Columbia Center for Archaeology Seminar

Amanda Guzmán
Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Trinity College CT

Neither Passive nor Absent: Naming and Narrating Puerto Rican Makers in American Museums

Friday 8th April, 5.10pm EST

 951 Schermerhorn Extension

Virtual and in-person for CU affiliates

Registration link

Museums as a space of intercultural interpretations and Puerto Rico as a product of imagined representations have launched into national consciousness and contestation in the wake of renewed civil discourse about history, memory, and responsibility. With grassroots movements like Decolonize This Place, museums have been challenged to confront their colonial legacies attending not only to the necessity of truth-telling and the future of exhibitions but also to the infrastructure of cultural institutions themselves and how traditional gatekeeping has narrowed the access points of would-be future storytellers. Post-Hurricane Maria Puerto Rico stands at a crossroads with a long legacy of past portrayals alternatively as a tropical paradise for tourist consumption and a place of absence to be acted on by outside forces. The public ousting of the island’s governor in 2019 as the result of widespread protests shakily opens the door to a new, uncharted path ahead for an island that is imagined and written by and for the sake of its people.
 
Puerto Rican museum collections reside, too often unrecognized, in many North American sites of traditional diaspora migration. Object assemblages have the potential to recover generations of silenced local actors and agency. Each museum collection interweaves narratives and itineraries not only of the collector as a named acquisition agent or the collecting institution as the site of eventual deposition but also of historically contingent sets of exchanges that provide on the ground, material-oriented interventions into our ways of documenting the island and its liminal relationship as an incorporated island territory to the U.S. mainland. On the eve of potential transformation, it seems like an apt moment to revisit the museum shelves, write object stories, and remember.

Biography

Amanda Guzmán is an assistant professor of anthropology at Trinity College in Hartford, CT. She received her Ph.D. in Archaeology from the University of California, Berkeley. Amanda specializes in the field of museum anthropology with a focus on the history of collecting and exhibiting Puerto Rico at the intersection of issues of intercultural representation and national identity formation. Her writing has been featured in Museum Anthropology and Sapiens as well as through blogs with the Digital Library Federation and the University of the West Indies Museum. Amanda’s research has been supported by Smithsonian Fellowships from the National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History. She serves on the Board of Directors for the Pre-Columbian Society of New York, as an Innovative Cultural Advocacy Fellowship Mentor for the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, and a Bronx Council on the Arts grant panelist.