Museums in the colonial horizon of modernity Fred Wilson's mining the museum (1992)

Abstract

I will argue here that museums in the modern/colonial world (that is, the way of life, economic principles, political structures, and models of subjectivities that originated in the sixteenth century with the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuits) had and still have a particular role to play in the colonization of knowledge and of beings. The questions then are (1) how to decolonize the museum and (2) how to assess what a decolonial option reorienting the work museums can do (e.g., in a nutshell, reproducing the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality or entering in a spirit of epistemic and aesthetic disobedience undoing what museums did in modern/imperial history: learning to unlearn and to enact museums for decolonization of being and of knowledge).