The presentation approaches the modern/colonial paradigm that defines the history of museums in the so-called West and determine museum practice until the present time. By looking at the modern museum from its borders, i.e. from the perspective of its subaltern subjects, excluded from the narrative of major institutions, this talk will reflect on the “post-colonial” museum in its persistent reproduction of coloniality, notably in the context of European national and ethnographic institutions. In some cases, the discourse of “decolonisation” adopted by these museums and some museum scholars allow new ways for institutions to continue acquiring and exhibiting non-European materials, thus preserving coloniality as part of a national project grounded in modernity. Finally, it introduces the notion of anticolonial museum practice, based on a threefold and interrelated process that encompasses deconstructing, reconstructing, and redistributing. Going beyond the decolonial conception of the borders and the persistence of the divisions between them and us inherited from colonialism and that are no longer useful to understand relations of exchange and appropriation, this presentation seeks to theorise on the practical ways to tackle the margins and to disrupt the borders used to subjugate and dehumanise.
Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Michaelmas 2023
Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm
In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre, except for Weeks 6 and 8, which are online only.
Convened by Elizabeth Hallam and Clare Harris
