Narratives of Community

In this groundbreaking book, cultural theorist and historian Olivia Guntarik brings together a collection of essays on the revolutionary roles museums across the world perform to represent communities. She highlights a fundamental shift taking place in 21st century museums: how they confront existing assumptions about people, and the pioneering ways they work with communities to narrate oral histories, tell ancestral stories and keep memories from the past alive.

The philosophical thread woven through each essay expresses a rejection of popular claims that minority people are necessarily silent, neglected and ignorant of the processes of representation. This book showcases new ways of thinking about contemporary museums as spaces of dialogue, collaboration and storytelling. It acknowledges the radical efforts many museums and communities make to actively engage with and overthrow existing misconceptions on the important subject of race and ethnicity.