Rose, J. 2016. Interpreting difficult history at museums and historic sites, Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, Boulder, New York and London, paperback, ￡23.95, pp215

摘要

The challenges of interpreting difficult history and heritage is seen as a largely modern phenomenon. Kidd (2014) suggests the new museology movement of the 1970s led to heritage becoming ‘a contested site, seen as subjective and subjectifying, incoherent, multiple and (of course) “difficult”’ (3).) The recent growth of ‘dark tourism’ has led to interest in why people visit sites of death, disaster and atrocity in living memory (Lennon and Foley 2000) as well as historical sites (Sharpley 2009). What most of the research shares is a need to understand why sites connected with difficult or dark histories have proliferated over the last 30-40 years and how these sites can be interpreted, considering the dilemmas in presenting these histories and the motivation for visiting such sites. History can be ‘difficult’ in a number of ways; it can present something unexpected or new about the past, or ask ‘uncomfortable questions about our humanity and inhumanity, legacy, apology, ownership, voice, repatriation, classification, memorialisation, memory and forgetting’ (Kidd 2014: 1). Macdonald defines ‘difficult heritage’ as the past which is ‘meaningful in the present but that is also contested and awkward for public reconciliation with a positive, self-affirming contemporary identity’ (2009: 1). These definitions suit the approach of Rose’s Interpreting Difficult History at Museums and Historic Sites (2016), which focuses on how to encourage visitors to museums and sites of difficult history to learn about something which might conflict with their sense of self, community identity and wider understanding of the world