'Only Connect’: the heritage and emotional politics of showcasing the suffering migrant

In recent years the plight of contemporary refugees has become the difficult heritage of the future. Attention to historical forced migrations related to slavery, deportation, genocide, extreme poverty and displacement, is commonplace in numerous museum types. If it seems strange at first to think of the plight of contemporary refugees as a heritagised phenomenon (less so historic slavery, or East Germans fleeing to the West), its widespread inclusion in museums, in collections and in the form of large and often permanent exhibitions, prompts us to reconsider. Today’s refugees trust their lives to the inadequate boats and lifejackets that first pile up on the beaches of Lampedusa or Lesvos; or they trek through Mexico to the US border with woefully inadequate shoes. But many such objects subsequently take on an iconic second life as they are collected or displayed by museums eager to mark a phenomenon of the present for inclusion in the future past. Filmed testimonials from refugees about their dangerous journeys, lost friends, spouses and children, and the then-and-now of their lives are produced for museums, or borrowed from news media. This is, as it were, a difficult history happening now, which we are invited by museums to project as a matter of contemporary discomfort and future regret. It is also laden with values for future-making, for its representation in museums is generally undergirded by tacit propositions about how, henceforth, we humans should treat each other, and how the fortunate should care for the unfortunate. What then should the perspectives of the museum be when representing refugees and suffering migrants, and how should it position visitors emotionally? Should the perspective be a coolly cognitive, from-above view of the globe, with arrows on the map to represent flows of people; or a distressing eye-level view into the life and struggles of a migrant; or even an embodied experience in which we visitors are subjected to a simulation of the duress that refugees live through? If museum producers seek to alternate between these (and if they should), what are the techniques of this, and how and why should they negotiate and manage their different politics, effects and affects? This chapter addresses these questions in reference to recent trends in the representation of illegal migration in museums and exhibitions, attending to the representational potentials and politics of display. Some of these potentials and politics are relatively new, as museums and exhibitions gradually borrow and mix technologies and techniques from other cultural technologies, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and the videogame. We explore some of these using visits of our own, building on theories of positionality in museums and in moral spectatorship to bring together different understandings of how and why museums visitors are positioned by displays to respond affectively, cognitively and ethically. An idealised proposition can be (and often is) made here, which is that visitors’ encounters with museum or exhibition representations of migrants may trigger empathetic responses based on the imaginative capacity to ‘step into the shoes’ of another person, ‘to understand their feelings and perspectives’. This in turn – still ideally – conducts those visitors towards critical and ethical reflection on grievous social concerns and towards personal, collective and elective responsibilities of care. Now, the real consecutiveness of this process can and should surely be problematised, for visitors are not blanks slates with no prior knowledge or dispositions, as any sociological, hermeneutic or constructivist perspective will show. We must also problematise the further effects of the process. What does the reflection ‘do’? Does it lead to action on the part of the visitor to try to make the world a better place? What is that action? Or does it merely play out as an empathetic call-and-response with no particular concrete effects? This is, of course, a significant question about the social power of museums and, in particular, what it is that empathy does therein: what are the long-lasting effects of empathy in the museum, both on the individual and on wider society? We pose these questions in a moment when the value of cultivating empathy is critiqued across various fields, but less so in museums, where it is often mobilised as remedy for tremendous global problems. We will make two general arguments. Firstly, that provoking empathy in the museum for the distant suffering of illegal migrants is liable to promote a moral citizenship that involves only momentary attention and limited possibilities for care. Secondly, and connected to this, in reducing encounters with migrants to empathetic engagements, museums screen off wider and more complex geopolitical considerations of the causes and contingencies of migration crises. To do otherwise requires a radical shift, for it would involve engaging and participating in ideological disputes and going against the museum’s institutional grain of representing an imagined consensus; but it is this that would create the grounds for a critical, reflective and active moral community.