Nintendo Museum: Intercultural Pedagogy, Neoliberal Citizenship, and a Theatre without Actors

Abstract

Since 1998, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa has stood on the waterfront of the capital city, Wellington, where only a few years earlier dockworkers loaded freight ships bound for the UK with bales of wool, lamb carcasses, and unprocessed, unpackaged cheese and butter. Now Te Papa anchors an entertainment, leisure, and shopping development where cruise ships dock and the office workers of New Zealand’s “creative capital” (as Wellington is called, in a nod to Richard Florida’s trademark theory) enjoy their lattes against a backdrop of public art, urban parks, and spectacular harbor views. Planned during the nation’s neoliberal transition from agricultural Fordism to knowledge industry post-Fordism, Te Papa has been both an index of and a laboratory for the processes of cultural management, and particularly bi-cultural management, that would characterize the new state. It is also a ground-breaking experiment in what has become known as “the new museology.” A massive, ongoing audit of the nation’s beliefs, a tourist attraction extraordinaire, an elaborate enterprise in public pedagogy, the museum is quite unlike its predecessor, the Dominion Museum (formerly the Colonial Museum, a “universal survey museum” which stood behind a forbidding Romanesque façade on a hill a mile away from the present site). Neither the temple, nor the archive, nor the trophy house of the state, Te Papa evokes not the solidity of that state but its verbiness . These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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