Book Review: Contested Histories in Public Space: Memory, Race, and Nation edited by Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer

Book Review 52 Contested Histories in Public Space: Memory, Race, and Nation Edited by Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer Duke University Press (2009) ISBN: 0822342367, 376 pages. Reviewed by: BROOKE NEELY How are racial and national narratives imagined in a postcolonial, global context? A growing body of work across the disciplines locates these processes in public sites of commemoration. Memorials, monuments, and other historical spaces operate as contested terrains for constructing, opposing, and negotiating racial and national discourses. In Daniel J. Walkowitz and Lisa Maya Knauer’s edited volume Contested Histories in Public Space: Memory, Race, and Nation, contributors illustrate these representational struggles at a variety of historical sites around the world, from New Zealand’s national museum to South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument, highlighting in particular how postcolonial theory has informed the character and politics of public debates over how to convey history. Walkowitz and Knauer argue that this is a particularly important time to study debates over history in the public sphere because deindustrialization and outsourcing have made cultural and historical sites important spaces for economic development. To address the range of ways public histories get contested, they divide the book into four main thematic sections that take the reader on a tour of four theoretical problems the editors see as central to the study of memory, race, and nation. The first section focuses on how indigenous groups engage with national historical sites in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada and attempt to expand and complicate the national narratives that circulate in these memorial spaces. For example, Ruth B. Phillips and Mark Salber Phillips offer a compelling piece on the First Peoples’ Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. They detail the conflicts and collaborations that emerged in the process of expanding the museum’s narratives in ways that legitimate indigenous epistemologies and foreground First Peoples’ traditional and contemporary experiences. In this case, we see how museum spaces can avoid singular narratives and artifact-oriented displays by offering unfinished, multiple, and fragmented stories of current and former Native inhabitants as well as by conveying the ongoing political struggles surrounding identity, land rights, and sovereignty. Similarly, Paul Ashton and

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