Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum's new permanent exhibition, Glasgow - City of Empire is a shameful piece of Social Justice propaganda
Glasgow – City of Empire is a new permanent exhibition at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in the West End of Glasgow. The display was cocurated by Miriam Ali, Meher Waqas Saqib and Kulsum Shabbir from Our Shared Cultural Heritage, a youth project supported by Glasgow Life Museums (GLM). Their approach to the objects drawn from GLM is to highlight ‘what it means to decolonise museums’, and to ‘combating the collective amnesia in Scotland regarding atrocities such as transatlantic slavery...’ Kulsum Shabbir wanted to ‘narrow my focus to objects that specifically implicate Glasgow in its involvement in the transatlantic slave trade’, while Meher Waqas Saqib wanted the ‘whole project to encourage people to view the history of Glasgow in a different way, that acknowledges the struggles and exploitation of people of colour’.
Nelson Cummins, Curator of Legacies of Slavery and Empire at GLM, said of Glasgow – City of Empire, that ‘As soon as you start to acknowledge these histories and educate the public on these histories there can be a wider call for action, and I think that’s only a positive thing in terms of not only having a fuller understanding of the past but also addressing some of the present-day legacies of that as well.’
To understand the development of modern Scotland – warts and all – is indeed a vital project. To know where we have come from can inspire us towards a better future. But the narrow presentist and hyper-racialised social justice view – which rests on a binary understanding of the world made up of ‘oppressors’ and the ‘oppressed’ – robs history of its contradictions, dynamism and complexity, and worse, denigrates the contribution Scots have made in the modern era. Glasgow – City of Empire is a bad, narrow, one-sided and racialised reading of Scottish history.
For Nigel Biggar, CBE, Emeritus Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology and a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford, and the author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, it is a travesty of the truth.
Further, the idea that ‘educating the public’ about the transatlantic slave trade might act as a call to action to fight racism today is a shameful instrumentalisation of history to suit contemporary political concerns. The more the cultural elites say this display is about history, the hollower that claim rings.
By their own admission, this display is not really about engaging with an important historical moment, but rather it is about contemporary concerns of the Scottish cultural elites. It is quite clear that it is about promoting their contemporary political and ideological worldview. The narrative that modern Scotland was built on the backs of slaves and that Britain’s colonial past hangs over Scots today is absurd and just not true. While statues and some street names nod to Britain’s colonial past, they don’t dominate the thoughts and actions of Glaswegians, who simply don’t need trigger warnings (nor did the Glasgow – City of Empire display). Glaswegians are not guilty for the sins of their distant brethren.
Dragging us down an ahistorical one-way street, as Glasgow – City of Empire does, blinds the viewer to other significant forces, nuance, and the rich tapestry and nature of history. It flatlines history and renders it one long, continuous calamity for the oppressed.
The contemporary cultural elite’s approach to history is not to expand our understand of it, but to deep-mine history for the sole purpose of legitimising their ideological outlook. In their hands, this is ‘the end of history’. To them, history is not up for debate – it is binary, it’s a closed book.
While it is of course true that museums in the past represented the outlook of the ruling cultural and political elites of the time, and how they saw themselves, it is no different today. The real curators of Glasgow – City of Empire (Jean Walsh, Senior Curator, Kelvingrove, and the aforementioned Nelson Cummins to name but two) have used and abused their ‘cocurators’ to give a youthful gloss to the idea they are radical outsiders, but their social justice outlook is now mainstream; it is the outlook of the new political and cultural elites in Scotland. They are peddling a wholly destructive ideology that sees the past in binary terms, where no good can be found but only oppression and white supremacy in action.
The idea of the museum’s purpose being to transmit the best knowledge of the past through art and artifacts is being upended in favour of a new role for the museum: to ‘change the culture’ and promote an ever-increasingly narrow and ideological point of view. This is a point of view that runs counter to the existing values and interests of the wider viewing public. But, of course, this is the point. The cultural elites are more interested in ‘educating the public’ through their social justice agenda, while at the same time taking a sledgehammer to traditional Scottish values and mores. From museums to schools and universities, we have political activists recasting the role and function of these institutions. Our cultural institutions should engage, challenge and inspire – not harangue and indoctrinate. Social justice ideology is about ‘controlling the narrative’, not education.
The one-sided and wrongheadedness of Glasgow – City of Empire is just the next phase of Scottish museums shaming the Scottish public through ‘decolonising’ the museum. Scots have way more to be proud of than ashamed about. It is worrying that those with their hands on the levers of cultural power refuse to recognise this fact.
Scottish history is littered with social and cultural highpoints, from the Scottish Enlightenment, educational excellence that was the envy of the world, literary wonders that are read worldwide, great artists and designers, industry and invention. That such a wee country and its people had such an international impact should be an immense source of pride, not contemptuously cast aside and damned.
Modern Scotland was not built on the backs of slaves, but of Enlightenment thinkers, inventive industrialists, and hard-working industrious Scots of all stripes.
Museums in Scotland are leaving the arena of knowledge and culture and instead have embraced the world of politics and ideology. No one will benefit from this.
Alex Cameron (June 2024)
Originally published on Scottish Union for Education Substack
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