Hidden histories made visible? Reflections on a geographical exhibition

Abstract

This paper addresses the potential of public exhibitions to challenge long taken‐for‐granted assumptions about the history of exploration and geography. The Hidden Histories of Exploration exhibition, originally held in 2009, was based on historical research in the Royal Geographical Society’s extensive collections, including manuscripts, books, maps and atlases, artefacts, artworks, photography and film. The exhibition was designed to reveal the agency of indigenous peoples and intermediaries in the history of exploration, as reflected especially in the recruitment of guides, interpreters, porters and pilots. By highlighting and to some extent celebrating the role of such individuals, it sought to prompt questions about what is made visible and what is obscured in standard narratives of exploration, especially when seen from a metropolitan perspective. However, the relationship between research and exhibition was by no means one‐way, as is implied by the language of ‘dissemination’ and ‘output’: the process of bringing the exhibition into being raised questions about the structure of the archives on which the exhibition depended, as well as prompting further reflection on the biographical mode in which the work of recovery of ‘hidden histories’ is often conceived in the heritage sector. Particular attention is devoted to the impact of collaboration with designers on the presentation and interpretation of materials in the exhibition. The paper focuses on three design strategies reflected in the exhibition space: ‘role reversal’ (celebrating the role of intermediaries and presenting the explorers as dependent); ‘juxtaposition’ (emphasising the importance of partnership and the co‐production of geographical knowledge); and ‘re‐scaling’ (transforming anonymous archival fragments into documents of a truly human history).

Victorian Field Notes from the Lualaba River, Congo

“…16 In its broadest outlines, the approach advanced here continues a recent tendency among critics of colonial literature and biographers of Victorian explorers to tie the journeys of their primary subjects to the many non-Western cultural contexts in which these journeys developed and to consider the impact of these contexts on both exploration in the field and the resulting narratives of encounter. Common approaches include sketching the histories of the regions and cultures through which an explorer passed, as does James Newman (2010) in his recent biography of Richard Burton, 17 or underscoring the previously overlooked contribution of local populations to exploration, as in the recent Royal Geographical Society exhibition called 'Hidden Histories of Exploration' (Driver & Jones 2009a, 2009bDriver 2013). 18 However, because British and European exploration remains the focus of such work, scholars rarely give more than passing attention to the relevant non-Western contexts and so fail to engage the cultural and material particulars of those contexts in any detailed or sustained manner.…”

Revealing Repton: bringing landscape to life at Sheringham Park

“…These include various efforts to uncover "hidden histories" (Driver, 2012;Driver & Jones, 2009) of subaltern aspects of architecture and landscape and its making, of servants, slaves and the labouring poor. Georgians Revealed exhibition at the British Library included a guided walk to discover the landscape of Georgian London within walking distance of the building, as well as a display of objects, card games, silk shoes and picture books-including Repton's publications-which made up the material world of wealthy trades families as well as landed aristocrats (see Goff, Goldfinch, Limmper-Herz, & Peden, 2013).…”

Writing as righting: Truth and reconciliation, poetics, and new geo‐graphing in colonial Canada

“…Increasingly, we are arguing for a refocusing on the craft of writing as a means of expressing affective and deeply felt orientations to places, landscapes, and the spaces of our lives (Wylie 2009;Lorimer and Parr 2014). And in producing poetry (see Cresswell 2013Cresswell , 2015de Leeuw 2013de Leeuw , 2015Magrane and Cokinos 2016) or visual and sound art (Driver et al 2002;Foster and Lorimer 2007;Hawkins 2013;Kanngieser 2015), or curating and co-producing with artists (Driver 2012), geographers are also responding to a long lineage of geographers (e.g., Meinig 1983;Watson 1983;Cosgrove 1978) who have called for geographers to become artists, to produce creative expressions, to acknowledge that "life [itself] will reside in poetry" (Hawkins and Straughan 2015, 96). This is a concept dating back decades in geography, when Watson (1983, 391--392) Still, while there is admittedly a growing amount of poetic work at play in geography, almost none of the creative geographic writing circulating within geohumanities or the creative re-turn tackles the ways that writing might work to not tell, to un-tell, or to break the traditions of telling so as to narrate and undertake geo-graphing in radically and new critical ways, including ways that open new spaces through which to consider colonial violence in a moment-in Canada, in particular-of truth and reconciliation (remember here not forget truth, reaching for some kind of truth, it is about truth and reconciliation, truth-writing truth, truths, and perhaps there can never be a truth, singular).…”