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You’re All Just Using Us Right, to Do Your Work for You’:Co-Curating with Teenagers at the Horniman Museum
No full textLimbo Time:Museums, Caribbean Temporality, and the Wounds of History
No full textIn this chapter, I draw on three distinct museological episodes in Jamaican history – the request for the loan (and later the return) of Taino objects to Jamaica from a British museum in the 1970s, the acquisition of a large collection of African art objects by the National museum of Jamaica in the late 1960s, and the responses by some Black Jamaicans to the (Great) Jamaica Exhibition of 1891 – to argue that thinking with and from the Caribbean may help museums address what I will describe as the wounds of history. I take wounds here to mean both the physical and emotional injury caused by a traumatic event and the temporal fissure, the gap or break caused by this injury. Addressing the wounds of colonial history, I propose, would require that museums reorient their approach to temporality, a reorientation that I call limbo time, or the temporality of repair and return. Such a reorientation, I suggest, would require, first, that museums see colonial injury not as in the past but as part of the folding of time in which past injuries live on in the present; and second, that museums see the potentiality of objects to afford imaginative return, to recover what is lost through the erasures, to bridge or suture the gaps and fissures that the violence of colonialism created. I will locate my argument within a longer history of scholarly engagement, both from and about the Caribbean, with questions of time. I engage with scholarship on Caribbean temporalities in the wake of colonial violence, specifically Deborah Thomas’s work on prior-ness and simultaneity, then on Caribbeanist work concerned directly with the notion of limbo, specifically that of Kamau Brathwaite and Wilson Harris. This reorientation is, however, not limited to the Caribbean but can help us deal with catastrophic pasts that live on continue to shape our present.</p
Introduction:Time of and for the Museum
No full textOn June 18, 2022, the fifteenth edition of the iconic quinquennial contemporary art exhibition documenta opened in Kassel, Germany. Marred with controversy even prior to its opening, documenta 15 would be received with, arguably, equal parts praise and critique. On the one hand, for some of the commentators more positive about the show, it was a “turning point” in art exhibitions 1 – a “nothing in the art world will be the same after this” experience. On the other hand, until the exhibition’s end in September, the curators struggled with critiques ranging from it “not being about art” to accusations of anti-Semitism that threatened to close the exhibition.</p
Museums, Heritage and Development: A Critical Conversation
No full textThe impetus for this book came from a symposium that we organized at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam in September 2011. The symposium was the fi rst in a series that we envisaged under the rubric of ‘Critical Conversations in Culture and Development’. While many claims have been made concerning the importance of culture in international development interventions, we were conscious that there was very little in the way of critical refl ection or evaluation of these claims. We were also conscious of the lack of understanding that often exists between the worlds of academic critique, policy making and development practice. Our objective, therefore, was to create a forum in which to bring together different stakeholders and interlocutors in an attempt to foster constructive dialogue and interchange. The challenges of bridging academic critique and theorization, on the one hand, and policy development and implementation, on the other, are well known, and it would be naïve of us to imagine that the meeting brought about any signifi cant breakthrough. We remain committed, however, to the idea that there is a need for such critical conversations: a need to explore, refl exively and dialogically, the relationships not only between different actors and their various perspectives but, even more so, the very concepts of culture and development
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