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Dismantling the Master’s House

Thoughts on Representing Empire and Decolonising Museums and Public
Spaces in Practice An Introduction

John Giblin, Imma Ramos & Nikki Grout

To cite this article: John Giblin, Imma Ramos & Nikki Grout (2019) Dismantling the Master’s
House, Third Text, 33:4-5, 471-486, DOI: 10.1080/09528822.2019.1653065

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1 Audre Lorde, The Master’s
Tools Will Never Dismantle
the Master’s House, Penguin,
London, 2018
2 Annie Coombes, ‘Museums
and the Formation of
National and Cultural
Identity’, in Oxford Art
Journal, vol 11, no 2, 1988,
pp 57–68; Tony Bennett,
‘The Exhibitionary
Complex’, in New
Formations 4, 1988, pp 73–
102; Tim Barringer and Tom
Flynn, Colonisation and the
Object: Empire, Material
Culture and the Museum,
Routledge, London, 1998
3 Robert Aldrich, ‘Colonial
Museums in a Postcolonial
Europe’, in Dominic
Thomas, ed, Museums in
Postcolonial Europe,
Routledge, London, 2010,
pp 12–31
Third Text, 2019
Vol. 33, Nos. 4–5, 471–486, https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2019.1653065
Dismantling the Master’s House
Thoughts on Representing Empire and
Decolonising Museums and
Public Spaces in Practice
An Introduction
John Giblin, Imma Ramos and Nikki Grout
For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
Audre Lorde1
European imperialism was one of the most significant processes that shaped
the modern world. The British Empire was the largest in history, ruling
directly and indirectly over more than one fifth of the world’s population
(around five hundred million people) by the early twentieth century. The
devastating consequences of colonial rule, including the violent extraction
of resources, continue to structure our present global economic order.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, museums emerged as
active tools of empire, showcasing Eurocentric and racialised ideals and nar-
ratives that often reflected the disciplinary logic of the imperial state. Collect-
ing practices abroad were an inherent part of colonialism, and by displaying
these collections under Western classification systems, British museums also
offered a public justification for expansion and imperial rule.2
Alongside monuments, memorials and statues, museums can today
also be viewed as potent, celebratory reminders of colonialism.3 A 2014
YouGov UK survey asked the public how they felt about the British
Empire – fifty-nine per cent said they felt it was ‘something to be proud
of’ and forty-nine per cent thought the ‘countries that were colonised by
© 2019 Third Text

4 Will Dahlgreen, ‘The British
Empire is “something to be
proud of”’, 26 July 2014,
YouGov, https://yougov.co.
uk/topics/politics/articles-
reports/2014/07/26/britain-
proud-its-empire, accessed
27 May 2019
5 Ishaan Tharoor, ‘Brexit and
Britain’s delusions of
empire’, Washington Post,
31 March 2017, https://
www.washingtonpost.com/
news/worldviews/wp/2017/
03/31/brexit-and-britains-
delusions-of-empire/?
platform=hootsuite&utm_
term=.0e6683573109,
accessed 27 May 2019
6 Deana Heath, ‘Why the
curriculum must stop
whitewashing the British
Empire – according to a
historian’, The Independent,
8 November 2018, https://
www.independent.co.uk/life-
style/history/jeremy-corbyn-
british-empire-
whitewashing-national-
curriculum-slave-trade-
colonialism-a8618006.html,
accessed 27 May 2019;
David Wearing, ‘Corbyn’s
right. It’s not as simple as
having “pride” or “shame”
in our history’, The
Guardian, 12 October 2018,
https://www.theguardian.
com/commentisfree/2018/
oct/12/jeremy-corbyn-right-
pride-shame-britain-history-
empire, accessed 27 May
2019; Felwine Sarr and
Bénédicte Savoy, The
Restitution of African
Cultural Heritage: Toward a
New Relational Ethics, Drew
S Burk, trans, November
2018, http://
restitutionreport2018.com/
sarr_savoy_en.pdf, accessed
25 June 2019
7 Felicity Bodenstein and
Camilla Pagan, ‘Decolonising
National Museums of
Ethnography in Europe:
Exposing and Reshaping
Colonial Heritage (2000–
2012)’, in Iain Chambers,
Alessandra De Angelis,
Celeste Ianniciello,
Mariangela Orabona and
Michaela Quadraro, eds, The
Postcolonial Museum: The
Arts of Memory and the
472
Britain are better off for being colonised’.4 The Rhodes Must Fall move-
ment in 2015 exposed the considerable reluctance to confront Britain’s
colonial history by complicit institutions (see Drayton, this issue). Further-
more, a postcolonial nostalgia for when Britain ruled the waves has sha-
dowed Brexit debates since the 2016 referendum, with government
officials speaking of an ‘Empire 2.0’ consisting of new trade deals with
Commonwealth countries.5 On the other hand, politicians including
Jeremy Corbyn and Emmanuel Macron have made attempts to engage
with imperial histories, with Corbyn insisting on the inclusion of the
‘role and legacy of the British Empire, colonisation and slavery’ in the
school curriculum and Macron commissioning the Restitution of
African Cultural Heritage report.6 Thus, we inhabit a paradox in which
there is a popular resurgence of colonial fantasy alongside the desire to
confront it.
The British Museum’s Global, Local and Imperial Histories Research
Group, co-ordinated by Giblin and Ramos between 2016 and 2018,
was formed to discuss ambitions to explore and display the last three
hundred years of global history through the Museum’s collections. Specifi-
cally, and according to one of the Museum’s identified research challenges,
this would look at how we planned to develop object-centred approaches
to enable the Museum to communicate global and local histories in the
context of shifting structures of political and cultural power, including
imperial, postcolonial and neo-colonial narratives. The idea that Euro-
pean museums need to decolonise has been debated for over two
decades,7 but the pressure to do so has recently intensified. Decolonisation
is now an ever-present part of museum debates and is increasingly a part
of museum action plans.8 The current momentum driving decolonisation
is entangled with a resurgence in efforts to repatriate colonial-era objects
in European museums to communities of origin.9 It is also part of a wider
trend among European cultural and public institutions, in parallel with the
public themselves, to be more willing to critically engage with colonial his-
tories. This article locates ‘Exhibiting the Experience of Empire’ within
this decolonial framing.
In the abstract, decolonising the museum concerns the proactive identi-
fication, interrogation, deconstruction and replacement of hierarchies of
power that replicate colonial structures.10 In this way, museum decoloni-
sation is active, radical and potentially all-encompassing, having the scope
to include almost any aspect of museum work, from recruitment to rep-
resentation, audience engagement to repatriation, acquisitions to architec-
ture, design to labelling, conservation to storage, and so on.11 Museum
decolonisation is open to multiple interpretations, from the sharing of col-
lections via long-term loans or repatriation to the challenging of curator-
ial, directorial, scientific, and other forms of established expertise to
empower previously excluded voices and generate conversation and
debate.12 However, in contrast to its potential reach, it is harder to
define what decolonising should involve in museum praxis, and there is
no consensus across the museum sector.
Instead, over the past twenty years, museums have selectively engaged
in a range of more manageable options that are now being concentrated
and co-ordinated under the banner of decolonisation. Prominent among
these options are the introduction of more critical object-centred represen-
tations of European empires.13 This special issue is based on two events
473
Pressures of History, Ashgate,
Farnham, 2014, p 42
8 Elisa Schoenberger, ‘What
does it mean to decolonize a
museum?’ MuseumNext,
February 2019, https://www.
museumnext.com/2019/02/
what-does-it-mean-to-
decolonize-a-museum/,
accessed 7 July 2019
9 Bénédicte Savoy, ‘The
Restitution Revolution
Begins’, The Art Newspaper,
16 February 2018, https://
www.theartnewspaper.com/
comment/the-restitution-
revolution-begins, accessed
25 June 2019; Thomas
Marks, ‘Rethinking the
Restitution of African
Artefacts’, Apollo, 2 January
2019, https://www.apollo-
magazine.com/rethinking-
restitution-african-heritage/,
accessed 7 July 2019
10 Amy Lonetree, ‘Museums
as Sites of Decolonization:
Truth Telling in National
and Tribal Museums’, in
Contesting Knowledge:
Museums and Indigenous
Perspectives, Susan Sleeper-
Smith, ed, University of
Nebraska Press, Lincoln,
Nebraska, 2009, pp 322–
337
11 On conservation issues see
Miriam Clavir, ‘Preserving
the Physical Object in
Changing Cultural
Contexts’, in Annie
Coombes and Ruth Phillips,
eds, The International
Handbooks of Museum
Studies, volume 4: Museum
Transformations, Wiley-
Blackwell, Oxford, 2015,
pp 387–412
12 Annie Coombes and Ruth
Phillips, ‘Introduction:
Museums in
Transformation: Dynamics
of Democratization and
Decolonisation’, in
Coombes and Phillips, eds,
The International
Handbooks of Museum
Studies, op cit, pp xxi–xxiii
13 For example, see Mary
Bouquet, ‘Reactivating the
Colonial Collection:
Exhibition-Making as
Creative Process at the
Tropenmuseum,
Amsterdam’, in Coombes
that explored this topic. One of the GLIH group’s identified challenges
was to consider object approaches to experiences of empire, and
another was to consider what objects and narratives should be prioritised
in any future gallery of the modern world. Since the British Empire shaped
the history of the Museum (and indeed the British Museum in turn shaped
the history of the British Empire), it was felt that this would be a suitable
focus for a one-day symposium, ‘Exhibiting the Experience of Empire’,
held at the Museum on 13 March 2018. The event brought external
invited academics, writers, and museum professionals into an interdisci-
plinary discussion with British Museum staff to explore how experiences
of European imperialism, with a focus on the British Empire, might be
researched and exhibited through objects.14 We asked twenty speakers
to explore the ways in which we can turn colonial objects on their
heads, recontextualise them, and interrogate the stories they reveal as
well as conceal. The participants approached the subject from a range
of object-centred angles, from the need to emphasise alternative perspec-
tives on empire to transparent approaches to collecting histories.
The symposium took place to coincide with an Asahi Shimbun Room
3 display exploring the global impact of the Haitian Revolution and
Toussaint Louverture (considered by many the original moment of deco-
lonisation), curated by Esther Chadwick (see Chadwick in this issue) and
co-ordinated by Ramos, featuring a commission by Gina Athena Ulysse
(see Ulysse in this issue). Wayne Modest, the Head of the Research
Centre at the Tropenmuseum, gave the keynote lecture. He questioned
whether, as a museum, we were inherently implicated in a process of
creating nostalgia. He asked whether curatorial practice could ever be
radical and about the role of intervention and constructive disobedience
in museum settings. An important message from the talk was that we
must, quote, ‘learn from being uncomfortable’. This was in the context
of a project that Modest had organised in 2015 called ‘Decolonise the
Museum’, which invited young people from Amsterdam to critique
and rewrite museum text, actively inviting discomfort into the space.
He admitted that he was nervous about this initiative but argued that
the public now trusts the museum more as a result. Papers and panels
throughout the day explored the importance of placing the voices and
experiences of those under colonial rule at the forefront of museum nar-
ratives on the modern world. The possibilities of more progressive
museum practices were discussed as well as issues around provenance
and restitution.
The second event was a panel, ‘Representing “Modern”, Global, Local
and Imperial Histories in Object-Centred Museums’, which was held at
the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Conference, ‘Art, Materiality, and
Representation’, at SOAS and the British Museum, 1–3 June 2018. This
panel asked its participants to think about how museums can explore
the last 300 years of global history through their collections. Papers con-
sidered a broad range of topics relating to the British Museum’s or other
institutions’ collections, including, but not restricted to: curatorial engage-
ment with the history of European empires and decolonisation; colonial
collecting and how this is addressed across permanent displays; the role
of contemporary art in mediating between the present and recent histories;
theorisations and deconstructions of the modern in history museums;
ethical issues of representing the recent past, and ‘modern’ imperial,

and Phillips, eds, The
International Handbooks
of Museum Studies, op cit,
pp 133–155
14 Around fifty British
Museum members of staff
attended, along with
museum colleagues from
the V&A, Royal Maritime
Museum, the National
Archive, the Wellcome
Collection, Science
Museum, Museum of
London, Royal Collection
Trust, Pitt Rivers,
Birmingham, Bristol and
Brighton Museums, and
university colleagues from
UCL, SOAS, Queen Mary,
Goldsmiths, KCL, the Paul
Mellon Centre, Oxford and
Cambridge.
15 For example, see Annie
Coombes, Reinventing
Africa: Museums, Material
Culture and Popular
Imagination in Late
Victorian and Edwardian
England, Yale University
Press, New Haven,
Connecticut, 1994; Mark
Crinson, ‘Imperial Story-
lands: Architecture and
Display at the Imperial and
Commonwealth Institutes’,
in Art History, vol 22, no 1,
1999, pp 99–158; Tony
Bennett, Fiona Cameron,
Nelia Dias, Ben Dibley,
Rodney Harrison, Ira
Jacknis, Conal McCarthy,
‘Collecting, Ordering,
Governing’, in Collecting,
Ordering, Governing:
Anthropology, Museums,
and Liberal Government,
Duke University Press,
Durham, North Carolina,
2017, pp 9–50
16 Daniel Sherman, ‘“Peoples
Ethnographic”: Objects,
Museums, and the Colonial
Inheritance of French
Ethnology’, in French
Historical Studies, vol 27,
no 3, 2004, pp 669–703;
Henrietta Lidchi, ‘The
Poetics and the Politics of
Exhibiting Other Cultures’,
in Stuart Hall, ed,
Representation: Cultural
Representation and
Signifying Practices, Sage,
London, 1997, pp 151–222
17 Imma Ramos, ‘From Tipu
to Ambedkar: Retelling the
story of South Asia at the
474
global, or local stories that should feature in a gallery of the modern
world.
European empires have been represented implicitly and explicitly
throughout the existence of museums, for example through the object
legacies of early explorers, the spoils of colonial wars, the collections of
scientific expeditions and religious missions, the ethno-racial terminolo-
gies and categorisations used, and in the grand architecture of the build-
ings themselves.15 However, concurrently, explicit, critically reflective
narratives about colonialism, colonial collecting and colonial legacies
have been conspicuously absent. Instead, with few exceptions, critical
histories of empire have been marginalised in favour of celebratory
narratives, art-historical perspectives, or de-historicised ethnographic
descriptions.16
In the UK, the British Museum is presented as the ‘museum of the
world for the world’ with galleries that describe global art and cultural his-
tories, but it is also a museum that is itself intimately entwined with its
imperial past and which is currently missing a colonial interpretative nar-
rative. However, this situation is changing. Two major temporary exhibi-
tions, ‘Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation’ (2015) and ‘South
Africa: the Art of a Nation’ (2016), experimented with more critical colo-
nial narratives (see Frost in this issue), and similar approaches are being
introduced into new permanent galleries. For example, displays dedicated
to colonial and postcolonial South Asian history were included in the new
South Asia gallery, which opened in 2017 to coincide with the seventieth
anniversary of Indian independence, and the emergence of India and Paki-
stan as independent nation states.17
The question of how to implement some of the symposium and panel
ideas in a practical way via display strategies is one that has continued to
be actively explored at the Museum. Frost and Ramos proposed a small
temporary Asahi Shimbun Room 3 exhibition (June 2019) that was devel-
oped collaboratively with curatorial staff across a number of different
departments, and the interpretation team. The main display introduced
Solomon Islands, a former British colony, through five artefacts and a
selection of historical photographs that illustrated the kinds of colonial
relationships through which objects left Solomon Islands and came to
be in the Museum’s collection, ranging from looting by Royal Navy
ships’ crews, to gifts and items purchased by colonial agents, including
missionaries, government officials and commercial business owners. The
display, a tightly focused case study of colonial collecting curated by
Ben Burt (curator of the Oceania collections) with Frost, introduced visi-
tors to themes that were further explored in a trail around the permanent
galleries to learn about the collecting histories of other objects from Africa,
Asia, North America and Oceania, which also provided glimpses into the
history of the British Empire. The intention was to provide a series of inter-
ventions that would encourage a wide international audience, including
British visitors, to reflect upon the history of the Museum’s collection,
within the broader history of colonialism. The display and trail will be
evaluated by the interpretation team to inform future projects.
By contrast, elsewhere in Europe the approach has been more exten-
sive. In Austria in 2018, the Welt Museum Wien (World Museum,
Vienna, previously the Museum of Ethnography) reopened, having radi-
cally redisplayed its entire museum as a history of colonial encounter, fore-
475
British Museum’, Arts of
Asia, vol 47, no 6, 2017, pp
92–101
18 Dipesh Chakrabarty,
Provincializing Europe:
Postcolonial Thought and
Historical Difference,
Princeton University Press,
Princeton, New Jersey,
2000
grounding colonial collecting histories, histories of empire, and postcolo-
nial legacies and politics. In addition, in Belgium in 2018, the Africa
Museum, Tervuren (previously the Royal Central African Museum), reo-
pened having undergone a complete refurbishment with the express inten-
tion of transforming it from an implicitly colonial to an explicitly
decolonial museum.
It is in this context, of greater museum engagement with colonial his-
tories, that we organised the events that are discussed and examined in
this special issue. Both asked a basic two-part question: how are
museums and other public spaces using objects, images, materials and
words to represent empire today, and how might they do so in the
future in ways that provincialise Europe and foreground multi-vocal,
affective experiences of empire, including traumatic histories and the
recovery of instances of cultural erasure, in contrast to narratives that
reproduce narrow official histories?18 We invited a range of external cur-
atorial and university voices and internal British Museum ones to respond
with case-study examples, which have been developed for publication
here.
To introduce the themes and issues that run throughout this volume,
this article expands on two of the examples cited above that were
curated by two of us: ‘South Africa: the Art of a Nation’ (Giblin); and
the new colonial and postcolonial South Asia displays in the South Asia
gallery (Ramos). This introduction concludes with a discussion of these
themes in relation to the articles in this issue.
South Africa: the Art of a Nation
From October 2016 to February 2017, the British Museum presented a
major temporary exhibition, ‘South Africa: the Art of a Nation’. This
was only the second major sub-Saharan exhibition to take place at the
British Museum since what was then the ethnography department,
located at the Museum of Mankind, moved to the main Bloomsbury
site in 1997, the first exhibition being the ‘Kingdom of Ife’ (curated by
Julie Hudson in 2010). In addition, this was the first exhibition to use pri-
marily British Museum collections, the ‘Kingdom of Ife’ having been
mostly based on loans from Nigeria.
Intentions and Actions
The exhibition told a long chronological story of South Africa through art-
works, from the earliest examples of symbolic thought to contemporary
post-apartheid art. In every section, historical or archaeological artworks
were paired with contemporary ones and with artist quotes to explore the
political relevance of each period to South Africa today. This approach
introduced contemporary artistic experiences as reflections on empire
and apartheid, in contrast to the missing voices of the early artists in the
exhibition, which were never recorded. Following this logic, themes of
colonial and apartheid racial segregation, violence, and denial of Indigen-
ous cultural accomplishments emerged in each section. This was pro-
nounced in the periods that covered the arrival of Europeans in
 476

southern Africa, colonial conflicts, and apartheid and post-apartheid

South Africa, but was also present in earlier periods where contemporary
artistic commentary highlighted the denial or cultural destruction of those
pasts under colonialism and apartheid.
Presenting this narrative at the British Museum was in many ways
curatorially uncomfortable. Much of the British Museum’s southern
African collection was collected in the colonial period during colonial
conflicts. In addition, three, white, non-South African curators attempt-
ing to tell a decolonial narrative of colonial and apartheid racial segre-
gation, violence and denial was highly presumptuous. Furthermore,
the intention to highlight how these issues were rooted in British colonial
involvement in what became South Africa conflicted with more comfor-
table and popular British beliefs that racial segregation in South Africa
was solely the product of white Afrikaner nationalism in the mid-twen-
tieth century. Consequently, this became a key concern of the exhibition:
to confront a largely white British audience with uncomfortable histories
of empire in southern Africa that are rarely engaged with in the UK. One
example was the use of racially segregated concentration camps in the
Second South African War, in which many thousands died. This event
was illustrated by two objects, a plate decorated by a Miss Hamelburg,
an Afrikaner Boer, when she was imprisoned in a white concentration
camp, and a photograph of an unnamed black South African woman
taken in Camp Irene, explicitly challenging the notion that this was a
‘white man’s war’. Indeed, the curatorial team decided not to adopt an
ostensibly neutral position and instead consciously took a political pos-
ition that colonialism and apartheid were not just historical facts but
were a shameful legacy, and the choice of objects and interpretation
reflected the curatorial positionality. As cited by Frost (this issue), pre-
senting uncomfortable experiences of empire is vital given that a
YouGov survey from 2014 indicated that the British public views the
history of the British Empire positively, with around fifty-nine per cent
feeling that it is something to be proud of, with only nineteen per cent
feeling that it is something to be ashamed of, and the remainder being
ambivalent.
The original brief, as articulated by the then director of the British
Museum, Neil McGregor, was to develop and deliver an exhibition
within two years that included: African art, at a geographically regional
rather than national scale, and was ‘a British Museum exhibition’, that
is, requiring a big historical idea. In response, the curatorial team rejected
the regional steer and selected a nation with a prominent art history, South
Africa, and confined the narrative to modern national borders, even when
that was anachronistic. The national approach was adopted as a challenge
to the more common regional one in museums, which implicitly questions
the cultural authenticity of African nations because their borders were
largely colonial creations that were maintained after independence. The
regional approach is problematic because it denies the lived experience
of these borders since their introduction, and separates contemporary geo-
political realities from the past. This can be considered a double bind, and
a denial of the experience of empire, because European countries imposed
borders but subsequently reject them in museum representations as cultu-
rally inauthentic. In response, the title of the exhibition, ‘South Africa: the
Art of a Nation’, referred to the way in which post-apartheid South Africa
477
19 Morris Hargreaves
McIntyre, A Country’s Soul
Laid Bare. A Summative
Evaluation of South Africa:
The Art of a Nation at the
British Museum,
unpublished report,
Manchester, March 2017
was transforming from a country with many nations, as presented under
apartheid, into a single unified nation.
The use of the term ‘art’ was also a challenging aspect of the brief,
because as a concept and practice it arrived in southern Africa with
empire, and has been wrongly applied to some African cultural heritage,
which has latterly been collected, traded and exhibited as art in
museums. However, this is again a double bind because, although it recog-
nises the difference between the art industry and other forms of object pro-
duction, it denies Africa a pre-colonial art history, despite the rich heritage
to the contrary, seen most famously in South Africa in its rock art. In
response, the exhibition employed an inclusive definition of art, which
included any objects that went beyond the utilitarian and held symbolic
meaning. To emphasise this point, the exhibition followed established
museum practice in South Africa, and broke with British Museum label-
ling norms, by referring to all makers as artists even when the makers’
names were not recorded, thus: ‘Name(s) of artist(s) unrecorded’. This
was common for most of the non-European-made works before the twen-
tieth century and helped to highlight the absence of these individual voices
and their experience in the exhibition. Similarly, to recognise the colonial-
ities of labelling practices, and the way in which fluid cultural identities
have been made static and ascribed to objects in the past, cultural attribu-
tions were only designated by the prefix ‘Recorded as’, rather than as
being definitively produced by a particular cultural constituency, for
example ‘Recorded as Zulu’ or ‘Recorded as Xhosa’, rather than ‘Zulu’
or ‘Xhosa’. Finally, a decision was also made to include only artworks
that spoke to sociopolitical historical moments, which meant that some
of South Africa’s most famous and most expensive artists, such as Irma
Stern and Marlene Dumas, were not included.
Reception and Reflection
The British Museum commissioned Morris Hargreaves McIntyre (2017)
to ascertain who attended the exhibition, their motivations, their overall
experience, and the outcome of their visit.19 The information extracted
here focuses on the reception of the political, postcolonial nature of the
exhibition and its engagement with experiences of empire. The summative
evaluation considered the responses of 442 visitors out of a total of
approximately 60,000 people who visited the exhibition. Of these,
eighty-one per cent were from the UK, three per cent were South
African, and eleven per cent of visits were made by people that identified
as black, Asian or minority ethnicity, whether from the UK or overseas.
This supported the curatorial assumption that most visitors would be
white and British.
According to the summative evaluation, ‘the exhibition challenged
many visitors’ perspectives of British and European involvement in
South Africa, and educated many about the history of apartheid’,
which was one of the exhibitions state objectives: ‘I came away with a
better understanding of the cultural differences, and struggles of a con-
tinent.’ The evaluation highlighted how some visitors were shocked and
saddened by the treatment of South Africans at the hands of the British
and how the exhibition pushed many people to question their under-

20 Although partly a response
to the strengths of the
collection, these
chronological, material and
religious limitations were
also due to a particular set
of restrictions, including the
inability to exhibit fragile
works, such as paintings, in
daylight conditions. The
plan for the redevelopment
was to display, for the first
time, light-sensitive
material on a rotating basis.
21 Audrey Truschke, ‘The
great Mughal whitewash’,
India Today, 10 March
2016, https://www.
indiatoday.in/magazine/up-
front/story/20160321-the-
great-mughal-whitewash-
audrey-truschke-south-
asian-history-828594-
2016-03-10, accessed 27
May 2019; Sudipta Sen,
‘Tampering with history’,
The Conversation, 20 May
2019, http://
theconversation.com/
tampering-with-history-
how-indias-ruling-party-is-
erasing-the-muslim-
heritage-of-the-nations-
cities-116160, accessed 27
May 2019
478
standing of colonial history, another objective: ‘I feel ashamed about
British and European colonialism.’ ‘I was horrified to hear about the
concentration camps the British created during the Boer War and the
categorising of people according to their colour during the Apartheid
era – I was aware of this before but it really hit home.’ ‘I came away
with the terrible history of colonialisation [sic] and hope and resilience
of art and spirit of people.’ The exhibition also taught visitors about the
history of apartheid, which apparently not all of them had fully grasped:
‘I wish that I had been taught the history of the apartheid at school and
was shocked by how recently it stopped.’ ‘Apartheid was worse than I
imagined.’ Others made connections to contemporary political events:
‘It had particular resonance for me with the rise of race attacks in the
UK following Brexit.’ ‘Currently we are entering a troubled era, yet
again defined by hatred against the OTHER.’ (Original emphasis).
However, for some visitors the exhibition was too political and was dis-
missive of the contribution of Europeans to South Africa: ‘The exhibi-
tion had a highly biased narrative designed to support a simplistic
thesis that European involvement in South Africa was uniformly nega-
tive [particularly British]. It also attempted to present a thesis of a thriv-
ing pre-colonial South African culture based on scant artistic evidence. I
believe this exhibition crossed the line between interpretation and bias.’
And: ‘Stop wittering on like Post-Colonial Studies undergraduates;
clear, detailed, historically accurate signage is sufficient for an intelli-
gent audience to understand the issues of racism, war and apartheid.
Stick to facts: stop moralising.’ Although most visitors reported
feeling satisfied with the exhibition and having had a positive visit,
clearly for some this version of empire was not what they had experi-
enced before or had expected to experience at the British Museum.
Curating Modern South Asia at
the British Museum
In November 2017, the British Museum opened the new South Asia
gallery, with displays dedicated to the colonial and postcolonial periods
of South Asian history. Since 1992 the emphasis of the gallery had
rested on the religious sculpture of the medieval period, with a limited
focus on Hindu, Buddhist and Jain works.20 The new narrative, which
is now chronological and geographic with an emphasis on cultural
history and cross-cultural exchange, has changed significantly. It takes
the gallery right up to the early modern and contemporary periods with
displays dedicated to the Indo-Islamic cultures of the Sultanates and
Mughals as well as displays on colonial encounter, exploring histories
of South Asia and Britain. At a time when Indian history books are
being rewritten to erase the subcontinent’s composite Indo-Islamic heri-
tage, and the British Empire remains a source of national pride, it is
vital that clear, engaging and accessible research is carried out and pro-
moted on this often-misunderstood period of South Asian history.21 Con-
cluding the display with examples of twentieth- and twenty-first-century
material allowed the inclusion of responses by artists to colonial and post-
colonial debates and experiences.
479
22 A stereotype recently
perpetuated by the British
Conservative MP, Jacob
Rees-Mogg: ‘Thuggee is a
religious cult around the
goddess Kali that murders
travellers’, talkRADIO, 3
June 2019, https://www.
youtube.com/watch?v=
FyVuhNtKfRA, accessed 7
July 2019
23 Emelyne Godfrey,
Masculinity, Crime and
Self-Defence in Victorian
Literature, Springer,
New York, 2010, p 27
24 In March 2018, the
Museum acknowledged the
links between its founder,
Hans Sloane, slavery and
Jamaica on its webpage
dedicated to the Museum’s
history: http://www.
britishmuseum.org/about_
us/the_museums_story/
general_history/sir_hans_
sloane.aspx, accessed 7 July
2019. This was written with
input from James
Delbourgo, Collecting the
World: The Life and
Curiosity of Hans Sloane,
Penguin, London, 2017.
Displaying the last few centuries of South Asian history via objects
feeds into the Museum’s wider ambitions to exhibit the last 300 years of
global history across the galleries. How can we critically engage with
the imperial past via a collection largely accumulated by colonial officials?
And how can we do this with objects generally? There is a need for insti-
tutional self-reflexivity, critical distance, and an acknowledgement of
empire as the context for many of the Museum’s permanent displays.
The approach has been two-pronged – collecting histories have been
addressed throughout the gallery, and in the colonial section South
Asian voices and agency have been emphasised.
Actively decentring Eurocentric paradigms was central to a reconstruc-
tion of the period. Examining South Asian interpretations of the British,
for example, whether through courtly Indian paintings that exoticise the
otherness of Europeans, Lala Deen Dayal’s photographic portraits of colo-
nial officials hunting tigers, or censored lithographs of a goddess wearing a
necklace of suspiciously British-looking decapitated heads, turned the
‘gaze’ back on itself. Interrogating not only the surface implications of
objects but also what they conceal beneath was crucial to their re-anima-
tion. An elaborate silver teapot is a window into the tea industry, one of
the early drivers for early British activity in India, while a convict’s identity
tag from a colonial prison introduces a narrative about the political pris-
oners deported there after the Great Rebellion of 1857.
Transparently highlighting the ways in which certain objects were col-
lected, displayed and interpreted by the British Museum to project the
‘idea’ of India can yield thought-provoking results. A nineteenth-century
model (part of a set of four) portraying Indian bandits strangling and
robbing their victims, commissioned by a British railway owner, reflects
a colonial stereotype. Although banditry occurred because of economic
instability, worsened by colonial taxation policies, the British sensationa-
lised ‘Thugs’ as an ancient cult of stranglers, enabling them to impose stric-
ter controls over the local population.22 The models were displayed in the
British Museum after they were acquired, and in 1857 the chaplain of
Newgate Prison made a complaint about them in The Times. He felt
they were corrupting British audiences and inspiring young men to
commit crimes around London: ‘I have often thought, and still think,
that the origin of garotte robberies took place from the exhibition of the
way the Thugs in India strangle and plunder passengers, as exhibited in
the British Museum.’23 Reflecting on these models today allows us to
identify the colonial anxieties that fed into these kinds of representations,
and to acknowledge the Museum’s role in reinforcing an image of India as
violent and irrational. Addressing uncomfortable institutional histories is
a crucial step towards any attempt at decolonising from within.24
Exploring how far modest personal belongings or vernacular art forms
might reinforce or challenge historical and contemporary projections and
understandings of the period also fed into initial object selections. Objects
were chosen not based solely on their aesthetic qualities but on the potent
stories behind them, to evoke complex histories of conflict, struggle and
solidarity. This was also raised when curators from the National
Museum in Delhi and the CSMVS Museum in Mumbai took part in the
British Museum’s 2016 International Training Programme. During con-
versations emerging out of a workshop focusing on how the Museum
should display the last 300 years of global history through objects
 480

across the collections, our colleagues stressed the need to challenge

museum hierarchies of ‘elite’ versus ‘popular’ objects, from fine art and
royally patronised sculpture to so-called ethnographic material and ephe-
mera. In response, narrative-driven objects were highlighted in the gallery
regardless of their perceived value, placing the ‘high’ and ‘low’ on the same
footing. An almost two-metre-tall shadow puppet representing Mohandas
Karamchand Gandhi, once used in performances about his life, introduced
a display focusing on stories of activism during the independence move-
ment. Since figures such as Gandhi are familiar to visitors, it was also
important to include representations of more marginalised but no less
important twentieth-century icons of the period, such as Bhimrao Ramji
Ambedkar, who fought for the emancipation of Dalits, a stigmatised
group excluded from the Hindu caste system.
The value of sharing interpretive power and engaging in dialogue with
colleagues beyond the museum walls to dissolve the singular curatorial
voice is paramount. In the final section of the gallery we included stories
relating to the South Asian diaspora, some of which came out of work-
shops organised by the Museum’s community partnerships team, with
representatives from different groups around London, including SOAS’s
South Asian Diaspora Society. Participants were asked to share ideas
about objects that we could display in order to tell stories about the
London-based diaspora. This led to the inclusion of narratives centring
on Dadabhai Naoroji, Britain’s first Indian MP; Sophia Duleep Singh, a
leading suffragette; and Noor Inayat Khan, a secret agent for the British
during World War II. Where the Museum’s collection did not include
objects that could articulate these stories, loans played a key role, from
Inayat Khan’s George Cross and Duleep Singh’s golden sari, to Naoroji’s
election gift of a carved box from Mumbai. Highlighting the trajectories of
these twentieth-century figures enabled us to illustrate how Indian and
British activists struggled together to implement their emancipatory ideals.
Contemporary art mediates between the present and recent past in the
gallery. Satish Gujral’s 1980s reprint of a painting he made in 1949
(Mourning), capturing the devastating consequences of Partition, which
he lived through, speaks to its enduring legacy, with the creation of
borders along predominantly religious lines with no agreed settlement
over the future of Kashmir still violently playing out today. A 2008 instal-
lation by Naeem Mohaiemen, entitled Kazi in Noman’s Land, uses com-
memorative stamps of the revolutionary poet Kazi Nazrul Islam from
India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, to reflect on the artificial nature of
borders. Claimed by all three nations, Nazrul’s verses transcend territorial
boundaries in their celebration of humanity against oppressive authority
and their promotion of Hindu-Muslim fraternity.
Today it is widely recognised that museums do not constitute a neutral
space. The act of selecting and displaying objects is a subjective decision. A
history of colonial India cannot be and should not be confined to the range
of objects in the display cases alone, many of which were often subjectively
collected according to predominantly nineteenth-century British tastes, by
individuals who had a distortive view of South Asian culture – either a
connoisseur’s approach, or an ethnographic one, for example. Narrating
histories of empire can be a challenge because our colonial-period material
was not originally assembled to educate the public about the realities of
imperialism with any kind of self-reflective and critical distance, but to
481

either glorify and justify colonial rule, for private pleasure, to romanticise
India, or as a form of trophy. If the archive therefore reflects the interests
of the colonial state, it becomes necessary to reinterpret objects and (re)
frame them in a critical context. While in the past the Museum attempted
to provide a conclusive overview of non-Western cultures based on static
and objectifying Western classification systems, now it is necessary to
abandon attempts at assumed neutrality and deliberately subjectify them
by presenting fragmented, kaleidoscopic and multi-vocal views. We
must also be vigilant of a hegemonic statist register that seeks to
promote official commemorative histories of South Asia at the expense
of the richer multiplicity of subaltern voices. In India, for example, the
voice of Hindutva (‘Hindu-ness’) – a Hindu nationalist ideology tending
towards cultural exclusion that, over recent decades, has grown in
force – encourages the supremacy of a single, monolithic Hindu-ness
to the detriment of other traditions and cultures within and outside
Hinduism. Displays dedicated to modern South Asian history should
feel uncomfortable not only to those refusing to reckon with the realities
of the colonial past but also to those wishing to impose a singular voice
of authority serving the interests of the state.
The British Museum’s South Asia collections can yield many stories
and there will be opportunities to revise, correct and expand them over
time, inviting feedback and active re-scripting from beyond the
Museum. Opening the collections as a resource for schools to improve
teaching on colonial history, and for community groups, artists, histor-
ians, activists and filmmakers to interact and respond to a living
archive, will allow us to generate a more nuanced picture of the British
Empire beyond the textbooks. It will also allow us to reimagine, in creative
and emancipatory ways, those histories obscured by the same archive.

Contributions to this Special Issue

From the South Africa and South Asia examples emerge overlapping deco-
lonial themes that are common to exhibiting the experience of European
colonial empires, including the need for: 1) curatorial and audience dis-
comfort; 2) inclusion of silenced voices and histories; 3) political curatorial
positioning to decentre European paradigms and expose and challenge
colonially created subjectivities; and 4) the transparent representation of
colonial collecting and display histories. These themes are woven through-
out the articles in this special issue, and other themes not in the case studies
above also emerge, for example how different forms of knowledge cre-
ation through performance and intervention are being mobilised for this
work (as opposed to more traditional object-centred exhibitions, or
‘indexical forms of display’ and ‘anonymous authoritative discourse’:
see Binter in this issue). In addition, the articles relate to three different
display modes: temporary exhibitions (Frost, Chadwick, Ulysse, Patel,
Minott, Binter, Elliott and Odumosu), permanent galleries (von Zinnen-
burg Carroll), and external, non-museum, spaces (Drayton), which all
present different opportunities and challenges, but also share many com-
monalities.
In terms of audience discomfort, through his analysis of two major
temporary exhibitions, ‘Indigenous Australia: Enduring Civilisation’ and
 482

‘South Africa: the Art of a Nation’, Frost reports on research commis-

sioned by the British Museum into audience perceptions of how the
British Empire is represented and received. Frost highlights how, until
recently, and in the absence of strong and critical narratives of empire in
the British Museum, audiences associated the collection primarily with
looting, despite its having been assembled in a myriad of ways, an associ-
ation which is a barrier to more varied engagement. Frost also points to
the small but significant number of visitors to these exhibitions who felt
discomfort with the political nature of their interpretation, including criti-
cal reflections on empire. Frost tentatively links this discomfort to the
census results, cited elsewhere in this introduction, which suggest that
most of the British public still view the British Empire positively. In
response, Frost suggests that temporary exhibitions may act as necessary
experimental spaces through which new approaches to empire in the
museum may be approached.
Chadwick also explores the challenge of representing empire at the
British Museum, where any staging of ‘radical history’ might be expected
to be ‘doomed to reinscription by the nature of the very platform’. Chad-
wick does this through her self-critique of a small temporary British
Museum exhibition that she curated, ‘A Revolutionary Legacy: Haiti
and Toussaint Louverture’. Chadwick contexualises her exhibition
within three decolonising events, one that happened within the British
Museum and was directly connected to her exhibition, and two that hap-
pened outside and were unconnected. The event inside the museum was
Gina Athena Ulysse’s artistic response to her exhibition (see Ulysse in
this issue). The external events included night-time projections of images
relating to Haiti across London landmarks with connections to Britain’s
imperial past, a project completed by students at Goldsmiths University
(see cover image), and an activist occupation of a building adjacent to
and owned by the British Museum. The implication of Chadwick’s analy-
sis is that the British Museum, and other similar institutions, can only
move conversations around exhibiting the experience of empire forward
by engaging with the wider context of decolonisation beyond its walls,
to excavate and listen to the missing voices and histories of empire that
it seeks to represent.
The British Museum commissioned Ulysse to perform a spoken-word
piece, ‘Skin Castles’, for the ‘A Revolutionary Legacy’ display. In her
article, Ulysse, an artist and anthropologist, offers a critical response to
her incorporation of affective and embodied interventions in retelling
experiences of entangled histories. Ulysse’s article is a poetic performance/
talk hybrid, which draws on archival and oral history, poetry and personal
narrative, and offers us the idea of a rasanblaj as a response to legacies of
empire, which in Haitian Kreyòl means an ‘assembly, compilation, enlist-
ing, regrouping of ideas things, people, spirits’. As Ulysse explains, while
she has nothing new to say that has not been said before by people in the
black diaspora, what she offers is a remix, a reconfiguring of perspectives
on coloniality. Drawing on Robyn Autry’s concept of the ‘museumification
of memory’, Ulysse uses her performance to explore, challenge and unsettle
the ‘entangled historical foundation of museums… as public institutions
and seats of empire… in the re-production of collective memories’. In so
doing, we are again challenged to find silenced voices, to decentre and
subvert European paradigms, and to seek discomfort.
483

Performance as intervention, disruption and subversion is also the

background for von Zinnenburg Carroll’s article. Like Ulysse, von Zin-
nenburg Carroll uses a commissioned performance, Cook’s New
Clothes, to provide an external perspective on, and engagement with,
the National Maritime Museum’s ‘Endeavour Galleries project’ and new
permanent Pacific Gallery. Employing her concept of museopiracy,
defined as ‘a way of working with museum collections as an outsider to
the institution’, a ‘therapeutic piracy’, a form of institutional critique
through disobedience that seeks to ‘take the vessel itself [the museum]
not just the artefact’, von Zinnenburg Carroll describes how her project
worked with, and at times against, the museum to create an internal
and external performance that subverted the official narrative. Her
account highlights the institutional, managerial and curatorial discomfort
felt when once silenced external voices are given access, power, visibility
and voice in narratives of empire. To decentre European paradigms, von
Zinnenburg Carroll advocates museopiracy as ‘a turn to transparency,
movement, performance and experimentation, historical redressing,
mourning, healing laughter, and embarrassment about empire’.
Minott also discusses the potentials and limitations of museum
inclusion of once silenced voices through her curatorial involvement in a
temporary exhibition at the Birmingham Museum, ‘The Past is Now: Bir-
mingham and the British Empire’. The exhibition was co-curated with six
activists who were ostensibly enabled to make decisions on all aspects of
the exhibition, including the story selection, object choices, interpretation
and events. These, as Minott describes them, ‘disruptively inclined’ indi-
viduals, challenged the museum on any action viewed as supportive of
the colonial power structures and hierarchies embedded within the insti-
tution. In recent years, ‘The Past is Now’ has become the poster child
for decolonial museum projects in the UK. However, Minott critiques
the project from her perspective as a temporary curator working on the
show, as well as from the perspectives of the activists who also occupied
temporary, uncomfortable positions, since they were not quite volunteers
nor members of staff. Minott’s case highlights the problematic place of
‘community consultants’, or in this case ‘activists’, in museum projects.
Although they have become an essential part of decolonial projects, they
largely remain unequal partners. As Minott argues, ‘to truly operate
from a decolonial standpoint museums must not expect loyalty, goodwill
or trust from our external community partners, but should strive to earn it,
and pay fairly for external contributions’. Furthermore, in contrast to
Frost’s identification of temporary exhibitions as a useful mode for exhi-
biting the experience of empire at the British Museum, Minott’s case
study highlights the problematic temporality of such projects and how
they act against decolonisation. This temporality contrasts sharply ‘with
the idea of permanence at the heart of museums. Indeed, the transience
of projects associated with ‘black’ history stands in sharp relief to those
of white British history, and this will always create tensions, unease and
an imbalance of power.’ As Minott implies, while museum decolonisation
remains dominated by temporary projects, as exemplified by the case
studies in this issue, decolonial projects will fall short.
The articles by Binter and Patel also describe temporary exhibitions
but, in contrast to the examples already given, they explore how
museums can move beyond exhibiting the experience of empire. Both
 484

articles highlight explicitly (Binter) and implicitly (Patel) the way in which
the exhibitionary focus on empire can reinforce stereotypes, such as those
of loss and victimhood, and thus maintain European paradigms, and
prevent discomfort, instead of decentring them. Binter applies Bakhtin’s
notion of the chronotope to two case studies concerning external artists
and activists at the National Maritime Museum and at the Kunsthalle
Bremen. Binter defines chronotope, ‘as the ways in which writers
narrate time and space and thus create worlds that enable particular sub-
jectivities to emerge’. Through the two performative interventions, Binter
stresses that ‘European historiography – in its chronological and “sanitis-
ing” way – is but one among many chronotopes competing in today’s
postcolonial world.’ For museums, Binter argues, this chronotope has
turned once fluid objects into entities that are fixed in time and space.
Thus, the exhibition of more objects of empire only perpetuates this
problem, in contrast to performances that can ‘unsettle’ and challenge
‘white visitors to engage with embodied experiences of Empire in the post-
colonial presents’. The ‘installations, films, public talks and cultural per-
formances’ in Binter’s examples, she argues, ‘allowed subjectivities to
emerge which contradicted dichotomous and victimising accounts of colo-
nisation and instead offered empowering ways to discuss imperial pasts
and fashion postcolonial presents and futures’. Binter also makes an
important distinction between effective decolonial projects for different
audiences and purposes. For example, while many museums may be
seeking to come to terms with their colonial pasts by exhibiting the experi-
ence of empire, ‘which might be among one of the few moments that white
audiences are confronted with the colonialism and its legacies’, for ‘many
black people and people of colour… [the aim is]… to overcome colonial
legacies and work towards decolonial futures’.
Similarly, Patel’s article implicitly questions how, ‘in the current heated
debate on decolonising museums’, the British Empire has again become a
dominating force through exhibitions that focus narrowly on its actions
and effects at the expense of other narratives and experiences. In response,
Patel narrates her experience of curating the ‘Fabric of India’ exhibition at
the V&A, and the way in which it explored the story of Indian indepen-
dence via a selection of simple objects, including hand-woven cloth, that
was harnessed as a symbol against British machine-made fabric, as only
one aspect of a much longer and richer narrative of textile production
and use. Furthermore, Patel suggests, ‘the human impact’ of ‘colonial
encounter’ in her exhibition may have been made more powerful
because it was located within a wider narrative that was not defined by
empire, thus giving the audience space to contemplate the implications
of empire. Binter’s and Patel’s articles, like Chadwick’s, are effective
reminders that, to further the decolonisation conversation, museums
must do more than simply give prominence to the experience of empire.
Continuing the theme of silenced voices and histories, Odumosu’s
article provides a reflective overview of a project that she produced in col-
laboration with the Statens Museum for Kunst and Royal Library of
Denmark, What Lies Unspoken: Sounding the Colonial Archive. This
project sought to address the uncomfortable silences surrounding
institutional and societal engagements with colonial history via audio
interventions attached to objects. As with many of the articles in this
issue, Odumosu reflects on the importance of sharing interpretative
485

power. As in Chadwick’s piece, Odumosu’s article breaks from the British

Empire in order to provide a case from a different postcolonial context
that has relevance for all European empires of the colonial period. Tack-
ling the silences of the colonial past head-on, Odumosu asks: ‘In Danish
exhibitions on colonial history, who usually speaks and why? What
might people actually have to say about colonial artworks, if given the
space and time to respond? Could the affective resonance of sound
nurture the breaks and silences of history?’ In response, Odumosu
‘sought to enable polyphonic interpretations of artworks that could
rupture the institutional master narrative, while also attempting to
capture the emotional resonances and affective depth of the archive’. In
this way, the project spoke ‘about, and back to, colonialism’s visual
archive’. Again, in Odumosu’s example, ideas of discomfort, decentring,
and the empowerment of silenced voices and histories in the museum
space are key to exhibiting the experience of empire. Ultimately, Odumo-
su’s article highlights the challenges of ‘intervening’ in institutional ways
of knowing and doing, but argues that the flawed and messy nature of
such events are preferable to silence.
Elliott’s case study is also based on a temporary exhibition, this time at
the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) at the University
of Cambridge, ‘Another India: Explorations and Expressions of Indigen-
ous South Asia’. In contrast with the other articles in this issue, Elliott
uses this case study to describe the decolonial ambitions of a contempor-
ary collecting project in eastern India, which underpinned the exhibition,
and which, despite his best efforts, replicated certain ‘colonial’ approaches
to and methods of collecting and curating. By doing so, Elliott highlights
another of the overlapping themes that emerged in the British Museum
‘South Africa’ and ‘South Asia’ cases in this introduction, and which are
present but more implicit in the other articles in this issue: the need for
transparent representation of colonial collecting and display histories.
Elliott’s exhibition was devised to ‘enable investigation of the identities,
circumstances and motivations of the more than three hundred individual
men and women who collected and donated items from South Asia now in
MAA’. Elliott identifies the silence or absence of Indian voices in the col-
lection as one of the challenges of exhibiting narratives of empire. In
response, in order to ‘bring a critical contemporary dimension to an exhi-
bition dominated by an interrogation of “historical ethnography”’, Elliott
went to eastern India to commission new pieces. Despite undertaking this
work as an explicitly decolonial practice, Elliot narrates how, ‘whether by
accident or design, [he] repeatedly found [himself] retracing the footsteps
of curators, collectors, anthropologists and others who had shaped the
collections of MAA and the way that they had come to be understood’.
In so doing, Elliott draws out the unavoidable and necessary curatorial
discomfort associated with exhibiting the experience of empire.
Finally, Drayton’s article takes us away from museum exhibitionary
practices to explore the urban landscape of empire through statues and
monuments, which different publics encounter daily. Drayton’s two
examples are the now infamous Cecil Rhodes statue at the University of
Oxford, the initial focus of the #RhodesMustFall campaign in the UK,
and the statue of Lord Nelson in Bridgetown, Barbados. Both statues
are exhibits of empire, but they are also silencing ones that drown out
and mask the actions and legacies of empire. Calls have been made to
 486

remove both statues in order to decolonise the urban landscape, while

others have invoked heritage and the danger of historical erasure as
reasons to preserve them where they are. The invocation of historical
erasure is comparable to the summative feedback in Frost’s paper and
the ‘South Africa’ example in this introduction, whereby challenges to offi-
cial, comfortable European narratives of empire are cited as postcolonial
revisionism and the destruction of the objective past. In response, Drayton
argues against the notion that removing such statues would erase history
and demonstrates how, even in his lifetime, Rhodes was a controversial
character, his visual legacy only ensured by his wealth and power.
Instead, he proposes that such works should be critically recontextualised.
Drayton asks:

Are the present and the future contracted in perpetuity with preserving the
world view of the past in its pristine form, or might the face of the city not
be remade to reflect both the silenced voices of the past and the ideas of the
public and the citizenship of the present? In a world that has rejected colo-
nial domination and white supremacy, is it not time to reorder our cities
and museums? The point is not the destruction of ‘the past’, as if it has
ever been monolithic and uncontested, but the renegotiation of which
past the present holds up for examination.

Drayton’s article again highlights the persistence of positive percep-

tions of the British Empire among some audiences, and the consequent
challenges that exist to exhibiting critical reconsiderations of empire
through silenced voices and histories that upset this nostalgia.

Conclusion
As we move forward, museums and other cultural institutions must be
committed to exploring contentious histories that have formerly been mar-
ginalised or omitted, including those that involve looting, economic
exploitation and racism. Although the ‘master’s tools’ may never ‘disman-
tle the master’s house’, it is only by honestly working through the past or,
to take the German expression, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, that one can
begin to create the necessary conditions for healing. Museums are obliged
to proactively research their collections in order to understand, present
and interpret collecting histories, the colonial past, and the legacies of
the empires of the colonial period for the postcolonial present. There is
much work to be done, but it is hoped that this issue will contribute to
future conversations around decolonising museums in practice.

We are grateful to the Museum Research Fund, the Global, Local and Imperial His-
tories Research Group, the International Training Programme, the Learning and
National Partnerships team, and the Miles Morland Foundation for their support in
making the symposiums possible.