Curating Community : Museums, Constitutionalism, and the Taming of the Politi... For Sale

Curating Community : Museums, Constitutionalism, and the Taming of the Political, Paperback by Douglas, Stacy, ISBN 047205354X, ISBN-13 9780472053544, Brand New, Free shipping in the USThe author explores how museums curate the idea of community, through interactive educational practices used in adult learning programs meant to promote democratic engagement, diversity, and accessibility. She also looks at the role of the constitution in producing political community through its representational framework of sovereignty, and considers how the concept of community is used to hinder the diversity of the world. Focusing on South Africa, she challenges the necessity of representing community and critiques the centrality of the constitution, contending that the fundamental logic of the liberal legal system is based on a sovereign individual that is contained within a sovereign legal community and that the constitution must be decentered as a key device in the process of transformation. She offers an alternative approach to address the limits of conventional constitutionalism and the factors of colonialism, apartheid, and other forms of inequity and brings the museum and the constitution together to outline a theory of the production of nonsovereign imaginations of community, showing how the museum has more potential to disrupt concepts of political community. She discusses the work of political theorists and philosophers on constitutionalism and the political; how the theme of community persists through the rise of the modern museum; and the idea of time as chronological progress in both the museum and constitutionalism, with examples of the British Museum, the District Six Museum in Cape Town, and Constitution Hill in Johannesburg. Also discussed are the interruption of community through countermonumental memorializing practices at the District Six Museum; and a theory of countermonumental constitutionalism based on existing South African constitutional theory that disrupts the centrality of the constitution as the key site for the production of political community, applied to postapartheid theories of law. Annotation ©2017 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR ()