Museum International

ISSN: 1350-0775 (Print) 1468-0033 (Online) Journal homepage: www.tandfonline.com/journals/rmil20

Museums and the Epistemology of Injustice: From

Colonialism to Decoloniality

Shahid Vawda

To cite this article: Shahid Vawda (2019) Museums and the Epistemology of Injustice:
From Colonialism to Decoloniality, Museum International, 71:1-2, 72-79, DOI:
10.1080/13500775.2019.1638031

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13500775.2019.1638031

Published online: 11 Jul 2019.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 5438

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Citing articles: 20 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rmil20
 Museums and
the Epistemology
of Injustice:
From Colonialism to Decoloniality
by Shahid Vawda

Image © Iziko Museums, South Africa, Carina Beyers

Article © 2019, International Council of Museums (ICOM)
72 | MUSEUM international
S
hahid Vawda currently holds the Archie
Mafeje Chair in Critical Humanities
and Decoloniality and the directorship
of the School of African and Gender Studies,
Anthropology and Linguistics at the University
of Cape Town, South Africa and is a Research
Fellow of the City Institute at Wits University.
His research publications appear in a wide
range of journals and books. He has
participated in UNESCO, ICOM and CAM
workshops and conferences, and has been
active in the ICOM International Committee
for Archaeology and History Museums
(ICMAH), on the board of ICOM South Africa
and on the boards of the Msunduzi and
Ncome Museums and the University of
Witwatersrand’s Art Museum in South Africa.
MUSEUM international | 73
 T
he aim of this article is to explore a central paradox of museums. Often
thought of as integral institutions of progress, enlightenment and modernity,
museums are deeply implicated in colonialism itself. The article explores ele­
ments within the nexus of colonialism/post-colonialism and its relationship
to museum activities in the past, but also in the present. It asks the question
of how we understand and recognise the colonial imprint of museums and
how decolonising might be addressed. The issue is not only about former
colonisers coming to terms with their colonial pasts through museums and
other heritage sites, but also how and why it is important to decolonise museums.
Taking an indulgent perspective from the Global South, museums are a strange cre­
ation arising out of 18th-19th century industrialism and colonialism, a mixture of
research, albeit within the cusp of modern scientific disciplines, and the spectacu­
[How do] we understand lar. These early museums housed collections of curious and wonderful artefacts ex­
and recognise the tracted from European voyages of exploration and the colonies, including horrifying
colonial imprint of collections of human remains stored, measured and experimented with on spurious
museums and how grounds of scientific research. By the late 19th century museums functioned in sup­
decolonising might port of the imperial project, simultaneously serving as informal educational institu­
be addressed? tions that attempted to shift pre-modern ideas of the populace onto a more rational
plane, and allowing glimpses of a world beyond their own everyday existence. This
was a generative Enlightenment presumption that knowledge was liberating, while
consolidating the idea of human progress and the universal rights of humans. But
alongside these progressive ideas, imbricated with the rise of capitalism, was the rapid
spread of colonialism with its attendant oppressions of ‘the Others’, especially those
indicative of slavery, race and gender. The contradictions of the age of Enlightenment
pull through into the age of museums.

Museums and the persistence of colonialism

Tpeating the excesses of colonialism’s
his article is less concerned with re­
political economy, its lacks of humanity,
its injustices and their links to museums,
than with what decolonisation means.
To decolonise means to admit what col­
onisation meant for museums:
­– The conquest of the land and takeover
of states and governance systems,
the subjugation of Indigenous
peoples, migrating them as slaves
and material, and to engage in trade
and marketing of commodities
on unequal terms.
– Within that system of colonisation,
the act of removing, without
permission of the owners or their
trustees, usually by stealing, looting,
as spoils of war, or trading on
unequal terms, the material objects,
including plants, animals, human
remains and knowledge from colonies
and in the colonies by their
custodial representatives, depicting,
and continuing to depict, such
objects that (I) legitimise the colonial
conquest and (II) place the people
represented by the objects in inferior,
unequal positions that are racially
or ethnically stereotypical and (III)
‘others’ them from both the colonial
power and other colonised people.

Iamples to tease out the persistence of

and indentured labour to places
far from their places of origin,
and remaking them, wholly or in part
to serve the agendas of a colonising
power—usually to extract labour
and abstracting their historical
and cultural context to a ‘museum
collection’ for research and exhibition.
– The creation of museums with
such collections in the North
n what follows, I shall provide some ex­
coloniality as the intimate and insepa­
rable relationship between colonialism
and modernity.

Museums, modernity and colonialism

Mhumanity coexists with the under­ Fmer imperial metropoles, settler col­
odernity’s claims of a progressive
side of the European colonial project of
physical and ideological oppression and
injustice. It could be said that the in­
justice of colonialism, regardless of the
historical narrative about formal legal
acquisition of land and resources by im­
perial powers is, or should be, an axiom­
atic responsibility of most museums.
or the most part, museums in the for­
onies, new states, former Soviet Union
states and countries know that many
of their collections have been acquired
in less than legal ways, even if not ex­
plicitly acknowledged in their mission
statements and practices. For those mu­
seums in former settler colonies such as
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and
South Africa (just to mention those of
the former British Empire), Indigenous
rights movements have had significant
success in securing the acknowledg­
ment of the dubious acquisitions and
collections, and the return of objects and
human remains, or are in the process of
doing so. The bulk of objects and human
remains from the colonies are, however,
in the former European imperial centres
of power, where there is still a lingering
defensive reaction among some of the
most important museums against repa­
triation of objects and human remains.
Even if or when repatriation does occur,
there is a certain reluctance to admit to
the objects having been looted or ac­
quired in dubious ways and in unequal
exchange terms.

74 | MUSEUM international
Fig. 1. Old Town House © Iziko Museums, South Africa, Carina Beyers.

Tthat originated in inhuman and Tparadox, both in response to profes­

his defence of museums’ collections
non-democratic practices is significantly
insightful. It is a defence that perpetuates
notions that the civilised ‘races’ coming
from Europe and North America are
alone capable of defining and preserving
the universals of humans in perpetuity.
dominant view and privilege in the per­
manent exhibition of the museum, while
the people without history are relegated
to temporary displays. Museums, what­
ever their origins and multiple diversely
applied purposes, are deeply entangled
with colonialism.
he challenge is to transform this
sional and scholarly critique, and par­
ticularly to those publics who have been
systematically silenced or marginalised.
The institutional changes necessary in
the wake of the critiques must address
directly epistemological and ontologi­

Tview, another truth, another form

Such a presumption hinders the full ac­
knowledgement of their own difficult
and troubled history and relationship to
colonialism, and it ignores and silences
Other voices, particularly their knowl­
edge of the artefacts.
hat there might be another enduring cal challenges required to completely re-
think, re-do, and remake the museum.
of governance informed by experience
and empirical investigation is not ful­
ly appreciated. When colonialists take
over indigenous systems of governance
or ideation systems to serve their ends,

Tics and commodification rather than

he criticism of deference to aesthet­
social-historical and cultural context is
only recently being appreciated, signi­
fied in museums in the scramble to ad­
just their exhibitions. More than two
decades ago, Euro-American museums
began to adjust to the critique of muse­
ums as eurocentric by adopting a Janus-
face approach, by leaving their perma­
nent exhibits more or less intact, but
holding a number of new exhibitions.
The new displays responded to demands
from those that had been historical­
ly silenced, not seen or heard and least
of all consulted by the dominant rulers,
insisting that their historic multicultur­
al origins, sensitivities and polycentric
views, with responses to colonialism
ranging from mimesis to alterity, be re­
flected. Yet the effect was to retain the
the response of the colonised has been
critical, ranging from outright rejec­
tion to accommodating the intrusion of
the new interloper on their land, their
oceans, cities, towns and villages, from
battles and wars to mimicking the col­
oniser, yet without ever surrendering
completely (except when exterminated).
The always localised nuances and dif­
ferences speak to different kinds of co­
lonialisms and the attendant responses.
It is the appreciation of these extraor­
dinary, nuanced responses of the col­
onised in museum exhibitions that is a
challenge. Straightforward tropes of vic­
timhood, or tradition versus modern,
or other binaries that creates ‘us’ and
‘them’ or the ‘West and the Others’, are
unhelpful. They do not address the par­
adox of colonialism as the dark side of
modernity.

MUSEUM international | 75
 Fig. 2. Installation View: Perneef to Gugulective © Iziko Museums, South Africa, Carina Beyers
Beyond acknowledgement and aggrievement
Paggregated and dispersed: they are
ost-colonial communities are dis­
found in the South, but are also dias­
poric and very much part of the North.
It implies the colonisers are, or should
be, part of the post-colonial and decol­
onisation practices, and that contacts
with post-colonial communities globally
should be sustained and fruitful, rather
than fleeting and ephemeral. It requires
a reorientation in the authority of the
museum, and a permanent shift in in­
stitutional cooperation between Global
North and South, informed by new in­
sights drawn from new frameworks out­
side of the old and new museology.
T
he important element in this re­
orientation starts from the acknowl­
edgment and recognition of colonialism
and its subjects, but should include what
Epistemic violence
Ias imperial metropole, elaborated into
n the global colonial context of Europe
series of complex asymmetrical rela­
tions, the idea of the Self mutating to­
wards Eurocentric ideas of being, or
Tor an act of disengagement from the
ambivalence towards it, or none of it,
is relevant. Caroni expresses this com­
plexity as ‘the dissolution of the Other
by the Self; the incorporation of the
Other into the Self, and the destabili­
sation of the Self by the Other’ (Caroni
1996, p.58). It is this aspect of the de­
colonisation project that needs urgent
attention by museums as part of their
research and educative roles. The key
question is what role did and do muse­
ums play in the creation and continued
76 | MUSEUM international
is museum knowledge, the norms, val­
ues, ideas, shared ways of thinking about
objects and actions that inform their ex­
hibitionary representation, and the fric­
tions embodied in the attempt to resolve
the paradoxes and contradictions. It is
possible to pursue ‘normal’ profession­
al museological work while under pres­
sure to transform. At times museum
researchers and curators incorporate
dialogical discussion, while retaining
asymmetric interaction with ‘local’ ex­
perts from communities.
Ycal communicative relationship be­
et it is precisely the epistemologi­
tween the generation of knowledge and
the deployment of this knowledge in
the museum and with its publics that it
is necessary to analyse. In order to ad­
dress epistemological asymmetry, the
maintenance of the colonial/decolonial
subject? Recognising this role, what
would a decolonial project for museums
be in the 21st century?
o decolonise is not a physical process
coloniser or the metropole and return to
some prior imagined past, but to engage
in a process of ‘thinking and doing’ that
is not an uncritical endorsement of euro­
centric ideas. It is a call to reflect on the
conglomeration of ideas or knowledges
that make up ’Western civilisation’ and
those ideas and knowledges that precede
and continue during and after colonial­
isation. It is to question and unmask the
epistemological, sometimes the onto­
logical, foundations of such ideas, which
production of knowledge and making
sense of artefacts and texts, and the de­
ployment of that knowledge through a
community of knowers is crucial. But by
privileging ‘museum desires’ this often
becomes a hermeneutical community of
unequals. Despite consultation and en­
gagement, the dominant position of the
museum expert vis-à-vis the marginal­
ised and alienated ‘knower’ as the Other
(whether that Other is inside or outside
the museum), triggers an epistemolog­
ical violence and injustice. Without in­
vestigating critically the structural im­
passe, the paradox of museums becomes
a self-serving contradiction.
inform the knowledge that make the so­
cieties and people of Africa, Asia and
Latin America ‘invisible’ for the colo­
nizers, but also those ideas that exist be­
fore, during and after colonialism, which
continue to have a purchase on people’s
lives, informing their behaviour, their
responses, strategies and tactics (Levitt
and Crul 2018, pp.4-50). It is to under­
stand the mental, political and econom­
ic powers that captivates the mind of the
colonised, particularly in mimicking the
‘West’, alongside those ideas that appear
through imperial conquest and design
to dismiss, tame, obscure, make (in)vis­
ible, re-categorise and render ‘harmless’
the colonised peoples own history, ideas
and practises.
Fig. 3. Freeflight © Iziko Museums, South Africa, Carina Beyers
Tconquest and the resulting unequal Etemic violence squarely in ‘knowl­
he acknowledgement of colonial
exchange that ensued in the colonial­
isation, neo-colonial and neo-liberal
phases of globalisation is only an initial
step towards the decolonialisation of the
museum. Following this is an inquiry
into the complicity and invisibility, the
omissions, ambiguities and misrepre­
sentations in the representation of co­
lonialism. Is it simply oversight, or are
there foundational, systemic or institu­
tional-political reasons why omissions
and ambiguities occur?
Spivak refers to this as epistemic
violence.
The clearest available example of such
epistemic violence is the remotely
orchestrated, far-flung, and
heterogeneous project to constitute
the colonial subject as Other. This project
Gber of key considerations for mu­
is also the asymmetrical obliteration
of the trace of that Other in its precarious
Subjectivity (Spivak 1988, p.25).
Story and subjectivity of colonised
pivak goes on to ask what if the his­
people in all their heterogeneity rede­
fined the narrative of the colonisers his­
tory. It is a crucial question of how and
why the many ‘unacknowledged parts’
of the world are integral, rather than pe­
ripheral, to the rise of European domi­
nance in the 18th and 19th centuries and
its continuing effects to the present.
nrique Galván-Álvarez locates epis­
edge’, in the realm of what constitutes an
assemblage of wide-ranging ideas that
are dominant and dominating against or
with another set of ideas.
Epistemic violence, that is, violence
exerted against or through knowledge,
is probably one of the key elements
in any process of domination.
It is not only through the construction
of exploitative economic links
or the control of the politico-military
apparatuses that domination
is accomplished, but also and, I would
argue, most importantly through
the construction of epistemic frameworks
that legitimise and enshrine those
practices of domination (Galván-Álvarez
2010, pp.11-12).
alván-Álvarez points to a num­
seums. First, the violence associated
with epistemology to ensure domina­
tion is not physical. Epistemic violence
is much more subtle than structural or
even symbolic violence. Secondly, the
violence here is the near impercepti­
ble ways in which theories, methodol­
ogies, institutions, social, economic and
political practices combine and create,
in multiple uneven ways, the dissemi­
nation, consumption and application,
within a nexus of asymmetric power
relations, the normalcy of how to think
about any subject, topic, event or ac­
tions of individuals or groups of people.
The epistemic frameworks do not have
to be consistent or elegantly systematic.
Thirdly, although each colonial power
developed its own genealogy of power
within its colonial spheres, what came
into being was an epistemic foundation
of presumptions, assumptions, principle
ideas, accepted truths, actions and prac­
tices in varying colonial circumstances
that persist (Mignolo 2017, p.22).
Ting it in a collection, recording its
he very act of taking an object, stor­
provenance and other details, and re­
contextualising it as a ‘representation’ of
the ‘Other’, however generous to its so­
cial and cultural milieu, would be, fol­
lowing Spivak and Galván-Álvarez, an
act of epistemic violence. What comes
to bear on the object is the historical
accumulation of almost 600 years of
European modernity‘s contradictory
meta­constructions and suppositions of
what constitutes knowledge, who has it,
and who does not, and therefore who be­
longs and who does not, and who can be
incorporated into the pantheon of mo­
dernity’s goods, and who should be, or
can be, or choses to be, excluded.
MUSEUM international | 77
 Fig. 4. Random Poetry takes centre-stage, Rock Art gallery during storytelling session, Iziko South African Museums.
© Iziko Museums, South Africa, Carina Beyers.
Decolonising the museum: reversing the colonial imprint
Twhich
his has been the ‘normal’ way in
museological procedures
work with objects, information, his­
tories and cultures from the colonised
world within the broad parameters of
modernity or civilisational forces and in­
fluences. The meta-process may be sum­
marised as follows:
– Produce an assemblage of
representational practices that
participate in the production
of conceptions of the world.
– Separate the ‘discovered’ world
into bounded units.
– Name/label the bounded units
as if these were scientific objects
of inquiry.
– Separate and compartmentalise
the coloniser’s related and relational
histories.
– Interpret their representations as
incommensurable with colonisers.
– Create and reproduce colonising
power-conceptual relations.
– Normalise a new system of universal
social and person categories and
classifications into a hierarchy along
lines of race, ethnicity, language,
estates, classes, castes, nations, etc.
– Label conceptual thinking from
Africa, Asia and Latin America,
particularistic, exotic and limited
for modern rational thinking
and scientific work.
78 | MUSEUM international
Tcal postures rather than a linear his­
his process describes a set of indexi­
tory. It is very different from one that
presumes it is the burden of Europe to
spread its universal message of rational­
ity and modernity, but rather points to
imposition of diffused power.
Iallow for contemplation, reflection and
t remains of concern to present and to
critical renewal of museums through the
production and dissemination of knowl­
edge, derived and collected during its
colonial past and its inflections in the
post-independence period, compris­
ing both the activities of European col­
onists and their multiple engagements
with the colonised. Perhaps new ways to
explore the changing nature of colonial­
ism’s culture in museums is in a spirit of
decoloniality:
– Decolonialisation shall mean to resist
the reproduction and romanticising
of the pre-colonial and the colonial
situation with its predisposition
to colonial, racial and other
taxonomies, power hierarchies,
colonial consciousness
and subjectivities.
– Decolonialisation means taking
the concept of ‘sharing’ seriously,
allowing for the multivalent voices
and multi‑authorial possibilities
to emerge and strengthen,
in documenting and curating
the complex and specific histories,
cultures, scientific and everyday
practices of people. It both allows
for the critique of colonialism
and encompasses an acknowledgment
and absorption of differences
in a contested environment and space.
– Decolonialisation envisages a museum
practice that is collaborative,
dialogical, sympathetic to other views
and different perspectives, and also
provides a framework for discussion,
debate and decision making
that is just, equitable and humane
to producing both knowledge
and displays through co-curation
and exhibitions. A decolonised
museum seeks an encompassing
inclusive understanding of complex
archived collections, ethical research
practices, multiple histories,
with embedded values, norms,
and cultural practices that often
tell difficult and troubling stories
in its exhibitions.
– Museums provide an emerging
decolonial space to address unjust
practices of the past and present,
and provide for hermeneutically
shared environments of mutual
acceptance.
T
From epistemological injustice to justice
he question is what set of ideas does the museum as a ‘knower’
in its reverential role as knowledgeable institution, as producer
and conveyor of information, seek to communicate? How do
museums communicate on matters related to their entanglement
with colonialism? How and why did museums become part of colonialism’s
culture, and contemporaneously part of the call for its decolonialisation?
These questions are raised against a background of scholarship that points
to the multiple frictions and contestations built into the institution of museums
(Karp et al. 2006), and the shift in museums, from being the unchallenged
‘authority’ to one that accepts its provisional authority as minor in an institutional
forum for dissension and debate, and is reflexive of itself as the ‘Self ’
in the contours of other wider fissures and debates in society, locally and globally.
Museums, which are imbricated in colonialism, are sites of deep epistemological
unjust practices and clashes, and simultaneously the space to address
those injustices.1
A key aspect of museums’ current and future role is to deploy their resources
in epistemic ways that confront firstly, the variously acquired objects from
the former colonies in the museums, and misrepresentations and omissions
of colonialism in the exhibitions, but secondly, to confront the epistemic
injustice of coloniality in and of the museums themselves. If museums represent
an archetype of modernity, then its underside, epistemological injustice, can begin
to be reconsidered.
While concepts of epistemic violence and injustice are not conceptual
tools that are easily associated with museums and their publics, it is clear
that beyond the spectacle of gross colonial violence lies an entirely new mode
of museological work.
Notes ӹӹ Spivak, G. 1988. ‘Can the Subaltern
1 On the concept of epistemological Speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretation
injustice, see Fricker 2007 and Kidd, of Culture. Edited by C. Nelson
Medina and Pohlhaus 2017. and L Grossberg. London: Macmillan,
pp. 271-313.
References
ӹӹ Mignolo, W. 2014. ‘Further Thoughts
ӹӹ Coronil, F. 1996. ‘Beyond Occidentalism:
on Decoloniality’, in Post-coloniality,
Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical
Decoloniality – Black Critique. Edited
Categories’, in Cultural Anthropology,
by Broeck, S. and Junker, C. Frankfurt:
Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 51-87.
Campus Verlag, pp. 21-51.
ӹӹ Fricker, F. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power
and Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
ӹӹ Galván-Álvarez, E. 2010. ‘Epistemic
Violence and Retaliation: The Issue of
Knowledges in “Mother India”’, in Atlantis,
Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 11-12.
ӹӹ Levitt, P and Crul, M. 2018.
‘Deconstructing and Reconstructing:
Embracing Alternative Ways of Producing,
Classifying and Disseminating Knowledge’,
in Ethnolosha Tribina, Vol. 41, No. 48,
pp. 3-50. DOI: 10.15378/1848-9540.2018.41.01
ӹӹ Karp, I. Kratz, C., Sawaja, L.,
Ybarra‑Frausto, T. (eds). 2006. Museum
Frictions: Public Cultures/Global
Transformations. Durham: Duke
University Press.
ӹӹ Kidd, J; Medina, J and Pohlhaus, G. (eds).
2017. The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic
Injustice. London: Routledge.

MUSEUM international | 79