New Museums and the Making of Culture

Kylie Message is ARC Special Research Centre Research Fellow and Convener of the Museums and Collections graduate program at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, the Australian National University.

• Introduction: Shifting Organisations, Knowledges and Effects 1. Theorising New Museums, Language and Politics 2. The Shock of the New: Unity and the Modern Museum 3. History in the Making: Spectacles of Empire, Currencies of Newness, Consumption and Citizenship 4. Culture in the Making: Public Spheres and Political Urgency5. Contested Sites of Identity and the Cult of the New6. Diversity and Changing Models: From New Museum to Cultural CentreConclusion: Cultural Reconstruction

'Kylie Message insightfully reappraises the workings of 'new museums' as social sites at which the past, the present, and future can be continuously contested and created in complex cultural struggles over national and personal identity. Global in scope, historical by design, and local on purpose, her wide-ranging analysis is an important contribution to contemporary debates about museum studies and cultural criticism.' Timothy W. Luke, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University 'For all the explosion in the (inter)discipline of museology, Message does nevertheless manage to offer her readers something distinctively (dare one say it?) 'new'. This book is by no means the first to demonstrate how museums function as agents and instruments of social recognition, reconciliation and restitution, as the extensive references and bibliography testify. But Message is among a minority of scholars who prove able and willing to combine conceptual analsysis with practical demonstratio Through her thorough and inquisitive research, Message is encouraging us to step back and analyse what these new museums are truly accomplishing, inspiring us to take the initiative to work through the rhetoric and develop museum practice that is truly inclusive and representative of our multicultural communities. Christa Lohman, Journal of Museum Ethnography