Decolonize Museums

Shimrit Lee is a writer, curator, and educator. Her research lies at the intersection of visual and cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and critical security studies. Her essays and reviews have been published in a number of cultural journals and art magazines. She completed her PhD in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU in 2019, and currently teaches at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.Bhakti Shringarpure is editor-in-chief of Warscapes magazine. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital and co-editor of the forthcoming Insurgent Feminisms: Women Write War. She has written for The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Africa is a Country, among other places.

“Shimrit Lee’s provocative and lucid book is part-investigative report where the museum resembles a crime scene and part-polemic that grapples with what it would look like to upend the current ways in which museums are organized and function. Lee makes the convincing argument that museums must fall, and it is time we start taking this imperative seriously.” — Sean Jacobs, founder and editor of Africa Is a Country and author of Media in Postapartheid South Africa“This book takes us through, and far beyond, the museum as a contested space, raising urgent and complex questions about its future. Through her historically insightful and comprehensive take down, Shimrit Lee asks us to reconceptualize the museum in its entirety. She tears down the facade that museums were ever neutral, tracing their role in shaping, and perpetuating, structures of racial capitalism. Lee shows us that decolonizing museums revolves around creating an expansive sense of justice that moves us beyond its walls. Getting it right, she reminds us, means nothing less than liberation for us all.” — Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Assistant Professor of Black Diasporic Art at Princeton University and author of Black Bodies, White Gold"... in-depth research, which interrogates the foundations of museum and curatorial principles, makes Decolonize Museums an abundant read—it should be stocked in every museum gift shop worldwide." —Full-Stop