According to Ernest Renan, a nation is formed by its collective memory; it is a country’s shared experiences which enable it to become (in Benedict Anderson’s much later coinage) an “imagined community.” Building on these ideas, commentators such as Kavita Singh and Lianne McTavish et al. have shown how museums play a key role in helping nations to form an identity and understand their past. However, as these critics and those from other disciplines (including postcolonial studies) have noted, museums can also reflect and reinforce the unequal power dynamics between nations which result from colonialism and neocolonialism. This article demonstrates that these ideas are directly relevant to the 2019 play A Museum in Baghdad by the Palestinian-Irish playwright Hannah Khalil. This play is set in the Museum of Iraq in three different time periods: “ Then (1926), Now (2006), and Later ” (an unspecified future date) (3). Khalil uses specific characters – most notably, Gertrude Bell during the “Then” sections, the Iraqi archaeologists Ghalia and Layla during the “Now” sections, and a “timeless” character called Nasiya who appears across the time periods – to question the degree to which the museum is perpetuating Western views of Iraq.

中文翻译：

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Hannah Khalil 巴格达博物馆中的记忆、民族认同形成和（新）殖民主义

Ernest Renan 认为，一个国家是由它的集体记忆形成的。正是一个国家的共同经历使它成为（用本尼迪克特·安德森（Benedict Anderson）后来的造词法）一个“想象中的社区”。基于这些想法，Kavita Singh 和 Lianne McTavish 等人的评论员。展示了博物馆如何在帮助国家形成身份和了解他们的过去方面发挥关键作用。然而，正如这些评论家和其他学科（包括后殖民研究）所指出的那样，博物馆也可以反映和加强由殖民主义和新殖民主义导致的国家之间不平等的权力动态。本文表明，这些想法与巴勒斯坦-爱尔兰剧作家汉娜·哈利勒 (Hannah Khalil) 的 2019 年戏剧《巴格达博物馆》直接相关。这部戏剧以三个不同时期的伊拉克博物馆为背景：“当时（1926 年）、现在（2006 年）和以后”（未指定的未来日期）（3）。哈利勒使用特定的人物——最值得注意的是，格特鲁德贝尔在“当时”部分，伊拉克考古学家加利亚和莱拉在“现在”部分，以及一个名为纳西娅的“永恒”人物出现在各个时间段——质疑程度博物馆正在延续西方对伊拉克的看法。