Kishangarh (referring to the goddess, Krishna’s favorite), and informal one “Bani Thani” (referring to the purported model of the portrait, a concubine of the crown prince). It does so first by situating the painting among contemporaneous Mughal and Rajput Women Portraits. Further, it traces art-critical discourses surrounding the discovery of the Kishangarh School of Art during colonial times and the nationalist appropriation of the painting as an emblem for Rajput spiritual art, apotheosized in the issuing of a stamp. It describes the search for a model behind the painting, the protestations of this theory, and the painting’s current role in a popular cyber-orientalist love story.

This chapter focuses on exhibitions of comics history curated by contemporary cartoonists. It maps out the stakes of this curatorial gesture in a context of comics museification and the narrative, aesthetic, and cultural challenges that it raises. Drafting in cartoonists as curators has been a way for some museums to navigate these issues, by commissioning a “cartoonist’s eye” to select and present material from archives. Two specific cartoonist-curated exhibitions are central case studies for this chapter: Le Musée privé d’Art Spiegelman in 2012 and Eye of the Cartoonist: Daniel Clowes’s Selections from Comics History in 2014. The exhibitions frame “their” histories in quite specific ways, relative to their material and institutional contexts. Both cases present visitors with completely different versions of comics history, based not only on the material that is exhibited but on how it is presented, framed, and organized. Based on interviews and archival research, the chapter offers an in-depth analysis of the layout strategies and museological discourses around the two exhibitions, describing how curating shapes a particular visual transmission of comics history.

This chapter makes a case for writing the institutional history of museums as the history of process. Rather than focusing on the choices of individuals or structural elements that uphold museums’ claims to permanence and stability, I examine manuscript and published catalogues to excavate the nineteenth-century museum’s ‘procedural rhetoric’, the way processes were used persuasively to support systems of meaning and instil specific values. Through comparative analysis of the Hunterian museums in London and Glasgow, I argue that processes of sequencing, labelling and organizing objects on paper were deployed to forge and consolidate, or, alternatively, disrupt and dispute, each museum’s nascent institutional identity. Catalogues function as ‘instituting genres’—that is, genres of writing that enact and thereby make visible the dynamic processes of institutional formation and evolution.

Chapter 2 offers a visual paradigm for representations of black people in the ancient Greek world. It considers fifth-century BCE janiform cups that depict black and brown faces on opposite sides. Contemporary ideas are all the more pronounced when dealing with visual constructs of skin color in Greek antiquity and therefore require continual interrogation. Disputing the uncomfortable ease with which some art historians presume a fixed connection between black people and bumbling inferiority, this chapter argues that the black face serves as part of a repertoire of sympotic performance. Similar to masks, janiform cups enable drinkers in the symposium to adopt new identities. The discourse about the chromatics on janiform cups leads to a broader examination of black skin in ancient Greek art. Close scrutiny of museum displays reveals the temporal clash that can occur when audiences encounter iconography of black people in Greek antiquity. In particular, scrupulous inspection of the British Museum unearths a troubling tendency to privilege ancient Egypt as an indication of legitimacy and legibility, contrasted with Nubia.

The Epilogue moves from the museumification of Ichijōdani as a prefectural heritage site to the display of medieval urban archaeological materials in general. The excavation, analysis, and display of material culture from Ichijōdani provides us with an opportunity to rethink how we tell the story of medieval Japan and its relationship to modern history, particularly around issues of war, community, and national identity.

The House of Slaves at Gorée Island was listed as a World Heritage site in 1978, one year before Auschwitz concentration camp. This chapter examines the process of heritagization of the House of Slaves as one of the African sites for the commemoration of the slave trade. Adopting Michael Rothberg’s perspective on multidirectional memory, it demonstrates how the project of the House of Slaves was indebted to the recognition of the Holocaust as a global trauma: the commemoration of the slave trade is in several ways entangled with the commemoration of the Holocaust. But from Senegal’s independence onwards, the House of Slaves was also inflected by a vision of Negritude. The first curator of the House of Slaves, Joseph Ndiaye, gave it a global significance through his performances as ‘witness’ to the slave trade. By giving testimony, Joseph Ndiaye claimed an epistemic space for the articulation of Blackness. He simultaneously introduced the figure of the witness to the genre of the memorial museum and reclaimed the African legacy of orality against the Occidental epistemology of history. As embodiment of a legacy of the project for human rights, Joseph Ndiaye also claimed this museum as an African project of emancipation.

This chapter examines how a variety of twentieth-century popular forms – circus, Las Vegas spectacles, the modern pop/rock concert, living history museums, and theme parks – created new languages of performance and expanded the realm, scale, and scope of spectacle by borrowing and reshaping past forms and methodologies. These new languages of popular entertainment performance engage most directly with threads of technology, narrative, authenticity, and audience engagement. These threads in turn come to characterize the popular and influence contemporary traditional theatre practice, both nationally and internationally.

Anatomy museums were thoroughly scrutinised as institutions that potentially perverted public taste, exhibiting specimens of sexual disease, victims of vanity, and monstrous curiosities. Claims that museums might be sites of titillation were not entirely unfounded; visitors to La Specola in Florence were apt to touch the wax genitalia of the anatomical Venus, while Kahn’s Museum peddled quack cures to visitors’ sexual diseases. In an attempt to combat this, anatomy museums foregrounded the moral and educational aspects of their institutions, places that one could visit to ‘know thyself’. Sensation fiction suffered similar imprecations for exhibiting sexualised bodies. Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady (1875) engages with the excesses and order of anatomical, medical, and museum culture, his novel populated by characters that are simultaneously represented as specimens and curators, with clues collected from worryingly instable pathology, collections of female hair, and sexualised objects. Working with nineteenth-century anxieties about the differences between reputable and contentious displays of anatomy, Collins’s textualised and substitute bodies negotiate the tensions of the anatomy museum. This chapter argues that museums and literature shared similar strategies to make these excessive bodies respectable; narrative was used to order anatomy, making displayed specimens educative instead of titillating.