Decolonize Museums

Behold thesleazy logic of museums: plunder dressed up as charity, conservation, and care.

The idealizedWestern museum, as typified by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the BritishMuseum, and the Museum of Natural History, has remained much the same for overa century: a uniquely rarified public space of cool stone, providing anexperience of leisure and education for the general public while carefullytending fragile artifacts from distant lands. As questions about representationand ethics have increasingly arisen, these institutions have proclaimed theirinterest in diversity and responsible conservation, asserting both theiradaptability and their immovably essential role in a flourishing and culturallyrich society.

With DecolonizeMuseums, Shimrit Lee punctures this fantasy, tracing the essentiallycolonial origins of the concept of the museum. White Europeans’ atrocities werereimagined through narratives of benign curiosity and abundant respect for theoccupied or annihilated culture, and these racist narratives, Lee argues,remain integral to the authority exercised by museums today. Citing pop culturereferences from Indiana Jones to Black Panther,and highlighting crucial activist campaigns and legal action to redress theharms perpetrated by museums and their proxies, Decolonize Museums arguesthat we must face a dismantling of these seemingly eternal edifices, andconsider what, if anything, might take their place.