Decolonizing the Museum: Art, Activism and the Question of Race in Curation

This book asks what it means to decolonize museums in theory and practice. It explores recent calls by activists and artists for social change in and through museums and how museums have responded to these calls and interventions.

The point of departure for this volume is the burgeoning global debates around racism that have compelled many museums and public institutions to confront their complicity in colonialism, both past and present. Building on interviews with curators, cultural practitioners, activists, and artists, as well as the authors’ ongoing involvement with movements aimed at decolonizing museums, this volume explores how anti-racist activism and artivism have transformed museums, as well as the broader social and political significance of these transformations. The book focuses on the practices, approaches, and strategies that are being adopted in efforts to decolonize museums and cultural institutions, where they succeed and fail, and the similarities and differences between these initiatives. It discusses specific exhibitions and whether they represent colonialism as a past phenomenon or as enduring racial logics forcefully shaping the present. It analyzes both mainstream European museums and grassroots, museum-like initiatives that aim to reckon with colonialism and race in different contexts. Core to the argument is the issue of how memory, heritage, and museum studies, the disciplines that explore, explain, and staff museums, have engaged or not with race.

Decolonizing the Museum will be valuable for those studying or researching in the fields of museum studies, heritage, memory and art studies, decolonial theory, postcolonialism, race and racism, and cultural politics. Providing an important window into the political role of curators and the politics of race in transforming museums, it will also be beneficial to museum practitioners and activists and artists with a stake in these institutions.

Chiara de Cesari is Professor of Heritage, Memory and Cultural Studies and Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research explores how forms of memory, heritage, art, and cultural politics are shifting under conditions of transnationalism, post- and decoloniality. She is particularly concerned with the ways in which colonial legacies live on today, especially in museums and cultural institutions. She is the author of Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine, and co-editor of two key volumes in memory studies (European Memory in Populism, Routledge, 2019; Transnational Memory, de Gruyter, 2014). Committed to transnational and transdisciplinary collaboration, she has been and is involved in several major international research projects, connecting universities across the globe with different social partners, museums and cultural institutions.

Wayne Modest is the director of content at the National Museum of World Culture (a museum group comprising the Tropenmuseum, Museum Volkenkunde, and Africa Museum) and the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He is also a professor (by special appointment) of material culture and critical heritage studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. A cultural studies scholar by training, Modest works at the intersection of material culture, memory, and heritage studies, with a strong focus on colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean. His most recent publications include the edited volumes: Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in a Changing Europe (with Nicholas Thomas, et al), and Spaces of Care - Confronting Colonial Afterlives in European Ethnographic Museums (with Claudia Augustat).

Marta Pagliuca Pelacani is an artistic researcher and doctoral candidate at University College Cork (UCC). Her research explores peasant heritage, storytelling, and the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. She works with anti-colonial ontologies, anarchival methods, and socially engaged art, with a focus on curatorial approaches to archives and the epistemologies of historically dispossessed communities. She is co-convenor of UCC’s Memory, Commemoration, and Uses of the Past research cluster, and has taught at the University of Amsterdam.