Contested Sites of Identity and the Cult of the New

In the final section of New Museums and the Making of Culture, I explore two prominent museums in the Pacific region that I have selected because they illustrate the highly political and contested nature of culture in particularly important and astute ways. The Centre Culturel Tjibaou (CCT) in Nouméa (New Caledonia) and the national Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa) in Wellington both opened in 1998 as self-consciously new institutions that aimed to project postmodern strategies of representation. They both responded to imperatives to interpret and celebrate national or territorial identities as well as the need to participate in reconciliation processes. However, in accord with their divergent socio-political and economic contexts, each institution has adopted a mode of representing postcolonial identity that reflects different approaches to questions of history and cultural identity in their respective colonial contexts. In the making of Te Papa and the CCT, and in their day-to-day experiences, each museum actively demonstrates that the constitution of culture — both in and beyond their physical spheres — involves a difficult, highly charged and ongoing process of negotiation.