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Closings and Openings: Afterword on “Prospects for the Canadian Museum for Human Rights”

Many of the essays in this special issue were written by scholars based in Winnipeg in the year before the opening of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in September 2014, a context discussed in detail by the editors in their introduction. It is difficult to imagine that anyone living in Winnipeg who paid even glancing attention to current affairs could have been unaware of the coming-into-being of the CMHR over the past several years. For Winnipeggers particularly interested in texts and institutions of culture, it often seemed that the Museum filled the entire available field of vision. This effect was perhaps best emblematized by the massive structure of the Museum building as it rose from the ground in the center of the city but was certainly not restricted to it. As a cursory perusal of the lists of works cited at the end of the essays in this collection will confirm, the Museum seemed to be omnipresent in local cultural discourse—promoted in fundraising materials and events, described in architectural statements and reviews of the building, imagined in governing documents and annual reports, represented in official speeches and websites, protested in press releases from communities that believed they would be underor misrepresented in the permanent exhibits, and disparaged in blogs and letters to the editor, to name just a few of its appearances. Such discursive volatilization, as Fredric Jameson observes about the texts of mass culture, has the disconcerting effect of destabilizing the object of study (1979, 137). Indeed, between the colossal and the circulatory presence of the Museum in discourse, a pressing question for scholars of the CMHR would seem to be, what is the object of study? Although unarticulated, this appears to be one of the questions motivating many of the essays in this collection. To begin to answer it, a scholar must choose a point of view, a place to stand to take account of what can be seen, a ‘‘prospect,’’ to use the metaphor chosen by the editors of this special issue. But ‘‘prospect’’ as a geographical figure, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, carries with it not only the sense of ‘‘[t]he view (of a landscape, etc.) afforded by a particular location or position’’ (‘‘Prospect’’ 2015) but The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 37:264–267, 2015 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1071-4413 print=1556-3022 online DOI: 10.1080/10714413.2015.1028854