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This chapter examines modes of exhibiting revolution and revolutionary history in the post-Mao reform era. After looking at some Republican-era examples as a way of suggesting links between Guomindang (KMT) and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) revolutionary narratives, the analysis focuses on the Museum of the Chinese Revolution, the most official exhibitionary space for interpreting and propagandizing the meaning of the communist revolution in China. Over its more than fifty-year history, the museum's representations of the revolution have changed considerably to reflect political and economic shifts. In the post-Mao era, curators have sought to enlarge the exhibits into a more general history of modern China, one less centered on the party-led revolution, but those efforts have always been circumscribed by the state's continuing allegiance to the revolution as its central legitimizing myth. Many of the basic tropes and narrative strategies developed in the original exhibits from the early 1960s can be found in post-Mao iterations, even in its most recent exhibit, Road to Revival. Still, the changes in the museum's representations of the modern past are significant and hint at more radical representational transformations occurring in other exhibitionary contexts.

The Philippine exhibit and archive at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History forward the colonial project by taking the colonized as objects of accumulation that then can be studied in disciplines like anthropology and archaeology and exhibited as a means of educating and improving the general public.

This chapter explores the layered status and reception of South Asian art in US culture. It begins by setting the context for museum displays, explaining both the strategies used in exhibiting cultures and the power-play that museum organizers engage in, to suggest that what the public sees is not “just art” but the careful showcasing and eliciting of aesthetic responses by “mediating between art and the visitor.” Next, using three different exhibitions curated by the Sackler Gallery—“Devi The Great Goddess,” “India Through the Lens,” and the “Chola Bronzes”—the chapter explains how the author's Asian Americanness, that is, “the politics of her own identity as an insider-outsider, an individual with a hyphenated status, and a woman” coincided with the planning and curating of the exhibitions. “Devi,” in particular, was executed as an interactive exhibition that made concrete numerous aspects of Hindu culture as the materiality of many South Asian homes in the United States.

This book concludes by focusing on the memorialization of Timothy McVeigh ten years after he was executed. It suggests that the presences of McVeigh and his co-conspirators have not been altogether banished, noting how attention has shifted from the duties of prosecution and execution to incorporation—how best to acknowledge and explain the role played by McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier in the Oklahoma City bombing without giving them further credit or airtime. It also considers the impact of the task of incorporation on the ways survivors, victims' families, and Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum personnel negotiated the perpetrators' presences. Finally, it discusses the issue of including McVeigh in museum exhibits.

This book concludes by focusing on the memorialization of Timothy McVeigh ten years after he was executed. It suggests that the presences of McVeigh and his co-conspirators have not been altogether banished, noting how attention has shifted from the duties of prosecution and execution to incorporation—how best to acknowledge and explain the role played by McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Michael Fortier in the Oklahoma City bombing without giving them further credit or airtime. It also considers the impact of the task of incorporation on the ways survivors, victims' families, and Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum personnel negotiated the perpetrators' presences. Finally, it discusses the issue of including McVeigh in museum exhibits.

This chapter turns to the site of the art museum and examines the work of the Filipino American artist Stephanie Syjuco, which parodies the accumulation and exhibition of Asian artifacts in the Western civilizational museum. Syjuco critically uses strategies of mimesis and plagiarism in order to expose the museum’s history of raiding non-Western cultures and its racialized objectification of non-Western peoples.

This chapter introduces the concept of progressivist imperialism through the figure of Frank Murphy, the mayor of Detroit during the Great Depression and then the last American governor-general of the Philippines, who transposed his earlier work on the New Deal into the Philippine colonial context. This chapter focuses on his and his sister Marguerite Murphy Teahan’s accumulation of Philippine souvenirs and tribute collected in the family’s house-turned-museum, and it also examines Filipino responses to American progressivist colonial governance.