ABSTRACTThis study joins a prolific line of critical research on collective memory in relation to museums as ‘sites of memory’. It takes the political relations between museums and memory as the background against which audience production of discourses of remembering is analyzed. Collective memory is approached not as a passive ‘retainer’ of information, but as sets of public mnemonic practices which transpire in specific material and semiotic settings. The analysis is comparative and takes place in two Jewish history museums in (...) the US and Israel. It begins by ethnographically studying museums’ memory media, whereby discourse is produced and displayed. Then, the rhetorical currency of collective memory discourse is identified, illustrating that museum audiences’ discourses of remembering are dynamic remediations that break with institutional formats and establish audiences’ voice and subjectivity. Centrally, the analysis of more complex texts offers a tripartite typology of audiences’ discoursal strategies: Establishing addressivity, which concerns audiences’ self-positioning or whether they reflect on the museum’s historic narration or ‘step into’ it by directly conversing with historical figures; Re-citing, which concerns acts of importing texts into the museums’ discourse, creating new intertextualities and charging both the museum discourse and the cited texts with new meanings; Re-timing, which concerns indexing different mythical, religious, and national timeframes, which serve to embed the time of the museum visit. The study concludes by critically noting the scarcity of subversive visitor discourse in museums, and the vitality of collective ethnonational memory in Israel compared to transnational/cosmopolitan memory of the Holocaust. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary study brings together research on audiences’ participation in the media, and an up-close exploration of communicative entitlement of and for such participation. Viewing visitor books as situated, public media, the study asks two related questions: how museums and institutions that employ this medium frame participation of ‘ordinary’ people in the public sphere, and how, in return, visitors variously articulate their participation. The article first examines the context in which visitor books mediate participation, and how museums frame them so (...) as to invite ‘authentic’ expressions by ‘ordinary’ visitors. The analysis depicts a taxonomy of participation, evincing five types of entitlements found in visitor book texts. These entitlements shed light on how participation in the public sphere is both understood and pursued. The article responds to calls for empirically rich studies on mediation practices and processes. It adds to the literature on communicative entitlements by examining an under-researched hitherto public medium and by illuminating a shift from talk-in-interaction to the context of text-in-interaction. (shrink)