ABSTRACT

The heritage most commonly displayed and recounted in motor museums worldwide draws narrowly on a largely white, techno-male, progressive metanarrative. Men are celebrated inventing, designing, and driving cars to urbanize, colonize, and build, as well as to race, enjoy, and impress. The collected and curated vehicles usually mark incremental advances in automotive engineering development rather than social or political change and sit in largely chronological model-based exhibitions. The individual vehicles displayed behind ropes or on plinths represent motoring in an unnaturally static condition and are subsequently elevated to the status of objets d’art. However, motoring heritage is about much more than shiny flawless pieces of technology lined up on a museum floor, belonging to only one group and seemingly divorced from any form of dynamism. The motorcar is the quintessential vehicle of modernity experienced broadly by men and women, diverse ethnic and cultural groups, and in different ways for different purposes. The advent of the motorcar increased mobility for all, significantly reduced the impact of distance, and facilitated cultural exchange and personal independence. To expose visitors to a broader and more contemporary heritage story, the motor museum should more readily align its curatorial policy with recent developments in the writing of history. These include histories that explore class, gender, and ethnic complexity, colonialism and power relations, cultural insights that acknowledge emotion and expose secrecy, and histories of mobility that place the automobile within a broad social and political context. At the same time, the motor museum has a singular opportunity to privilege the unique perspective on modernity that only the lens of automotive mobility can provide and only the engagement with material culture can offer.