I spent a week in Melbourne. I learned a lot, mostly about the Middle Ages, because I was at one of my favourite conferences and so many scholars are breaking old walls and talking across disciplines and reducing bias. This is not universal. It’s Australian experts in the Middle Ages and in Early Modern history and literature. Also, it was one of those rare conferences where there was no antisemitism. There were individuals who were on the verge of saying something, but they looked up and caught themselves and found non-hateful ways of asking questions or of answering questions.
ANZAMEMS (the organisation whose conference it was) has a good history in this regard. I’ve been a member for squillions of years and, while sometimes I’ve been isolated, I’ve never experienced hate.
My most fun moment was when one of my undergraduate lecturers called on me at question time. He remembered my name… This is not always guaranteed 45 years after that degree.
My paper was about how museums tell stories of the past and how those stories can be worrying. I used one example, with a few pictures and compared it with some other museums. I played safe and the museum itself was in Germany. Several people came up to me afterwards and said that they need to read museum’s displays more critically.
What I intended to show (and what I actually showed, judging by the responses!) was that we take many of our stories from what we see and hear over our lives. When we’re not critical, we get so much bias and hate from well-intended people. I put my theory into practice at an in-service at the State Library of Victoria. The librarian was not at all impressed with me. She had claimed that the writers in some SF magazines on display were Australian, when every single one of them was American. The magazines were printed in Australia because of the really interesting politics in the US at that time, but they were still US magazines and are very famous for this. She also wasn’t entirely happy with me when I asked her why they only had Jewish ritual books and no other indication of Jewish book culture (or other Jewish cultures) when for every other ethnic or religious group on show they answered questions about books (authors, genre history, the nature of the book itself – the display using Islamic texts explained the texts, but was all about the binding and its brilliance and variation). Her excuse was “We borrowed the display objects from the Jewish Museum and this is what they gave us. I know the Jewish Museum. I used to teach the guides at the Jewish Museum. And I know their collection. That cabinet was part of a conversation between the two museums and for it to be only about the very-religious and without some of the basic explanations (why the miniature Torah was no longer able to be used was a very book-related query that was not asked nor answered) is due to the shape of that conversation. I want to know what the State Library asked for. Was it “Jewish items”? Was it ritual items? Was it book history (which was the subject of the exhibition)? There was a conversation that needed to happen before that display cabinet was filled, and it obviously didn’t happen or didn’t happen in the best way.
My conference was extraordinary in that it consistently asked the questions and discussed the answers and most topics were nicely nuanced. The SLV and the street marchers the day I arrived and the day I left were more typical of current Australia.
And I just realised I wrote you a post while I was away. It’s on my laptop and I haven’t downloaded it yet! Next week…