Dinosaurs, Racial Anxiety, and Curatorial Intervention: Whiteness and Performative Historiography in the Museum
Scott Magelssen
magelss@uw.eduUniversity of Washington (United States)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2622-1181
Abstract
This essay argues that the staged encounters between museum visitors and dioramic display of dinosaur fossils in natural history and science museum spaces have been designed to capitalize on and performatively reify white anxiety about the exotic other using the same practices reserved for representing other historic threats to white safety and purity, such as primitive “savages” indigenous to the American West, sub-Saharan Africa, the Amazon, and other untamed wildernesses through survival-of-the-fittest tropes persisting over the last century. Dinosaur others in popular culture have served as surrogates for white fears and anxieties about the racial other. The author examines early dioramic displays of dinosaurs at New York’s American Museum of Natural History and conjectural paintings by artists like Charles R. Knight to argue that the historiographic manipulation of time, space, and matter, enabled and legitimized by a centering of the white subject as protagonist, has defined how we understand dinosaurs and has structured our relationship with them as (pre)historical objects. Exposing the ways in which racist tropes like white precarity have informed historiographical practices in dinosaur exhibits offers a tool for interrogating how racist ideologies have permeated the formations of modernity that inform our modes of inquiry.
Supporting Agencies
Keywords:
dinosaurs, museums, historiography, white precarity, white racial frame, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Charles R. KnightReferences
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Authors
Scott Magelssenmagelss@uw.edu
University of Washington United States
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2622-1181
Scott Magelssen is Professor and Donald E. Petersen Fellow in the School of Drama at the University of Washington, where he teaches Theatre and Performance Studies and heads the Program in Theatre History, Theory, and Criticism. His research interests also include museum studies. He is the author of Simming: Participatory Performance and the Making of Meaning (2014), and Living History Museums: Undoing History Through Performance (2007). His most recent book, Performing Flight: From the Barnstormers to Space Tourism, was published by the University of Michigan Press in 2020.
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