Feeling and Being at the (Postcolonial) Museum: Presencing the Affective Politics of ‘Race’ and Culture

Abstract

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Rancière and the re-distribution of the sensible: The artist Rosanna Raymond, dissensus and postcolonial sensibilities within the spaces of the museum

“…(Matless, 1997) Aesthetics and the politics of aesthetics are core to the geographical engagements with expressive cultures such as the body of work entitled 'creative geographies' (Hawkins 2013), new art-geography collaborations (Foster and Lorimer, 2007), cartography (Barnes and Duncan, 1992), visual art (Daniels, 1993;Cosgrove, 1984;1985;Cosgrove and Daniels, 1987;Matless, 1998), music (Revill, 2000, theatre (Pratt and Johnson, 2010;Raynor, 2017); visual methodologies and exhibitions (Tolia-16 Kelly, 2010;2016a). Visual cultures are core to the way in which we can examine the geopolitics and aesthetics of a national culture as displayed in a museum, gallery or indeed an artefact.…”

Decolonising museum cultures: An artist and a geographer in collaboration

“…One aspect of the deadening effect of imperial collecting is the scale of collecting, recording, and labelling (Tolia‐Kelly, ). The very mass of materials hoarded evidences a lack of value, respect, and mechanistic practice that diminishes those very cultures that are the object of interest and “scientific” study (Henare, ).…”

“…“Representative” is what they become, without attention paid to their biographical life (Gell, ), the power of their affective presence, or indeed their value to the community from which they came. Collecting dehumanises, deadens, and diminishes the value of artefacts to things, rather than beings, or art, or indeed enlivening ancestral forces (Tolia‐Kelly, ) that are needed for the heritage futures of Pacifika societies (Raymond & Jacobs, ). The naturalised systems of epistemic categorisations and hierarchy of cultures delimit and ultimately “fix,” dehumanise, silence, and reduce cultural expressions of “other” cultures to a place in the Hegelian continuum, outside of modernity:

What concerns me is the way that Hegel uses India as a model of a ‘primitive’ culture and then builds up the whole evolutionary continuum in which the West takes up the most advanced position.

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“…As museums shape our historical memory, any decolonising of the museum space refigures the sovereignty of indigenous knowledge systems; thus the shared museum narrative can be grounded within a postcolonial frame and illustrate clearly the impact of colonialism and its violences, be they physical, political, ideological, and epistemological. The key is to think through history, memory, and heritage as embodied and memorialised expressive cultures beyond the formalised, sanctioned written archives and texts (Tolia‐Kelly, ). Postcolonial and decolonial praxis acknowledges the expression of heritage as intangible, in multitudinous textual forms (Morrison, ), global mediations (Appadurai, ), and through gestures and sounds in circulation (Gilroy, ).…”

Museum spaces and experiences for children – ambiguity and uncertainty in defining the space, the child and the experience

“…Amid zones crudely defined as: Household, Nature and Transition, a huge video installation of a waterfall, over 10 metres wide preceded by light and sound before the visual element, observes the curatorial aims for the provision of multisensory and relatively unexplained experience. The lack of emphasis upon explanation may be judicious, in attempts to avoid presumption around either learning or connection with the past through museum artefacts which is disputed by Bjerregaard (2011, 76) and by Tolia-Kelly (2016). A sensory museology is risky, however, as Wiseman points out, criticisms of this kind of museum experience arise because of departure from the traditional emphasis of the 'real' in museum artefacts.…”