Dr Anindya Raychaudhuri (Senior Lecturer in the School of English): ‘Tell ‘em about the men’: The Fractured Politics of Heritage in Postindustrial Museums’
In this paper, I will look at a selection of industrial museums (spaces that were once factories or mines, and are now museums) to critically explore the narratives that they are constructing. I will argue that these narratives of the past are perhaps more complex than is at first thought – often opening up fractures within which the audience can insert its own interpretation, and come to its own conclusions, both about the past and the present. I will be looking at five museums across Great Britain – three coal mining museums, and two textile museums. I will be looking at Big Pit National Coal Museum of Wales in Blaenavon, the National Mining Museum of Scotland in Newtongrange, and the National Coal Mining Museum for England in Wakefield. I will also look at Scotland’s Jute Museum at Verdant Works in Dundee, and Masson Mills textile museum in Matlock Bath, Derbyshire. Together, these museums, and others like them, help to frame a British national narrative of deindustrialisation, through the ways in which they recreate ‘what it was like’. In the process, the disappearance of industry from the British economy becomes a matter of established fact, something that can safely be mourned, and the objects, stories, sensations that the museums provide its visitors, come to represent this mourning for a loss that has happened, a past that has been settled.
Brown Bag 1. Wednesday, 17 March, 13-14 (on Teams)
Jorge Sarasola (Phd candidate in Spanish, Modern Languages): ‘The Resurgence of 19th Century Afro-Uruguayan and Afro-Argentinean Heroes in Contemporary Historical Fiction’
