The ‘repatriation issue’ will never go away at museums, and if the institutions are serious about rebuilding trust, they must be transparent about their legacies of imperialism and theft, writes Alice Procter.
Museums are in crisis. In the past, their social role has been taken for granted – they’re spaces for preserving objects and educating the deferential public that comes to admire them. It’s a tidy, completist dream: wouldn’t it be nice to see the whole of human history, free and open to all?
Except that history is nasty and ugly. It’s full of violence: every moment, every event, takes place within a power dynamic – there’s always a hierarchy in play. The whole concept of The Museum is a colonialist, imperialist fantasy, born from the fallacy that somehow the whole world... Keep reading on The Guardian
Museums are in crisis. In the past, their social role has been taken for granted – they’re spaces for preserving objects and educating the deferential public that comes to admire them. It’s a tidy, completist dream: wouldn’t it be nice to see the whole of human history, free and open to all?
Except that history is nasty and ugly. It’s full of violence: every moment, every event, takes place within a power dynamic – there’s always a hierarchy in play. The whole concept of The Museum is a colonialist, imperialist fantasy, born from the fallacy that somehow the whole world... Keep reading on The Guardian