Museums, Empire and Decolonial Praxis workshop

Abstract

Audre Lorde famously said, “…the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”. For many, in the context of museums, this describes the impossibility of museums - a colonial technology - to ever truly be decolonial. For all good intentions, interpretive changes, restitutions efforts, self-critical exhibitions, research, and diversity programs, will “…never enable us to bring about genuine change.”. Bénédicte Savoy put it more bluntly when resigning from the in 2017 Humboldt’s advisory board in frustration with the lack of focus on provenance research on colonial-era objects saying that the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, a reconstruction of the former Berlin Schloss, would be “dead on arrival”. Can colonial era museums ever really be decolonial, and must they if they’re to remain relevant? These are central questions in our new edited collection, Museums, Empire and Decolonial Practice, due to be published by Routledge in 2025. We believe that the normalisation of ‘decolonization’ as a paradigm in which museums and heritage institutions need to locate themselves in or against, for their work to be relevant and meaningful to the contemporary world, is evidence of a new museum paradigm. This is not to say ‘decolonization’ has become a universally accepted notion that should be applied to working with the colonial past. Rather, it is to say that debates around how to make narratives around the material and visual culture tied to the project of European colonialism now take place within the spectre of ‘decolonisation’ as a thing that either needs to be embedded institutionally or in practice to enact radical change, augmented to fit the reformist aims of institutions or rejected as an existential threat to museums themselves. And, whilst most scholarship has focused on decolonising the epistemological aspects of museum practice, rather than the ontological. Can we imagine a museum approach that challenges the idea of the museum as the ultimate authority and representation of human existence? We invite papers from contributors to the edited volume, but also other scholars from history, art history, museum practice, art, and activism, to discuss decolonial museum praxis both from historical and contemporary perspective.

Programme