Introduction – Engaging with ‘Minority’ Voices: Cultural Representation in Museums of the Middle East and North Africa

This chapter offers a theoretical introduction to the question of cultural representation in museums of the Middle East and North Africa. It covers topics relating to museology, heritage development, inclusion and exclusion and community activism.

Paving the Way for a Lebanese National Narrative: Empathy at the Armenian Genocide Orphans’ Aram Bezikian Museum in Lebanon

The chapter proposes a discourse analysis of the Armenian Genocide Orphans’ Aram Bezikian Museum (Lebanon) through the lens of minority studies. The museum embraces the identity of Lebanese-Armenians and primarily highlights the legacy of the genocide orphans. The text explores how the identity of the Armenian minority is negotiated within the Lebanese context by examining some of the region’s historical and socio-political components. The museum discourse is then analysed by recounting the permanent exhibition’s storyline and its scenography symbolism. Finally, the paper evaluates the museum’s success in creating dialogue spaces by studying its audience. It becomes evident, throughout the investigation, that the museum not only raises awareness on the significance of the Armenian Genocide, but also strives to make its audience reflect upon questions of identities, and leaves the space open for interpretive, moral and spiritual considerations and enquiries raised by historical war crimes and differences within a society.

Egypt’s Coptic Museum: From Patriarchal to National

This chapter traces the most significant episodes of the Coptic Museum’s history and argues that the museum was not founded as a ‘minority’ museum but rather as an archaeological museum holding valuable religious Coptic art. Its foundation aimed at demonstrating that Coptic material culture had equivalent value in Egyptian history to Pharaonic, Greco-Roman and Islamic arts, which in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries already had their own museums. Unlike other museums, however, the Coptic Museum was established under the aegis of the Patriarch, giving it an unconventional status within Egyptian heritage owing to the religious nature of its initial collection. The essay presents the museum’s foundation during the early nineteenth century and discusses the context of its nationalization and transformation into a public domain museum (1931) as well as its expansion (1947).

‘Do I Even Exist?’ Kurdish Diaspora Artists Reflect on Imaginary Exhibits in a Kurdistan Museum

In the MENA region state-sponsored cultural institutions such as museums often advanced a unified story of nationhood rather than to account for diverse ethno-linguistic and religious communities such as the Kurds. Visiting museums, Kurds have encountered deep silences, distortions and complete omissions of their lives. During the Baathist regime in Iraq, which controlled the country after 1968, national museums served to enhance the state’s legitimacy. Modern Turkish museums perpetuate a nationalistic narrative that discriminates against ethnic Kurds. To counter colonial and repressive narratives, diaspora Kurdish artists now articulate the need for alternative knowledge production. In this chapter, ethnographic interviews focused on curating Kurdish museum exhibits offer insights into how diaspora Kurdish participants frame their identities. The planned Kurdistan Museum in Erbil is at the center of Kurdish diasporic critique. Cultural activism among Kurdish diaspora artists, not unlike political consciousness-raising, represents a form of resistance to the way in which Kurdish experiences have been manipulated by hostile power structures.

‘The Performance of Servitude’: Gendered and Racialised Representations of Citizenship at the Bahrain National Museum

This chapter explores a wedding exhibit near the entrance to the Customs and Traditions Hall in the Bahrain National Museum in Manama, Bahrain. It uses an African diaspora framework to analyse the mannequins and images that depict an olive or light-skinned bridal party and black musicians who accompany her during the most festive moments of the ceremony. Drawing from the work of historian and philosopher Michel Foucault on governance and power and sociologist Tony Bennett, it argues that the exhibit serves as both a parable of Bahraini society and as a way of naturalising and validating racial and gender hierarchies. The museum helps to shape the world of a population of subjects by functioning as part of the contract between a nation-state (embodied by a dynastic monarchy) and its citizens (non-royals).

Minority Audience: The Oudayas Museum and the Manufacturing of Elitism in Moroccan Museums1

This chapter focuses on the relationship between Moroccan museums and their relationship with local visitors. Drawing from original interviews, historical archives and the Moroccan museum context, it investigates how a postcolonial country like Morocco translates a colonial museum apparatus into public national heritage, destined to all citizens. The chapter’s analysis is based on an exhibition held at the Oudayas Museum in Rabat in 2003, as well as interviews with residents of the kasbah surrounding the museum. It highlights a slew of social, cultural, and economic issues linked to symbolic capital and local perception. The chapter shows the need for the Moroccan museum sector to re-think museums in local terms as a pathway toward cultural democratisation.

Branding Convivencia: Jewish Museums and the Reinvention of a Moroccan Andalus in Essaouira

Exploring the transformation of the Simon Attia Synagogue into a museum of memory (bayt al-dhakira) (house of memory) and research centre for the study of Judaism and Islam in Essaouira, this chapter shows an attempt to institutionalise new segments of Jewish history and bring them to the broader Moroccan public. Amongst Arab countries of the MENA region, Morocco provides a rare example of a nation that displays and protect its Jewish heritage. In the face of mass emigration from Jewish citizens to Israel and Europe, private investors and the Moroccan government have engaged in multiple initiatives to preserve the cultural heritage of this population since the 1990s, engaging in the branding of a Moroccan ‘convivencia’ (coexistence), the medieval concept of tolerance and interfaith dialogue that existed in Muslim Spain. Until recently, ‘convivencia’ had mainly revolved around the programming of festivals and the creation of cultural museums.

Lodges of Debate: Two Museumised Sufi Tekkes in Anatolia

This chapter analyses the museumisation of the main Sufi lodges (tekkes) of the Mevlevi and Bektaşi orders. Through an analysis of their museography and an ethnographic exploration of the multiple social experiences of visitors at these museums, the chapter interrogates some of the established narratives about the official closure of the Turkish tekkes. Rather than offering a counter-narrative, this text explores the complexity of ongoing debates about the role of Sufi sites in contemporary Turkey and the different forms of negotiation between the state and society, where secularism is not only contested and resisted but also strategically incorporated into contemporary experiences of Mevlevi and Bektaşi Sufism.

Afterword – Minoritised Memory and Affect in a Museology of Disaster

This afterword introduces the theoretical concept “museology of disaster” to describe the dynamics of state-administered memory through controlled spaces of circulation in museums, and shows how many of the case studies presented in the book disrupt this museology in order to stage the (re)appearance of minoritised political subjects. The chapter also proposes attention to affect as a methodology of research and practice for the study of minorisation and inclusion in museums. Drawing on a workshop led by the author in Morocco in 2018, the chapter addresses how affect theory might offer new entry points into the histories of minoritised collectivities and go beyond paradigms centered on the recuperation of oppressed authenticity to imagine and produce reparative futures.

Is Tunisia Ready for a Jewish Museum? Perspectives on the Current Debates Surrounding the Status of Jewish History in My Country

This chapter charts the genesis of the Museum of Jewish-Tunisian Heritage in Tunis. Jewish culture has been exhibited in Tunisian museums since the beginning of the French Protectorate in 1881. Until recently, however, the idea of a museum entirely dedicated to Jewish-Tunisian history and culture was simply unconceivable in Tunisia, as Judaism was solidly understood as being tied to Israeli politics. Kazdaghli explains how the Jewish-Tunisian community, domestically and overseas, have seized the so-called ‘Jasmine Revolution’ and the democratic ideals it purports to push for the establishment of a joint-venture Museum of Jewish-Tunisian Heritage in Tunis. In a context of new democratic achievements, the museum project is publicised as an instrument of social change, a partner to the democratic transition. However, the chapter shows that such a project proves a difficult exercise as the organising committee navigates cultural taboos surrounding Judaism in Tunisian society, as well as conflicting patrimonial opinions within the community itself, in Tunisia and within the diaspora.