Introduction: Staging Public Representations in the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, the Deutsches Historisches Museum, and the Friedrichshain–Kreuzberg Museum

Abstract

This introduction takes an art exhibit as a vantage point for asking whether an exhibition on the public representation of immigrants shown in the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, the Deutsches Historisches Museum, and the Friedrichshain–Kreuzberg Museum exposes public or personal stereotypes. The chapter describes how museums can be roughly conceptualised as the speech acts of curators, telling visitors about an exhibit that represents phenomena from an outside reality. Considering that symbolically charged museums are spoken about in the mass media, the existence of an immigrant museum can itself be read as a political statement. A variety of interaction occurs in the museum, such that a combination of interaction analysis, discourse analysis, and ethnography is deemed necessary to analyse the functioning and consequences of museum exhibitions.