Gareth Hoskins

Materialising Memory at Angel Island Immigration Station, San Francisco

This paper presents an object-centred account of the politics of memory at a National Historic Landmark: Angel Island Immigration Station, San Francisco. Once a port of entry and detention for Chinese immigrants arriving in the United States, the Immigration Station exists today as a historic site managed by California State Parks who are in the midst of implementing a new interpretive programme with a mission to: ‘turn a history of exclusion into a future of inclusion’. The discussion fixes on three objects located within the park which play an important role in the representation of the sites past despite being labelled as ‘noncontributing’ in the sites National Historic Landmarks nomination. The biographies of a bronze bell, a granite monument, and a group of wax mannequins as sketched out here suggest novel ways to be sensitive to the many and often unexpected contributions brought by the materiality of an object in practices of remembrance.

A secret reservoir of values: the narrative economy of Angel Island Immigration Station

An interest in narrative has done much to shed light on our understandings of geography. Studies linking narrative to nation building, the making of place, identity, the region, the spaces of health, heritage, and environmental history, give some indication of the breadth at which geographical scholarship has been pushed forward by an applied interest in stories. This article attempts to develop such work with a particular focus on the performative capacities of narrative; how stories might work towards various recuperative outcomes. It discusses the revision of historic tours around Angel Island Immigration Station, a California State Park property and National Historic Landmark with reference to the term narrative economy. The Immigration Station plays host to a narrative economy where stories circulating around the site acquire value on the basis of their factual content and their compatibility with a set of approved messages. Some of these stories are disputed and devalued so as to distinguish them from factual ‘histories’ produced by recently commissioned research. The article considers how heritage sites negotiate tensions between the burden of representational accuracy and the need to function more broadly as platforms for liberatory intervention.

A place to remember: scaling the walls of Angel Island immigration station

Abstract This paper considers the restoration and presentation of Angel Island Immigration Station, a federal facility in the San Francisco Bay that between 1910 and 1940 worked to prevent the arrival of Chinese laborers to the United States in accordance with the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. The production of Angel Island Immigration Station as a national historic landmark is delineated through the social construction of scale. I discuss efforts to achieve a leap in the scale of the sites significance and how this brings forth new management regimes that change the format of the interpretation there. In particular, narrative construction, landscape design, and revised tours, insert a standardized story of Chinese exclusion into the national memory. This paper shows how the imperative to increase the scope of recognition—to petition nationally for status and funds—requires a repackaging of stories to affirm popular American ideals of freedom over those that challenge the nations persecution of Chinese immigrants.

On Arrival: Memory and Temporality at Ellis Island, New York

Museums and heritage operations are increasingly employing experiential forms of interpretation, such as role adoption and first-person interpretation, in order to cultivate emotional bonds between visitors and the characters that populate historic sites. The paper argues that this form of relating to the past affectively reflects a notion of memory that is underpinned by commonsense temporality and a privileging of the corporeal, both of which serve to legitimate existing relations of power. Using a dispute surrounding public entry to Ellis Island, New York, via a bridge connected to New Jersey, I ask that we understand memory as a practice generating the pasts perpetual arrival where the past continually comes into existence anew rather than ‘returns’ from what once was. Throughout the paper I relate a number of examples where thinking about memory along these lines, as arrival, can help us question the temporal logics that underpin heritage and the authorities heritage maintains.

Vagaries of value at California State Parks: towards a geographical axiology

This article explores the vagaries of locating value in California’s state park system in general and Malakoff Diggins State Historic Park in particular. The practice of listing and delisting for purposes of preservation relies on accepting the premise that some places are inherently superior and more worthy of public esteem than others, and that such distinctions are detectable, indeed, measurable in gradations. In this article, I aim to undermine our confidence in these kind of valuations and the designations they proliferate through scrutiny of two occasions where value is ranked geographically. I compare Frederick Law Olmsted Jr’s 1928 statewide survey of California that identified land for acquisition as parks, with a 2011 deficit-reduction measure earmarking 70 specific state parks for closure. These two lists demonstrate how value is immanent to social relations. The article contributes to examinations of value within Human Geography by developing a relational axiology that attends to the materials, forces and practices that hold together when value becomes subject to a project of fixing. I challenge the exclusively positive conception of value in on-going policy work and outline how valuation as a technology works to produce the public in whose name it is performed. What kinds of justifications emerge when fine-grained negotiations about revenue streams come up against long-held principals about the importance of nature and cultural history? Geographical value, in the same way as any other kind of value, is not found but is made by the very act of its enunciation. Accepting this requires us to think more carefully about how and why value’s identification leads invariably to its uneven distribution.