Holders of battered memories: Exploring suitcases as museum metaphors for travel, exile, and incarceration

Abstract

In this article we consider suitcases: ubiquitous objects in museum exhibitions used to signify incarceration as well as involuntary or forced migration. Building on fieldwork from museums and public spaces, we consider how suitcases themselves are consigned to the “attic of memory:” As museum displays or as piles of discarded remnants, offered as vestiges, as witnesses to human loss and suffering at death camps such as Auschwitz. We consider suitcases firstly as aspects of the extended self, as described in Russell Belk's work, and subsequently as symbolic object figuring imprisonment and mobility in museum exhibitions. We present three different such instances: a suitcase full of personal belongings presented to a museum, a set of concrete facsimile suitcases symbolizing forced migration, and a display of suitcases representing individual stories of confinement and migration. Although some of the life stories in the latter exhibition are presented with happy endings, by and large the museum displays featuring suitcases tell of forced movement and forced immobility. This tension animates our analysis, as we explore the double signification of suitcases as markers of mobility, but also of immobility and imprisonment, as well as the intrusive gaze of the state or other voyeur (including the museum visitor). A suitcase is, thus, not just an extension of the self but represents the lost body, for which the museum becomes the final, very public resting place. It becomes and remains an important memory device, even as its very ubiquity threatens to banalize its meaning into a one‐dimensional shortcut.