Globalization, Nautical Nostalgia and Maritime Identity Politics. A Case Study on Boundary Objects in the Future German Port Museum

Publikation: Beiträge in ZeitschriftenZeitschriftenaufsätzeForschungbegutachtet

Authors

The future German Port Museum is scheduled to open in Hamburg in the late 2020s as one of Germany’s currently largest and best-funded museum projects. It is pursuing an ambitious programmatic agenda that aims not only to narrate the historic dimensions of ports and seafaring, but to assess ports as hubs of globalization and thus help the understanding of a globalized world. This paper approaches the Port Museum’s first and central artefact, the historic four-masted barque Peking, as a crucial organizational and epistemic entity in the museum’s development process. The Peking is of significant interest to actors from diverging social worlds, who approach the ship either as a starting point for critical debates on globalization and colonial heritage, as a symbol of nautical nostalgia, or as a vehicle for Hamburg’s maritime identity politics. Relying on the theoretical concept of boundary objects by Star and Griesemer, it is argued that the Peking’s interpretive flexibility enables it to mediate between these potentially conflicting individual agendas and facilitate a cooperative process between different communities of practice. Thus, the Port Museum is brought into being as a suspenseful, yet stable entity, that is situated in a field of tension between decolonial critique and revisionist maritime heritage politics.

OriginalspracheEnglisch
ZeitschriftEuropean Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes
Jahrgang4
Ausgabenummer1
Seiten (von - bis)113-132
Anzahl der Seiten20
DOIs
PublikationsstatusErschienen - 02.08.2021
Extern publiziertJa

Bibliographische Notiz

Funding Information:
This paper was written in the course of my PhD project which is funded with a scholarship by the Claussen-Simon-Foundation. I would like to thank my interview partners and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Funding Information:
The future German Port Museum that is scheduled to open in Hamburg in the late 2020s, is no exception. The Museum is currently being developed by the “Stiftung Historische Museen Hamburg” (Historic Museums Hamburg Foundation) and is funded with a €185m budget from the federal household. What distinguishes the museum from other comparable institutions is that the developers aim not only at narrating the historic dimensions of ports and seafaring, but at assessing ports as hubs of globalization and thus help the understanding of a globalized world. Globalization is therefore addressed as an inherently contemporary matter, involving complex economic, social and cultural interrelations, and is made accessible to the museum public by turning towards ports and global maritime trade.

Publisher Copyright:
Copyright © 2021 Melcher Ruhkopf.

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