Transforming Museums: Mounting Queen Victoria in a Democratic South Africa. Steven C. Dubin. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 339 pp.

A very rich book that tells so much more than what its title announces, Transforming Museums: Mounting Queen Victoria in a Democratic South Africa explores in ten rigorous chapters the cultural mutations that occurred in South African society just before and after the end of Apartheid. The year 1994 is set at the official turn of history: when democratic elections were held in South Africa. Professor Steven Dubin, from Columbia University, focuses on South African museums — from art galleries to science museums — as they remain the dedicated places where national identity and collective memory were and still are being constructed and narrated. From the first pages, it is clear Steven Dubin has an excellent knowledge of the recent theories in social sciences and in museum studies. He presents the four main concepts which are used throughout the book: 1) the transformation of discourses related to South African history and society in museums; 2) the politics of representation of the various groups; 3) the politics of reception by the diverse audiences who visit the new exhibitions; 4) the social and collective memory (p. 5).

The book's odd title echoes a painting in the Tatham Art Gallery, "State Coronation Portrait of Queen Victoria", which is immense and, say, embarrassing, because it symbolizes at best the colonial era in South African history. Moreover, this work celebrating the British power is so huge it can not be easily removed or stored. Hence, this painting brings very bad memories to many groups and individuals (p. 5). Colonial traumas have to be explained and re-visited, not censored. Hiding the past could have been perceived as a denial of the true facts of history. As a solution to this dilemma, Steven Dubin refers to a "marriage of convenience" (p. 246): a new painting from 2003, showing former Zulu King Cetshwayo kaMpande, was exposed nearby. A b/w reproduction of that noble work by Helene Train is shown in Chapter 9; I believe it is so interesting it could have been on the book's cover, although it is a sharp contrast with the title of the book (p. 252).

The author recognizes as well the fact that nowadays, "South Africa is an extremely complicated, challenging, and perplexing society to make sense of" (p. 4). In order to understand this complexity, the author uses various sources and perspectives; he refers to scholarly publications, speeches, interviews and even many anecdotes (as the "State Coronation Portrait of Queen Victoria" affair). Among numerous elements and debated issues, there is an overlooked quote from President Nelson Mandela, who in 1997 inaugurated the Robben Island Museum that was built on the site where he was himself prisoner during 18 long years. On that very day, Mandela insisted on the fact that still in 1997, 97 percent of the displays in South African museums "reflected a colonialist and apartheid point of view" (President Nelson Mandela, quoted by Steven Dubin, p. 2). Some curators who were present refused the critique. For instance, Marilyn Martin, from the Iziko Museum in Cape Town, declared that she felt "no guilt", but "some anger because President Nelson Mandela has never been to [Iziko Museum]" (p. 2). During the last two decades, the museums in South Africa have faced a dilemma regarding their national history: not to forget the past, not to reproduce colonial ideologies, but nevertheless trying to acknowledge the unfair practices that occurred in a recent past. Steven Dubin situates his book's aim in just one sentence, with an idea so important and central that it is repeated twice in the book:

"The apartheid legacy is most apparent in cultural history, natural science, and natural history museums, where the ideology was interwoven into the narratives that their curators composed, and it dictated the decisions they made about what to highlight, and how they chose which phenomena 'innately' belonged where" (pp. 4 and 242).

Transforming Museums does not only focus on "ancient" works from the Victorian era displayed in "old" museums, however, for many new institutions are presented and studied here, [e]specially in Chapter 8 and 9. Human rights appear as a conducting theme in some recent exhibitions in the "new" South Africa (p. 163). Another of the main issues is the burden of the European heritage in South African institutions for new audiences who mostly want to discover "the other side" of the South African culture, as put by Ann Pretorius (from the William Humphreys Art Gallery) who simply asked while being challenged : "What do you want us to do? Throw out all the white people? Throw out all the European legacy?" (p. 35).

As we can see thorough all chapters, many questions and some former debates still remain unsolved or re-emerge unchanged, for example when Steven Dubin concludes that "South African museums face a delicate balancing act today: how to shed the ideological corsets of the past without replacing them with similarly restrictive fashions" (p. 255). Moreover, former classifications of South African groups like the Zulus and the Bushmen were once useful to name and distinct different groups, but nowadays most historians and curators using these categories from the past must be aware that by doing so, they also reproduce the not-so-old segregated terms from the Apartheid era.

Among many qualities, Steven Dubin's book is interdisciplinary, and therefore would be suitable for various readers, even undergraduates beyond the network of African Studies. These could include those in sociology of art, museology, social sciences, ethnicity, but also in cultural and citizenship studies. Perhaps some open-minded art historians could appreciate as well its innovative approach and contents. To my view, Transforming Museums is so coherent and salient that its strong theoretical framework could even be adapted to other contexts and inspire some younger scholars who would like to study state-building, national identity and collective memory in other countries.

Yves Laberge
Québec City