Paper short abstract:

The analysis of Hannah Khalil’s play probes the opportunities that theatre and performance offer to museal dramaturgies of display, as a forum to expose the complex cultural and social challenges that emerge from the connection between national museums, identity and collective and cultural memories.

Paper long abstract:

The analysis of Hannah Khalil’s play probes the opportunities that theatre and performance offer not only to the theoretical analysis of museums and their dramaturgies of display, but also as a forum to expose the complex cultural and social challenges that emerge from the intimate connection between national museums, national identity and collective and cultural memories. Any discussion of museums, nationhood and theatre in A Museum in Baghdad, is necessarily informed by the colonial/postcolonial/re-colonial relationship, stamped onto the text and the performance through the continuous interaction between the past, present and possible futures of a semi-fictional Iraq. In the play, the colonial/postcolonial aesthetic focuses on Gertrude Bell’s Baghdad Archaeological Museum, created as a mirror image of a traditional Western museum, and seen both as a vehicle of nation-making and as an imposition and reminder of colonial power. The museum becomes a space where multiple tensions are explored, a microcosm of society and nation, a space of engagement with conflicting intellectual frameworks. All these elements create a comprehensive portrayal of a play and a performance that raise quite a few challenging questions about the tension between colonial and post-colonial displays of cultural memory in a theatrical setting. The colonial and post-colonial museums become main characters within a play that tackles a range and complexity of issues on a scale that risks obscuring the essential aspect of colonial intervention in the creation of national identity and the lasting effects of such interference in the discourse of cultural memory.