Museum Temporalities analyzes how museums relate to time. It explores the hidden temporal assumptions and practices that define museums. How might these assumptions help us to better understand and address museums’ often problematic and painful relationship to the colonial past? Since the nineteenth century, the globalization of the museum has spread specific understandings of permanence and temporariness that inform museum display, separated the modern from the t...

This book asks what it means to decolonize museums in theory and practice. It explores recent calls by activists and artists for social change in and through museums and how museums have responded to these calls and interventions.The point of departure for this volume is the burgeoning global debates around racism that have compelled many museums and public institutions to confront their complicity in colonialism, both past and present. Building on interviews with curators, cultura...

Victorian Jamaica explores the extraordinary surviving archive of visual representation and material objects to provide a comprehensive account of Jamaican society during Queen Victoria's reign over the British Empire, from 1837 to 1901. In their analyses of material ranging from photographs of plantation laborers and landscape paintings to cricket team photographs, furniture, and architecture, as well as a wide range of texts, the contributors trace the relationship between black...

This edited volume critically engages with contemporary scholarship on museums and their engagement with the communities they purport to serve and represent. Foregrounding new curatorial strategies, it addresses a significant gap in the available literature, exploring some of the complex issues arising from recent approaches to collaboration between museums and their communities.The book unpacks taken-for-granted notions such as scholarship, community, participation and collaborati...

While many claims are made regarding the power of cultural heritage as a driver and enabler of sustainable development, the relationship between museums, heritage and development has received little academic scrutiny. This book stages a critical conversation between the interdisciplinary fields of museum studies, heritage studies and development studies to explore this under-researched sphere of development intervention. In an agenda-setting introduction, the editors explore the seemingly ...

Institutions across the globe are increasingly questioned on how their foundations are rooted in colonialism and how they aim to ‘decolonize’. The Future of the Dutch Colonial Past provides an overview of critical scholarly reflections on the history of Dutch slavery and colonization, as well as how this translates into critical cultural practices. It also explores possible futures: What can heritage institutions learn from (international) best practices regarding the ‘decolonizat...

At a moment when the discipline of Canadian art history seems to be in flux and the study of Canadian visual culture is gaining traction outside of art history departments, the authors of Negotiations in a Vacant Lot were asked: is "Canada" - or any other nation - still relevant as a category of inquiry? Is our country simply one of many "vacant lots" where class, gender, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation interact? What happens to the project of Canadian visual history if we...

Contemporary art biennials are sites of prestige, innovation and experimentation, where the category of art is meant to be in perpetual motion, rearranged and redefined, opening itself to the world and its contradictions. They are sites of a seemingly peaceful cohabitation between the elitist and the popular, where the likes of Jeff Koons encounter the likes of Guy Debord, where Angela Davis and Frantz Fanon share the same ground with neoliberal cultural policy makers and creative entrepre...

Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere provides the first major social scientific study of these festivals in the wake of their explosion in popularity over the past decade. It explores the cultural significance of contemporary arts festivals from their location within the cultural public sphere, examining them as sites for contestation and democratic debate, and also identifying them as examples of a particular aesthetic cosmopolitanism.The book approaches contemporary ...

Decolonizing Colonial Heritage explores how different agents practice the decolonization of European colonial heritage at European and extra-European locations. Assessing the impact of these practices, the book also explores what a new vision of Europe in the postcolonial present could look like.Including contributions from academics, artists and heritage practitioners, the volume explores decolonial heritage practices in politics, contemporary history, diplomacy, museum p...

What is contemporary curatorial thought? Current discourse on the topic is heating up with a new cocktail of bold ideas and ethical imperatives. these include: cooperative curating, especially with artists; the reimagination of museums; curating as knowledge production; the historicization of exhibitionmaking; and commitment to extra-artworld participatory activism. Less obvious, but increasingly of concern, are issues such as rethinking spectatorship, engaging viewers as co-curators and t...

Historic sites, memorials, national parks, museums…we live in an age in which heritage is ever-present. But what does it mean to live amongst the spectral traces of the past, the heterogeneous piling up of historic materials in the present? How did heritage grow from the concern of a handful of enthusiasts and specialists in one part of the world to something which is considered to be universally cherished? And what concepts and approaches are necessary to understanding this global obsessi...