Since the 1936 publication of Gone with the Wind and the 1939 release of David O. Selznick’s film version of the book, the city of Atlanta has been associated in the public mind with Margaret Mitchell’s tale of the Old South, the Civil War and Reconstruction. The work of Mitchell and Selznick created images that shaped the public’s understanding of southern history and of Atlanta’s identity. This dissertation examines a series of attempts to capitalize on the fame and popularity of Gone with the Wind in museums in the Atlanta area. Focusing on the interpretive efforts of three entities—the Atlanta History Center, Clayton County, and the Margaret Mitchell House, Inc.—this study reveals the problematic nature of Mitchell’s and Selznick’s work and the impact that the book and film have had on shaping Atlanta’s identity and the public memory of the South.

This thesis will explore the concept of cultural citizenship by researching visitor’s responses to five exhibitions across two museums in the Lower Hutt region of New Zealand. The thesis will also examine museum management and staff’s perspectives on these exhibits, and compare these to visitor’s. The aim of the thesis is to understand how museum visitors reflect upon and use museum exhibits as tools in relation to their cultural heritage and cultural citizenship. This approach provides a focus for reflection regarding the cultural importance of museum exhibitions. Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model will serve as an overall framework for the study, and the theoretical concepts of memory, rhetoric, meaning making and cultural citizenship will further inform the analysis. The results indicate that museum visitors reflect upon exhibits as tools for reminding, and also indicate that exhibits are seen important for learning and representation. Furthermore, the study finds that visitors do not find exhibits particularly challenging or personal. Museum staff provide other perspectives on the importance of museum exhibits, such as their art historical, representational and community-museum relationship building potential, but the study finds that these themes are seldom explicitly recognised by visitors. The concluding discussion reflects on these results, and suggests avenues for future research.

The repatriation of the human remains of Indigenous peoples collected within a colonial context has been the subject of debate within UK museums over the last 30 years, with many museums now having returned human remains to their countries of origin. Although the repatriation of human remains is often characterised as the 'journey home', there has been a lack of consideration of the physical presence and mobility of the remains and the meanings created as they move through different spaces. This study uses the repatriations from The Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCS) to Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii as case studies to consider three key areas: (i) the impact of repatriation on museum landscapes; (ii) the journey of the repatriated remains and how this mobility intersects with wider discussions about restitution, sovereignty, identity, relatedness, memory and memorialisation; and (iii) the repatriation archives, how they are thought about by the institutions that hold them and their future potential and meaning within a post-colonial context. Taking a more-than-representational approach and engaging with the materiality, mobility and agency of the repatriated remains and the documentation that relates to them, this study bridges the gap between research considering the approach of museums to repatriation, and ethnographic studies on the meanings of the return of ancestral remains to individual communities. Combining work on museum geographies, deathscapes and absence opens up new ways of theorising and discussing repatriation through understanding the process in terms of the tension between absence and presence, and human remains as being in or out of place. Through engaging with the materiality and agency of the remains and viewing repatriation through a spatial lens, this thesis deals with aspects of the process that have received little attention in previous studies, foregrounding the challenging nature of repatriation for communities, the issues around unprovenanced remains, and discussions about the control, management and meaning of information and data, identifying that a significant legacy of repatriation for RCS is the documentation the museum continues to hold. What the journey of the ancestral remains repatriated by RCS illustrates is the emotive materiality of the remains, and agency that they and the distributed repatriation archive have as actors within social networks. It is therefore proposed that the concept of repatriation as having problematised human remains collections within UK museums is replaced with a nuanced and contextually sensitive understanding that recognises the role of the human remains in social interactions that impact on the emotional geographies of museum practice, and that rather than framing repatriation as post-colonial act that is either political or therapeutic, the return of ancestral remains be understood as part of a process of decolonisation in which there is space for discussion, disagreement and debate amongst all stakeholders.