The postcolonial museum: the arts of memory and the pressures of history

Introduction : disruptive encounters. museums, arts, and postcoloniality / Alessandra De Angelis, Celeste Ianniciello, Mariangela Orabona, Michaela Quadraro -- A museum without objects / Françoise Vergès -- Decolonizing national museums of ethnography in Europe : exposing and reshaping colonial heritage (2000-2012) / Felicity Bodenstein and Camilla Pagani -- Colonial spaces, postcolonial narratives : the exhibitionary landscape of Fort Cochin in India / Neelima Jeychandran -- Ethnographic museums : from colonial exposition to intercultural dialogue / Fabienne Boursiquot -- "There is not yet a world" / Ebadur Rahman -- The artist as interlocutor and the labour of memory / Joanna Figiel, Mihaela Brebenel, Christopher Collier -- Performance in the museum space (for a wandering society) / Margherita Parati -- "Museo diffuso" : performing memory in public spaces / Viviana Gravano -- Mining the museum in an age of migration / Anne Ring Petersen -- Blurring history : the Central European museum and the schizophrenia of capital / Ivan Jurica -- The limits to institutional change : organisational roles and roots / Peggy Levitt -- The incurable image : curation and repetition on a tri-continental scene / Tarek Elhaik -- The postcolonial "exhibitionary complex" : the role of the international expo in migrating and multicultural societies / Stefania Zuliani -- Orientalism and the politics of contemporary art exhibitions / Alessandra Marino -- What museum for Africa? / Itala Vivan -- Egyptian chemistry : from post-colonial to post-humanist matters / Ursula Biemann -- "The lived moment" : new aesthetics for migrant recollection / Peter Leese -- Coding/decoding the archive / David Gauthier and Erin La Cour -- Afterword : after the museum / Iain Chambers

This book examines how we can conceive of a "postcolonial museum" in the contemporary epoch of mass migrations, the internet and digital technologies. The authors consider the museum space, practices and institutions in the light of repressed histories, sounds, voices, images, memories, bodies, expression and cultures. Focusing on the transformation of museums as cultural spaces, rather than physical places, is to propose a living archive formed through creation, participation, production and innovation. The aim is to propose a critical assessment of the museum in the light of those transcultural and global migratory movements that challenge the historical and traditional frames of Occidental thought. This involves a search for new strategies and critical approaches in the fields of museum and heritage studies which will renew and extend understandings of European citizenship and result in an inevitable re-evaluation of the concept of "modernity" in a so-called globalised and multicultural world