‘The Musée de l’Histoire de l’Immigration: a museum for immigrants?’
The Museum of the History of Immigration (MHI) in Paris, modelled after New York Ellis Island Museum, is the only national migration museum of France. Opened in 2007, it is hosted in the Palais de la Porte Dorée, a palace initially built for the 1931 Colonial Exhibition. In my seminar I will discuss the difficulties and contradictions of hosting a museum that humanises the migratory experience in the largest monument to Empire in France, in an increasingly xenophobic society. For the creators of the museum, the choice of the colonial palace was understood as an act of subversion of the historical building. Curators, historians, and immigration activists who participated in the building of the museum have renewed museological practices of display, as well as challenged the politics of proprietorship of collections, the history of acquisition and the source of materials as an attempt to valorise the cultures of immigration. However what could have destabilised dominant narratives on immigration in a time of increasing tensions and hostility towards migrants, I will argue, only distorts the representation of immigrants, and furthers, not challenges, their marginalisation. As an incredibly politicised attempt to rehabilitate non-hegemonic cultural production, the MHI is a crucial institution to understand how state discourses of immigration rely on an erasure of the continuous effects of colonisation in the present era, and how an ‘institutional acknowledgment’ of immigrant populations’ contribution to the construction of the French nation-state is a ‘double-edged sword’.
All Senior Members, Students, and Staff are warmly invited to attend the Pudding Seminars, which feature coffee, cake, and lively discussion! To allow people to get to 2pm appointments, please note that coffee and cake will be available from 1 o’clock with the Seminar starting promptly at 1.15pm.
Full details of all this term’s pudding seminars can be found on the
college website:
https://newn.cam.ac.uk/research/pudding-seminars/forthcoming-pudding-seminars/