Guest lecture organized by the LMU Institute for Digital Cultural Heritage Studies

Dr. Robin Maria DeLugan (University of California, Merced):

"How Nations Grapple with their Difficult Pasts: The Role of Museums and Global Memory Constellations"

Where: 28.06.2022, 14 Uhr c.t, Oettingenstr. 67, room 123

This talk explores the role of museums to address the violent legacies of twentieth century state violence. Presenting case studies for El Salvador, Spain, and the Dominican Republic, I illustrate how museums are joining other new sites and practices of public memory that are freshly grappling with 1930s state violence followed by decades of authoritarianism that shaped hegemonic understandings of the contemporary nation. How does this new memory work aim to transform the very meaning of the nation and the experience of national belonging? In El Salvador the focus is on the 1932 massacre of indigenous peoples; in Spain it is the recent attention to the Civil War 1936-39 including the repression of Catalan language and identity that ensued; and in the Dominican Republic new commemorations focus on the 1937 genocide of Haitians at the border between the two countries. The research illustrates how museums are involved in global constellations of memory sites and actors to bring attention to historical episodes of state violence while making the connection between the difficult past and ongoing social exclusions (particularly based on race, ethnicity, and indigeneity). The dynamic reveals efforts to shape collective understanding about the nation’s heritage and future and invites a discussion of the role of ethnography to chronicle and theorize the always on-going process of imagining and re-imagining the nation.

Speaker's Biography:

Robin Maria DeLugan, PhD is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Merced. She is author of Remembering Violence: How Nations Grapple with their Difficult Pasts (Routledge 2021), Reimagining National Belonging: Post-Civil War El Salvador in a Global Context (University of Arizona 2014), and numerous articles that examine the emergence of museums and other sites and practices of historical memory to transform the meaning of national identity and belonging.