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Folklore: Illuminating Then and Now (review)

topics not well known by general audiences and issues tough for public consumption, such as slavery and colonialism. Even as the exhibit does engage in a wide variety of issues as well as some politically, culturally, and historically challenging questions, there are so many historical and contemporary topics that the subject of Africa—not to mention the African diaspora(s)—demands, there can be no way for a single exhibit to cover them all. It is here that visitors must begin to acknowledge the histories that African Voices excludes can be as telling as the ones it includes. African Voices is, selfconsciously, a celebratory exhibit. Indeed, its selection of a historical timeline that culminates with the democratic process that elected Nelson Mandela in 1994 casts light on a contemporary Africa that other events like the Rwandan genocide complicate. With African Voices the National Museum of Natural History finds itself at a political, philosophical, and economic crossroads currently facing many museums and public institutions that broker culture. African Voices negotiates the terrain well. It is a forward-looking exhibition that reflects some of the best contemporary anthropological and historical scholarship on Africa, while appealing to the growing number of tourists actively looking for a museum experience to rival, or at least accompany, IMAX, and attracting the corporate funding necessary to successfully mount a large exhibition. One recognizes the dynamism and contemporary relevance of African Voices even more when leaving the exhibit and immediately encountering the museum’s older, static, and, at times, offensive exhibits on Asian and Pacific cultures. Nonetheless, the enduring questions that the presence of this provocative exhibit at the heart of the National Museum poses are tougher to answer. Parting ways with African Voices, we read a Temne proverb from Sierra Leone that states, “Unless you know the road you’ve come down, you cannot know where you are going.” As we wind our way back to the museum’s rotunda and the elephant’s upturned tail, we cannot help but once again confront the organizational flow of the museum and wonder to what degree the Smithsonian is willing to apply this quote to itself more holistically, asking what are the racial and cultural implications and/or ramifications of continuing to sandwich exhibits about living cultures, no matter how forward-looking, between stuffed mammals and dinosaur bones. Although this exhibit labors mightily to undo long-standing stereotypes and provide a progressive, dynamic, and humane view of African history and life, the very layout of the museum relies upon older structures of thought that reinforce ideas linking “non-Western” peoples to “natural history” and/or to evolutionary conceptions of race that were dominant when the museum was constructed in 1911. Rather than succumbing to the thought that this exhibit is just an example of new wine in old casks, I prefer to hope that African Voices may be a first step toward dismantling the master’s house from within.