英文摘要 |
The article aims to study how France, a former colonial empire, tries to redefine the national identity and to govern the immigration issue in the age of globalization, through the rearrangement of existed ethnographic museums and the creation of the national immigration museum(la Cité nationale de l’histoire de l’immigration, CNHI). Immigration museum and ethnographic museum are analyzed as two kinds of representations of such relationships. The concept created to interpret the transformation of such relationships is “the metonymy between time and space”, which means a way of defining the relationship between self and others through the substitution between time and space. The mission of CNHI is to recognize immigrants and to change people’s perspective towards them. Changing the perspective towards immigrants results in changing the vision about France. What is intended to be told in the immigration museum is not the immigration history as a part of social history, but the history of France based on the immigration history. Inspired by the case of CNHI, I differentiate “the ethnic museum” from “the immigration museum”. The narration of the ethnic museum is based on the continuity and the development of a certain ethnic group. In contrast, the narration of the immigration museum bases on the land and the nation is used as the main frame for such narration, so as to relativize each ethnic group in the narration of immigrant nation. Nevertheless, the core concern of the immigration museum is not about the territory of the nation state, but peoples who have come to live in this land in different periods of time. The key implication of discussing the immigration museum resides in understanding “what is the immigrant society”. The migration museum incarnates the self/other relationships in the age of globalization. The “self” goes abroad and becomes the other, while people from far land become members of our society. Migration is the process in which “self” becomes the other, and the other gradually becomes part of us. |