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Decolonize Museums

Shimrit Lee Bhakti Shringarpure

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Paperback

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English
OR Books
01 November 2022
Behold the sleazy logic of museums: plunder dressed up as charity, conservation, and care.

The idealized Western museum, as typified by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Museum of Natural History, has remained much the same for over a century: a uniquely rarified public space of cool stone, providing an experience of leisure and education for the general public while carefully tending fragile artifacts from distant lands. As questions about representation and ethics have increasingly arisen, these institutions have proclaimed their interest in diversity and responsible conservation, asserting both their adaptability and their immovably essential role in a flourishing and culturally rich society.

WithDecolonize Museums, Shimrit Lee punctures this fantasy, tracing the essentially colonial origins of the concept of the museum. White Europeans' atrocities were reimagined through narratives of benign curiosity and abundant respect for the occupied or annihilated culture, and these racist narratives, Lee argues, remain integral to the authority exercised by museums today. Citing pop culture references fromIndiana JonestoBlack Panther, and highlighting crucial activist campaigns and legal action to redress the harms perpetrated by museums and their proxies,Decolonize Museumsargues that we must face a dismantling of these seemingly eternal edifices, and consider what, if anything, might take their place.
By:  
Edited by:  
Imprint:   OR Books
Country of Publication:   United States
Dimensions:   Height: 177mm,  Width: 127mm, 
ISBN:   9781682193150
ISBN 10:   1682193152
Series:   Decolonize That!
Pages:   224
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

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 Shringarpureis editor-in-chief ofWarscapesmagazine. She is the author ofCold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digitaland co-editor of the forthcomingInsurgent Feminisms: Women Write War. She has written forThe Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, andAfrica is a Country, among other places.

Reviews for Decolonize Museums

"“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"


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