Visitors’ discursive responses to hegemonic and alternative museum narratives: a case study of Le Modèle Noir

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Hodsdon, Laura ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0817-4852 (2021) Visitors’ discursive responses to hegemonic and alternative museum narratives: a case study of Le Modèle Noir. Critical Discourse Studies, 19 (4). pp. 401-417. ISSN 1740-5904

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Abstract / Summary

Recent reflection on the role of museums and galleries has focused on their socially situated nature; and that as a social construct, co-produced with its audiences, heritage is in part discursively constituted. This has included acknowledgement that the inherited discourse is hegemonic and exclusive of divergent narratives, leading to moves to create alternatives to contest it, which include temporary exhibitions. These provide a potentially democratic space for discursive incursions freed from the constraints of the permanent museum. But they are also spatially and temporally peripheral, occupying a discursive space outside the standard visit. This raises questions as to whether, once the exhibition is over, the alternative will be subsumed once more. This article explores this issue using a dataset of TripAdvisor reviews to analyse the discursive responses of visitors to temporary and permanent collections, using the Musée d’Orsay’s 2019 exhibition Le Modèle Noir as a case study. Analysis shows that Le Modèle Noir reviews exhibit greater discursive fragmentation, reveal a relative lack of appeals to collective identity, and do not connect the exhibition with the permanent collection. Potential implications of this for initiatives that seek to counter the hegemonic narrative are discussed.

Item Type: Article
Identification Number: 10.1080/17405904.2021.1895238
ISSN: 1740-5904
eISSN: 1740-5912
Subjects: History, Geography & Environment
Social Sciences
Communication
Courses by Department: Academy of Innovation and Research
Depositing User: Laura Hodsdon
Date Deposited: 09 Mar 2021 09:02
Last Modified: 15 Nov 2024 15:39
URI: https://repository.falmouth.ac.uk/id/eprint/4253
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