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Brindle POSC 217 Essay Brindle 1 Grace Brindle POSC 217: Monuments, Museums, & Meaning Prof. Barbara Allen April 30, 2021 Civil Disobedience in Myanmar: An Analytical Reflection Our exhibit, “Civil Disobedience in Myanmar”, explores different forms of political communication throughout three resistance movements within Myanmar: the 8888 Uprising, the Saffron Revolution, and the 2021 protests. By focusing on images of resistance rather than oppression, our exhibit centers the people of Myanmar as agents, not victims, and underscores the power of protest to evoke change. The intention of the exhibit is to examine, through political imagery, how pro-democracy movements in Myanmar have changed throughout time and space, focusing particularly on the role of collective memory, globalization, and technology. The larger purpose of this exhibit is a call to action: these images aim to raise support for the protesters in Myanmar while also serving as a model for antiauthoritarian movements across the world. While creating this exhibit, my group made deliberate decisions in our selection of images to not other the audience and grant too much authority to any particular ethnic group. Othering, defined by Jonell Logan, is a process that occurs when a singular master narrative decenters alternative identities and perspectives.1 As institutions, museums often act as ‘contact zones’ between a dominant culture and the often peripheral minorities whose cultures they represent.2 To resist othering any particular group, we chose photos that exhibited the wide range of ages, ethnicities, and genders of protesters to emphasize the diverse and inclusive nature of the resistance within Myanmar. These protests have cut across ethnic divisions and regional differences to unite the people of Myanmar in a common cause, and we wanted our exhibit to 1 Jonell Logan, “Framework of Otherness,” November 18, 2016, Charlotte, NC, 13:34, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JF4UMa1QuGg. 2 Katelyn L. Bolhofner, “Defining and Redefining American Indian Identity: an Examination of the Role of the Museum in Contemporary Ethnogenesis in the United States,” Museum & Society 11, no. 3 (2013), 2. Brindle 2 reflect this quality of solidarity. This can be seen in our language: we made the decision to refer to the protesters as the “people of Burma” rather than the “Burmese people”. Burmese has become a politicized term associated with the government and the Bamar people, the country’s principal ethnic group. In contrast, the people of Burma refers to a group of people who share a common homeland, regardless of their social and cultural identities, and thus allows for a multiplicity of perspectives within our narrative. Aware of the power of museums to reify identities and contribute to ethnogenesis, we wanted to create an expansive definition of who these protesters were. One of the primary ideas we wanted to address in our exhibit was the power of collective memory to shape resistance. Public collective memory is defined as “the dynamic process by which groups map myths (in an anthropological sense) about themselves and their world onto a specific time and place.”3 As one of the earliest protest movements in Myanmar, the 8888 Uprising has become a poignant moment within public memory and has transformed into a powerful cultural symbol; the number eight alone is enough to convey the memory of resistance in Myanmar. Protesters during both the Saffron Revolution and the 2021 protests reference the memory of the 8888 Uprising as a call to action, framing themselves as the legacy of the 1988 movement. This is most visible in the image of protesters in the United Kingdom holding signs that read “8888 POWER TO THE PEOPLE” and “FREE! FREE! FREE! ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS” on the 19th anniversary of the 8888 Uprising. This recycling of symbols links the movements together into one continuous stream, distorting a sense of time and creating a feeling of solidarity between generations of protesters. The commemoration of 1988 serves as a point for Myanmar people to recognize the injustices of the present and advocate for political change. As 3 Nuala C. Johnson, “Mapping monuments: the shaping of public space and cultural identities,” Visual Communication 1, no. 3 (October 2002): 294. https://doi.org/10.1177/147035720200100302. Brindle 3 Maurice Halbwachs states, the “past is not preserved but is reconstructed on the basis of the present.”4 Modern protesters coopt and transform memory of the past to fit their political views, using the memory of 1988 as a weapon in their protests against the Burmese government. Although political elites often control and shape public memory, our exhibit demonstrates the inversion of this dynamic as protesters have coopted official forms of political communication to support their cause. Protesters in Myanmar have used official symbols, grounded in Myanmar’s history and culture, to legitimize their movement and present it as an authentic outgrowth of the Myanmar people. This can be seen in the images of protesting monks and Buddhist flags at Myanmar’s most famous temple, Shwedagon Pagoda; the use of the Burmese language in signs; and the wearing of traditional Karen clothes to protests. These symbols of religion, tradition, and culture emphasize the protesters’ connection to the nation of Myanmar and paint them, not the military government, as the ‘real’ people of Burma. Beyond using these official symbols, protesters also adopt a sense of ritual that is traditionally within the domain of the state. As described by Katharyne Mitchell, “The ‘spectacular’ memorial event is created in order to produce a certain kind of collective memory, generally at the scale of the city and in relation to the production of the nation.”5 Protesters create their own spectacles through marches, innovative means of protest, and the gathering of immense crowds. These rituals reclaim collective memory and redefine the nation while affirming a sense of community through opposition to the state. Finally, our exhibit underscores the impact of globalization and technology on these movements for democracy. In her article, Mitchell acknowledges that an increasingly interconnected world has changed the landscape of collective memory: “Huyssen (2003, p. 4) 4 Maurice Halbwachs, “Preface” in On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 40. 5 Katharyne Mitchell, “Monuments, Memorials, and the Politics of Memory,” Urban Geography 24, no. 5 (2003), 443. Brindle 4 writes that ‘the form in which we think of the past is increasingly memory without borders rather than national history within borders.’ Thus globalization has altered our memories and our imagined communities, expanding our knowledge and our interests beyond the national scale.”6 This broadened sense of collective memory is evident in the number of international protests related to the events in Burma, such as the one in the United Kingdom. As social media closes the distance between us, people are able to experience events in different locations of the world at the same time, creating a collective memory that transcends space. This effect can be seen in events such as 9/11 where digital media such as television, radio, and photographs enabled billions of people to witness the tragedy in real time and partake in the construction of a collective memory.7 In Myanmar, this global witnessing has elevated internal protest movements to the world stage and reoriented protest symbols and tactics to an external international audience. In contrast to the 1988 protests conducted almost entirely in Burmese, protest signs in 2021 are written exclusively in English and incorporate Western symbols, such as Lady Justice and the three-finger salute from The Hunger Games series. Social media has created a digital space for these images to be shared and experienced, granting them the potential to go viral and enter even larger networks. Protesters have thus adapted their signs and imagery to whatever is most likely to go viral, resulting in funny signs like “MY EX IS BAD BUT MYANMAR MILITARY IS WORSE.” To highlight the influence of social media and globalization on political movements, we chose to feature an image from Instagram: a girl gives the three-finger salute while on her phone as a man in a Burmese military outfit films her on his phone. In this manner, different 6 Mitchell, “Monuments, Memorials, and the Politics of Memory,” 456. 7 Amy Sodaro, “The National September 11 Memorial Museum: ‘To Bear Solemn Witness,’” in Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 139-140. Brindle 5 groups weaponize technology and social media against one another. Such a photo stands in stark contrast to the black-and-white collage at the beginning of the exhibit that marks the technology available to protesters of the 8888 Uprising. By beginning and ending our exhibit with these very two different images, we strove to create a story that showed the shifting nature of protest tactics and symbols in Myanmar. We chose to organize our images in chronological order to show how the pro-democracy movements in Myanmar grew out of and differed from one another. By looking at each movement in isolation, one can discern the distinct attitudes, messaging, and composition of each one. By stepping back and looking at the three movements together, the similarities and differences between them become apparent. Although they draw upon the same well of collective memory, the symbols and methods of these movements have been shaped by the contexts of their time and diverge from one another in subtle ways. That being said, it is important to remember that these movements are more than just collections of political imagery: they are driven by people who risk their lives every day to fight for democracy. Our exhibit seeks to center these human beings and their experiences, and transform the passive viewer into an actor. To that point, our final slide reads #JusticeForMyanmar and contains a link to Mutual Aid Myanmar, a nonprofit organization founded by a Carleton professor that funds protesters in Myanmar.
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