The public discourse and presentation of migrant groups within a museum space

This chapter will explore the presentation of and contribution by minorities and immigrants to a British port city in the context of a museum exhibition. The Sea City Museum in Southampton explores aspects of the city's social history and it features two major exhibitions: one examines the role of Southampton in the Titanic story with a focus on the ship's crew and their daily life on board and fate, and a second one with the title 'Southampton: Gateway to the World'. The Gateway exhibition is focused on communities for which have Southampton was either a departure point for (further) migration or a point of settlement over the centuries. The exhibits are further subdivided into the themes of settlers, exiles, traders and soldiers and their presence in the city. Large segments are focused on what could be seen as ordinary people or groups that are excluded from the 'official' narrative of the location, such as Jewish transmigrants from Russia or Basque child evacuees during the Spanish Civil War and their legacies. In light of the discussions surrounding immigrants and their contributions to British society in general and within the context of the Brexit debates in specific, this chapter will examine how the various immigrant groups and their heritage are presented to the museum goers, based on the exhibits, the texts and the space. This project builds on some preliminary work (Loester & Puckey 2015; Loester 2016) which examined the linguistic landscapes and the presentation of heritage in Winchester (heritage of place) and Southampton (heritage of location) and issues arising from city spaces and rapid changes they often are subject to. The analysis will focus on the visual and textual representation of the individuals and the groups and how their contributions to Southampton are framed and placed within the physical space of the exhibition. This ranges from, for example, Huguenot lacemakers who are given a space in the main exhibition hall to the 'storyboxes' that are tucked away in a smaller side venue that explore the stories of various Commonwealth communities or refugees from Uganda in the second half of the 20th century. As interactive elements of the exhibitions also invite the visitors and residents to plot their places of origin and thus contribute to adding their stories to that of Southampton, this is an additional landscape feature to be examined in the analysis. The preliminary analysis hints at a superficial engagement with the minority groups, partially supported by the presence of English only in the explanatory texts.