This paper reflects on affect and emotion as they relate to poetics — her/histories — in twenty-first century museums. Using specific examples, it considers the ways in which collections of material culture hold diverse meanings and how ideas are communicated to audiences over time and space but might also be challenged through imaginative activity. Key objects, exhibitions and activities discussed highlight masculinities at work in museums and include the temporary art installations by Yinka Shonibare and Fred Wilson in the Victoria and Albert Museum's (V&A) Norfolk House Music Room in 2007; the portrait in oils of the Jamaican scholar Francis Williams, painted by an anonymous artist around 1745; and a contemporary oral commentary by Benjamin Zephaniah in the V&A British Galleries, which are considered through a feminist lens of poetics.

This ambitious chapter draws on a range of voices to examine what the ethnographic museum is and what it can be for the benefit of diverse audiences around the world. Taking their 2013 publication, Museum and Communities: Curators, Collections: Collaborations as a starting point, the authors critically consider their own work internationally, for example with ICOM (The International Council of Museums) and ICOM Namibia, as well as at everyday level with local communities, such as youth groups in Europe. Against increasing fear of difference, and movements to the right in world politics, they foreground the values of human rights, artist collaborations and the development of feminist pedagogy in museum work. Theoretically, the chapter unpacks the notions of the ‘human’, the ‘cosmopolitan’ and the inextricable relation between theory and practice that can underpin collaborative activities in museums of ethnography/world culture today.

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