| Since the mid-1980s, numerous critics, artists, and scholars have analyzed the politics of representing race, class, gender, and culture in Euro-American museums. As a whole, these critical analyses have articulated ways in which museums perform a hegemonizing function, even if the concept of hegemony has not been applied per se. The theorization of hegemony posits that a dominant class sustains its governing authority by garnering consent from subordinate groups to be governed according to the interests of the dominant group through means other than direct manipulation or force. This dissertation synthesizes critical analyses of Euro-American museums not merely to argue that the museum is a hegemonic apparatus but also to pose the question of what might constitute a counterhegemonic exhibition.;A discussion of the 1997 movie The Relic, which was filmed primarily in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, is presented as a means to outline how critiques published in the past fifteen years collectively implicate the museum's function as a hegemonic apparatus. The problem of conceptualizing a counterhegemonic exhibition subsequently is posed, focusing on the particular histories associated with the Fred Harvey Company collection of Native American art at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona. A theory of counterhegemonic museum practice is developed through a review of four exhibitions that have been celebrated and/or maligned for breaking from traditional museum practice. And the politics of cross-cultural representation are outlined through an analysis of Sherman Alexie's 1996 novel Indian Killer.;Conclusions are presented through visual texts that feature photographs from the Fred Harvey Company collection and are designed to reflect the assertion that a counterhegemonic exhibition pays respect to rememories---forgotten histories lurking within the social memories that are disseminated through hegemonic museum practice. Counterhegemony is considered to be a feature of, rather than antithesis to, hegemony and is characterized as an (im)possible endeavor, which is not the opposite of what is possible but rather releases what cannot be foreseen as a possibility. |
