Abstract
The recent global surge of public- and museum-initiated interest in Islamic art has been interpreted broadly as having a direct correlation with diplomatic imperatives. Since the onslaught of the so-called migrant crisis, German institutions, in particular, have sought to socially engage refugees with the existing collections of Islamic arts and artefacts in Germany. But how can museums showcase and contextualise the arts of Islamic lands across time and space, in a way that is attentive to the traumatic experiences of displacement, migration and forced exile? In assessing various integrationist and assimilationist discourses, this chapter seeks to examine the gravity and consequences of museums’ pivotal role in providing an empathic and dignified space in society, where it is otherwise absent.
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Notes
- 1.
Blair and Bloom bemoan the rise of heritage students studying Islamic art, stating that they are not motivated by beauty, but political and identitarian fixations.
- 2.
See also the original scientific findings on mirror neurons from Carr et al. (2003).
- 3.
It becomes clear that by pitting memory against history too absolutely, whether in action or in research, we run the risk of setting up a false and oversimplified polarization which unjustly identifies history with knowledge acquisition and reduces knowledge acquisition to a one-dimensional cognitive process when it is in fact a combination of cognitive and affective processes, just like empathy or indeed memory. (Simine 2013a: Ch. 2)
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Demerdash-Fatemi, N. (2020). Objects, Storytelling, Memory and Living Histories: Curating Islamic Art Empathically in an Era of Trauma and Displacement. In: Norton-Wright, J. (eds) Curating Islamic Art Worldwide. Heritage Studies in the Muslim World. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-28880-8_2
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