Editorial: Towards Decolonisation

The museum, an institution embedded in European modernity, was invented when a perception of ‘the Other’, or colonised populations, was being disseminated: this ‘Other’ represented a necessary exterior, or alterity, to be conquered. By conquering other peoples and assimilating some of their cultural heritage, colonisers also shaped the modern world based on the hierarchisation of different forms of knowing and being. Thus, what is now termed by decolonial authors as ‘coloniality’¹ are the traces of colonialism and modernity that are still present in the current world, reproduced through the expansion of capitalism and reinforced by some neoliberal governments. By acknowledging coloniality in museums, we must therefore assume that decolonisation is an ongoing process that involves restitution and rehumanisation, notably through the sharing of knowledge and by encouraging mutual understanding. It is a process towards which some museums and professionals have been orienting their practices; and it is one that is set to constantly challenge the museum’s colonial foundations, as well as its present-day, neocolonial effects.

As an organisation, ICOM has had a longstanding involvement in this process. The historical and geographical foundation of museums, and their colonial biases, were first denounced by an ICOM member in France in 1971, during the 9th ICOM General Conference. It was there that Stanislas Adotevi, a Beninese philosopher, politician and civil servant who directed the Institute of Applied Research and the National Archives and Museum in Benin, recognised that museums are ‘theoretically and practically attached to a world (the European world), to a class (the cultivated bourgeoisie)’ and ‘to a certain cultural perspective’ (Adotevi 1992/1971, p.122). By raising this debate at a moment when Europe refused to recognise the cultural heritage of recently independent nations (on this matter, see Savoy 2022), Adotevi opened a conversation on the role of museums facing their own coloniality in Europe and elsewhere.

The debates involving museums and practices of decolonisation are ongoing, and constantly evolving, taking into account the global consequences of colonialism in contemporary societies, including social and economic inequalities, the marginalisation of certain populations, the continuous threats to Indigenous peoples and their traditional lands, and institutional racism and sexism in all of their forms. Nonetheless, this is the first time that Museum International faces this complex topic in a full issue, bringing together diverse perspectives on the subject to carry out reflexive analysis on the role and work of museums’ towards decolonisation. The title for this issue underlines the fact that we are examining an unfinished and ongoing process for museums and museology; it recognises that within ICOM and in the museum sector more extensively, we might be merely ‘scratching the surface’ of debates, while learning how to recognise and sensibly approach our collective colonial wound. Nonetheless, the will to change and to ‘decolonise’ is a common one shared by museum professionals, scholars, community members and activists living and working in different parts of the globe. In the past few years, issues related to museum’s colonial legacies and coloniality have been critically analysed by some of ICOM’s National and International Committees, producing several focused publications, international conferences and workshops (see, for instance, Brulon Soares 2020). Furthermore, Decolonisation was adopted as a principle in ICOM’s Strategic Plan for 2022-2028, in which the role museums played during colonisation, as well as their present role in upholding normative instruments based on Western standards, are recognised and critically questioned. This new strategy has recently led to the creation of a specific Working Group, the WG on Decolonisation (to be formalised in 2023).

In this Editorial, we decided to avoid privileging a single definition for ‘decolonisation’, whether in a conceptual or practical sense, since the notion holds various meanings in the context of museums, in scholarly texts, or even in the discourse of activists and politicians. In some of its more common connotations, moreover, ‘decolonisation’ has been employed in contradictory ways, used to contest museums’ inherent coloniality, or, alternatively, as a brand to restore institutional credibility and relevance to audiences. Moreover, ‘decolonisation’ is in no way a universal term. Whilst in European and in African countries it can be more strictly related to repatriation and the return of illegally acquired cultural heritage, in the context of Latin America it refers to a redistribution of museums’ power to marginal groups, which is dependent on a deeper involvement of communities in museum work and decision-making processes. In some Asian countries, conversely, the term has been used to reconceive the material past, or to foster new interpretations of history beyond the master narrative of colonial history. Meanwhile, if we examine the context of some museums in North America or in the Pacific region, ‘decolonising’ can sometimes be seen as a synonym for ‘Indigenising’ institutional procedures and collections management. The term’s nuances and potential interpretations are seemingly infinite, and they continue to evolve as museums reinvent themselves to respond to societies’ new claims and needs.

The concept for this issue came together organically, following a call for papers for an open issue. In response to that call, the editorial committee received a high number of proposals — principally by Latin American authors — either critically approaching the colonial pasts of museums in Latin America or proposing decolonial analysis, anticolonial methods and understandings of museum work. Realising we had the core of an issue focused on museums’ efforts towards decolonisation, we decided to develop the present volume by extending this nucleus of papers. We achieved this by sending out several invitations to potential guest authors. In doing so, we considered how to include multiple voices, positionalities and alternative knowledges, but also how to address the numerous contours and nuances of the topic, whilst balancing the geographic distribution of contributions. Working from within an organisation whose European members and National committees represent a majority,² we aimed to challenge the very coloniality of ICOM, and to contrast professional views with those of Indigenous peoples and members of marginalised groups. However, for a journal that is historically attached to transnational organisations mainly serving the professional sector, it proved difficult to incorporate the perspectives of many Indigenous authors or community-based approaches to the museum, with some invited authors rejecting our invitation due to ICOM’s associated coloniality.

Acknowledging our many limitations as a consequence of our own positionality, we are nevertheless making a first attempt within this journal (and certainly not the last) to take an expansive view of decolonisation processes, whilst considering its specificities in different places around the world — without claiming to be exhaustive. What emerges, as a result, is a longer history of decolonising museums within the broader movement to democratise museums, spanning from the international movement for New Museology in the 1980s to new forms of ‘collaboration’, ‘co-curation’ and ‘co-design’. The examples documented within these pages testify to a plurality of methodologies and practices. Decolonisation, in its multiple usages by museums and curators, is a practice and an effort that sits within a continuum — which itself looks different in different parts of the world — tackling diverse difficult histories related to political relations and processes of Empire formation, and resulting in various experimental solutions. By recognising the vast range of practices and interpretations related to decoloniality, we call attention to the fact that there is no singular ‘decolonial’ approach that can be seen as detached from context, from politics, or from situated issues that will allow different groups and professionals to formulate, through negotiations and disputes, their own situated solutions. But one overarching thing that we can learn from the diverse articles presented here is the fact that ‘decolonising’ is much more about processes than it is about the end result. In this sense, most of the analysis presented here avoids thinking about decolonisation as solely the repatriation of cultural material artefacts: a perspective that has until now been predominant in the European context, as well as in the previous debates and recommendations promoted by ICOM. In fact, as most of the articles presented in the current volume indicate, decolonising and repairing past injustices begins with a focus on people. The process is thus dependent on the involvement of communities in the museum practices that historically alienated them.

The practice of ‘decoloniality’ in museums — as a method of continually combatting the coloniality of knowledge, power and being — is evoked by some of the authors whose work is presented here as a conception that allows a broader comprehension of this ongoing and multivocal process. According to Catherine Walsh and Walter Mignolo, decoloniality is not to be achieved as an end goal; rather, it is to be exercised on a daily basis. Moreover, Walsh and Mignolo propose that the notion is based on relationality: not as a universal principle, but rather conceived around ‘the ways that different local histories and embodied conceptions and practices of decoloniality, including our own, can enter into conversations’ (2018, p. 1). To perceive relationality as a basic principle for any international approach to decolonisation is to oppose a global prescription to liberation; in the case of museums, a relational approach obliges us to look at institutions through the lens of the multiple encounters that configure them. This notably involves a transformation in the perspective of experts, and in that of all those differing and dialoguing with it. As a consequence, the practice of decoloniality is structurally changing how we see, and make, museums in the so-called ‘postcolonial’³ framework or, more specifically, in decolonial analysis.

What will unfold in the following pages is a multivocal compilation of reflections on the restitution of the museum itself: to Indigenous peoples, to marginalised communities and vulnerable groups, and to all of those who are now collectively disputing the right to self-determination and self-awareness through this modern institution. We witness today, in the words of the Indigenous Brazilian artist and activist Glicéria Tupinambá, who opens this issue, a retomada (reclamation) of the museum in the Indigenous sense of reclaiming and occupying a determined territory. As Glicéria proposes in her compelling interview, in the case of the Tupinambá mantles that have been held by European museums since the onset of colonisation in Brazil, restitution is less a material (and legal) transfer of colonial objects and much more the spiritual return of sacred knowledge that had been partially lost. Most significantly, for the people reclaiming their right to memory, restitution signifies a reconnection with history: one that is dependent on their collaboration with the institutions narrating the colonial past. By reconnecting with the material traces of their past (now held in museums), using or re-finding traditional knowledge and engaging in collaborative practices, Indigenous curators, artists, activists and scholars are now reconquering the museum; they are rewriting narratives, changing practices and sharing their own cosmologies and knowledge as a way ‘to decolonise’. The focus, then, is on the process of sharing rather that on the end result, ‘everything being a journey’ in the Tupinambá way of perceiving.

But decolonisation is as much about shared practices and knowledges as it is about our divisions and inequalities. The Indigenous presence in museums, and the involvement of First Nations people in museum work around the world, offer the opportunity to make visible not only the illegal spoils of the colonisers, but also the loss and suffering of the colonised. Reconciling opposing narratives by recognising that museums no longer work with single truths is part of the political and social role of present-day institutions, which are being reinvented in ways that greatly move beyond the imagination of white professionals and experts.

Accordingly, this issue of Museum International is also about the most recent reinvention of the museum, in response to changing understandings of its social role. For instance, the issue ends with a detailed look at the recent process of achieving a new museum definition for ICOM: one that was approved in August 2022 after many months of global consultations. The voices of ICOM have spoken not homogeneously nor without friction, but through a process of democratic participation and dialogue, detailed here by Lauran Bonilla-Merchav and Bruno Brulon Soares. But while some of the contributions in this volume address the ruptures in the recent history of museums, others also recognise that the changes we are witnessing today began fomenting some time ago.

This is the case with contributions from Latin America in particular. Leticia Pérez Castellanos’ article reminds us that in Mexico City, La Casa del Museo operated as a decentralised project by the Museo Nacional de Antropología (MNA) for eight years (1972–1980). During those years, La Casa del Museo, through the work of Founder Mario Vásquez, sought to become an ‘integrated museum’ that engaged with the social issues of the communities they served. Embedded in this concept of the integrated museum is a longer history of principles and practices we now associate with processes of decolonisation. These included the development of practices that explicitly aimed to decolonise modern museum practices by imagining new ways of working with and for communities: ways that sought to work against hegemonic ideas of the nation, and the erasure of the heritage of the diverse communities that actually composed it — including Indigenous peoples.

This Mexican experiment was part of a wider Latin American movement that sought to change the colonial museum, rather than do away with museums altogether. Whereas Adotevi argued at the 9th General Conference of ICOM that, given their colonial origins, we perhaps no longer needed museums at all, Mario Vázquez proposed that instead of seeking the demise of museums, we should aim to change how they did their work. La Casa del Museo was an experimental site for the development of some of these ideas. While it did not survive, the principles that it put into place remain with us today. These include principles such as the participation of marginalised communities in the work of the museum; the notion that museums must address the problems faced by contemporary society by reconnecting these to the past — thus lending recognition to processes of decoloniality — and the idea that this work requires multidisciplinary approaches.

As Pérez Castellanos underlines in her contribution, the work of La Casa del Museo was itself linked to the agenda of the Santiago de Chile Round Table held in 1972. As Brulon Soares, Mario Chagas, Leonardo Mellado González and Karin Weil argue in their collective account of the ongoing relevance of this Round Table, the notion of the integral (and integrating) museum was formulated as a decolonising move associated with the liberational philosophies of Paulo Freire; its conception was also motivated by the need to heal the wounds caused by colonialism in the first place: wounds that were eloquently argued by Franz Fanon a decade earlier. Developed during a period in which some Latin American countries were themselves decolonising and throwing away the vestiges of authoritarian regimes, the social objectives embedded within the notion of the integral museum became the foundation for democratising impulses well beyond Latin America. Indeed, the notion of the social museum was foundational to the development of the New Museology in the 1980s and to the work of ICOM throughout that same decade; it also led to the consolidation of social museology as a dominant trend in this region. Through this lens, decolonising museums is therefore a process that is also intimately connected to processes of democratisation, and to the increasing multivocality embodied by museums.

Remaining anchored in the context of Latin America, and in the spirit of recognising some of the contemporary effects of coloniality, Eduardo Briceño-Florez and Kathryn Eccles consider how museums can be used as tools for resistance in a post-conflict society marked by violence in present-day Colombia. By relating transitional justice initiatives to ongoing decolonial activities in museums, while describing the historical context of conflicts in Colombia since the 1960s, the authors touch on a fundamental aspect of decolonisation which is common in different Latin American countries: the fact that current inequalities, political and economic crises are the vestiges of colonialism, and a result of the ongoing exploitation of these ‘independent’ nations. Discussions on decolonisation in the region have been considering the economic effects of colonial exploitation since at least the dissemination of dependency theory in the 1970s: a movement that was very much influenced by Fanon’s denunciation of how the political independence of certain colonies was merely a way to maintain their economic dependency at a global level.⁴ Such studies have influenced ‘decolonial’ thinking in several countries, which explains how some museums today approach contemporary issues and crises as part of a broader process of denouncing coloniality and presenting alternatives to current forms of domination: mostly those tied to global capitalism. Building from these discussions, Briceño-Florez and Eccles propose that decolonisation can take place through the inclusion of multiple narratives, and even contradictory memories, around Colombian conflicts and their present consequences, showing how institutions can help to manage the tensions inherent to fragile peacebuilding processes.

The importance of voice and conflicting narratives returns as a central theme in efforts to decolonise colonial museums situated in former colonies. While countries such as Nigeria, in West Africa, have gained political independence and have gone through political processes of decolonisation, the problem of decoloniality in many of its civic institutions remains. For Oluwatoyin Sogbesan, therefore, the task at hand is how to decolonise museums operating in nations that were formerly colonised. In her article, turning to the example of two Nigerian museums, Sogbesan points to the importance of voice in processes of decoloniality. She argues that privileging the use of local languages in public institutions over the language of the coloniser is key to achieving two objectives: achieving engagement from local communities in museums and incorporating local cultural knowledge and interpretations into the collection and display of objects.

Moving beyond theoretical reflections on decolonisation, the articles in this issue respond to an emergent need to translate theory into practice. As the different approaches highlighted in what follows demonstrate, there is no single set of practices that can be identified as ‘decolonial’, since the very standardisation of decoloniality in ‘universal’ protocols could be perceived as essentially neocolonial. Actions stemming from the recognition of institutions’ colonial complicity can take various forms and translate into different procedures that respond to localised issues and specific disputes. Thus, guidelines and protocols established in one context usually don’t apply to other realities marked by domination. Ricardo Punzalan and Deirdre de la Cruz, for instance, reflect on reparation processes in the context of the Philippines by analysing the formation of collections at a museum connected to the University of Michigan, in the US. Their article, based on a case study of the ReConnect/ReCollect project, offers a potent example of how institutions can respond reflexively, recognising their own colonial role in the formation of collections. As in other contemporary examples explored in this issue, a relational model involving community members and Indigenous knowledge is put into practice as a means of repairing cultural bonds. The article, then, presents some of the challenges and barriers involved in these collaborations, as well as in the implementation of continued dialogue with local communities. By arguing for ‘slowing down’ archival work and collecting processes, the authors present an insightful overview of the ongoing effects of colonisation in museum-based work with collections: in this case, examining those connected to the US Empire.

Meanwhile, in former centres of Empire, the growing acceptance that museums are social institutions and are, as such, implicated in politics, has led to an acknowledgement that their collections cannot be divorced from the power relations inherent in the development of Empire and global colonisation. Decolonisation, in Europe, is often associated with calls for repatriation. While this now has a history in terms of museums repatriating ancestral remains, there is a growing body of work on the history of collecting and its associations with colonialism, with the aim of improving our knowledge of the provenance of specific collections in order to initiate processes of cultural return (Savoy 2022). In this issue, this branch of thought around decolonisation efforts and their implications is represented by Debbie Challis and Lucia Patrizio Gunning’s article on the 19th-century British plunder of Maqdala, the former capital of Ethiopia — and its resulting collections, including those held at the British Museum. For the authors, their research on the provenance of collections resulting from the British plunder of Maqdala involving a British Museum staff member indicates not only a moral need to return these collections to Ethiopia, but also the need to undo western-centric interpretations of the objects held within them, which fail to recognise the ways in which these are enmeshed within spiritual and religious cultural practices. The article also makes a powerful argument for the role that histories of collecting can play in understanding relations between museums and colonialism.

In settler colonial countries, such as Australia, Canada and the United States, debates around, and practices of, decolonisation, are different yet again. While there are, of course, claims for the repatriation of ancestral remains and belongings to local communities both within these countries and in overseas institutions, the focus is not solely on repatriation as the end objective. Increasingly, attention is being paid to the importance of relational work aimed at the restitution of cultural knowledge for wellbeing, cultural maintenance and preservation purposes: a theme that is shared with Latin American countries. In Australia, for example, there are increasing attempts to reconnect Indigenous communities with collections both inside Australia and in overseas collections, with the aim of recovering lost Indigenous knowledge and working towards cultural revitalisation — without necessarily calling for the repatriation of objects. This work is thus also attentive to the ways in which the collecting process says much about the nature of colonialism and empire. Connections and opportunities to reconnect with and use collections are also brought into conversation with revisionist histories of the role of colonial-era museums and collectors (see for example Sculthorpe, Nugent and Morphy 2021; Gibson 2020) which seek to underline the complexity of cross-cultural relations. The focus on enabling reconnections in the present is as much on recognising and valuing intangible cultural heritage as material cultural heritage. This shift also opens up a space to extend ideas of repatriation to digital practices of return, extending the category of material to documentary heritage and spotlighting materials such as films, historical records, museum records and other forms of archival heritage that contain within them cultural knowledge. Another imperative is the need to work harder at recognising and acknowledging the role of museums within settler colonial nations in processes of colonisation and its aftermath, leading to more reflexive and critical museum practices.

Thus, Anna Edmundson’s article explores two case studies involving the digital return of cultural material to Yolngu communities in northern Australia. She focuses on the kinds of practices that led to this outcome, as well as understanding the benefits that accrue from the restitution of cultural knowledge. In settler colonial nations, where ongoing colonisation requires attention to the past, present and future of relations between First Nations people and settlers, ongoing collaboration is central to decolonising efforts. Key to this is the importance of developing more equitable sharing practices, thus ensuring the agency of Indigenous people and their communities in gaining access to and using Indigenous knowledge for their own purposes. What is achieved through these processes is the restitution of cultural authority. These outcomes can only occur through intensive collaboration between museums and archives and local communities, notably prioritising Indigenous perspectives on the meanings of collections and providing the means for local communities to create and use their own depositories of (in this case), digitally returned materials.

Laura Phillips’ contribution from Canada, another settler colonial nation, points to a different aspect of decolonising work: the need to come to grips with the ways in which settlers are always enmeshed in colonial practices, and the fact that museums are one of the key sites through which to understand past and ongoing forms of coloniality. Here, the point about provenance research as well as careful analysis of the histories of display is to reveal both colonial ideologies and ongoing practices of colonial thinking within museums. The object of reform is the non-Indigenous curator and the institution itself, with the hope of transforming mentalities among the broader public. Thus, Phillips argues, a display on minerals should never just be a display on minerals in a traditional taxonomic display. It should also illuminate how collecting minerals is part of a wider extractive culture and akin to mining; in so being, it is enmeshed in colonialism. Revealing these histories, alongside engaging Indigenous worldviews on the same material, bring us back to the importance of pluralising knowledge. The work, to refer back to Fanon, is on the Master’s house — even though, as many recognise today, that work will always remain unfinished. In this context, decolonising is not entirely synonymous with Indigenising; but the two processes do need to be in conversation with one another.

Another contribution from a settler colonial nation, that of Sofia Karliner, contrasts decolonising efforts at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) with those of tribal museums in the United States. In her survey of recent debates on the effort to decolonise museums in the US, Karliner points to the difficulties of achieving decolonisation in mainstream institutions, despite the increasing employment of Indigenous staff and use of collaborative methodologies that privilege First Nations voices and knowledge. Interestingly, the article underlines that these approaches don’t do enough to critique and expose the involvement of museums in the very development of colonialism through its collecting and display practices. This is also, of course, the central point of Phillips’ contribution. Beyond the obvious conclusion that both critical self-reflexivity on the part of white curators and collaborative practices are needed, Karliner goes on to contrast the methodologies of the NMAI with those of tribal museums in the US, whose distinctive characteristic, apart from being depositories of local cultural items that have either been repatriated or that have resulted from archaeological surveys, is the interpretation of this material for the purposes of restitution, reclamation and preservation of local Indigenous knowledge. In this respect, they eschew the imperative of serving a wider general public and with it, the need to work within Western and colonial frames of knowledge, instead privileging practices which treat objects as living entities — a point which Challis and Gunning, as well as Sogbesan, argue is desperately needed with regard to the way collections from former colonies are interpreted. Importantly, tribal museums are also free to produce their own ways of remembering the effects of colonisation, offering a parallel to the equal need for mainstream museums to openly recognise their own involvement in processes of colonisation — and their broader impact on colonised peoples.

What we can observe, therefore, is that processes of decolonisation and reflexivity intersect. In many ways, this issue is an invitation to museum professionals and scholars to critically assess their own positionalities and colonial practices. Reflexivity is a basic tool for conceiving a museum that is critical of its colonial past and modern foundations. It allows for the recognition that museum authority is no longer centred in the curator’s perspectives and beliefs, but that it must instead be built horizontally, through processes of knowledge-sharing, intercultural exchange and dialogical education: all of which result in a deeper transformation of all involved parties.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bruno Brulon Soares

Bruno Brulon Soares, Lecturer in Museum & Heritage Studies, University of St Andrews, Scotland.

Andrea Witcomb

Andrea Witcomb, Professor and Associate Dean of Research, Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University, Australia.

Notes

1 The concept, coined by Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (1992), was disseminated in the work of Latin American scholars identified with the project known as M/C (Modernity/ Coloniality), originating at the turn of the 21st century and composed of a body of interdisciplinary research. These scholars evidence coloniality in the configuration of Modern World-Systems, as defined by Immanuel Wallerstein (1974). This group of so-called ‘decolonial’ authors includes Quijano, Walter Mignolo, Enrique Dussel, María Lugones, Edgardo Lander, Catherine Walsh, Arturo Escobar and Fernando Coronil, among others.

2 As commented on in the article on the new museum definition in this issue (see Bonilla-Merchav & Brulon Soares in pages 134-147), ICOM’s European national committees represent 39 per cent of the organisation, also including the majority of its members: a number that was much higher throughout its history.

3 The term ‘postcolonial’ commonly refers to analysis imbued with ‘disciplinary and interpretative contestation’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 2007, p. 168), a connotation that has been accepted almost since its initial uses, whether under the post-structuralist influence of the main proponents of colonial discourse theory (such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak) developed since the 1970s, or in relation to the notion that the ‘post-colonial’ (in this case with a hyphen) would mark a rupture in the chronology of history. This last assumption is related to the fact that the term first appeared in the early 1970s, in concrete reference to societies that had recently liberated themselves from formal colonisation; it is currently critiqued for ignoring the economic and political consequences of colonialism after independence.

4 Dependency theory was one of the responses from Latin American authors to a changing world order in the mid-1970s. According to Fernando Coronil, dependency theorists argued that ‘development’ and ‘underdevelopment’ are mutually dependent outcomes of capitalist accumulation on a world scale. Thus, since ‘underdevelopment’ is the product of ‘development’ — and a direct consequence of colonialism — the peripheries cannot be modernised by unregulated capitalism but through an alteration of its polarising dynamics (Coronil 2008, p. 398). Works such as that of Argentinian economist Raúl Prebisch are foundational to dependency theory, which was further explored by Aníbal Quijano, Theotonio Dos Santos and Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the 1970s.