“Museums are Investments in Critical Discomfort”

Rethinking gender from the ethnographic museum. Introduction to the special issue

“…As Towle and Morgan (2002) argue, Euro-informed gender theory is itself an imprint of a specific cultural norm: 'if gender is determined by culture elsewhere, then it must be determined by culture at home, too' (487). The challenge then is to work towards a scholarly language that can with what Wayne Modest terms 'critical discomfort' translate across the ever-expanding multiplicities of the varying 'locations of culture' from which we emerge, move, and transform, while accepting that there shall never be a 'right' universal way to write about gender (Modest, 2020) . Given the hybridities and resistances that determine the encounter between and among multiple generations of the colonial with multiple generations of Indigenous 6 communities and defining gender as from a specific location or time, means to a certain extent (far greater than we would want) deploying Western vocabularies, yet constantly reconsidering them, reworking them.…”

Working Through Colonial Collections

“…Working through colonial collections is thus always as much about difficult pasts as it is about difficult presents. As places of 'critical discomfort' (Modest, 2020), ethnological museums mirror in their State of the Collection of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz and particularly of the Ethnological Museum Berlin and the Museum of Pre-and Early History' (Prosinger, Mboro, & Kisalya, 2013).…”

Doing Diversity in Museums and Heritage

“…Museums, as key sites for proclaiming the canon-especially, though not only, of art-are of considerable importance for such moves. Over the twenty years since Pollock's important text, not only has more scholarship been directed towards disciplinary differencing; it has also been taken up by some museums and heritage institutions, albeit more often through strategies of trying to increase the space given to difference rather than more extensive revision of approach and practice (Bayer, Kazeem-Kaminski and Sternfeld 2017;Modest 2020;Reilly 2019). Tony Bennett, a long-time commentator on museums and power, uses the term 'differencing machines ' (2006) to refer to this in-creased tendency of at least some museums to 'refashion' themselves in this way, doing so particularly with reference to 'the promotion of cross-cultural understanding, especially across divisions that have been racialized ' (2006: 46).…”