One could look at the museum as being an active entity, or an urban actor. The museum could be seen as agitator and the space it occupies as a place where political activism can develop. Museums can engage in acts of representation as intervention, and \u2013 at least in the Netherlands –\u00a0 lectures and debates concerning societal issues are more and more organized between those walls. Nowadays museums are relooking into their own history and collections, as society nowadays pressures museums more into applying a self-critical approach towards its collections, knowledge production, and curatorial practices, where even the concept of the museum itself gets criticized.<\/p>\n
The concept of \u2018decolonizing the museum\u2019 is also widely used where questions such as Who is the museum including and excluding?<\/em> and Is there enough representation of black and non-black people of color?<\/em> among others are discussed. As is argued by Bryce and Carnegie in \u2018Exhibiting the \u201cOrient\u201d: Historicising Theory and Curatorial Practice in UK Museums and Galleries\u2019, \u201ccurrent thinking about museums and their roles and responsibilities and overall accountability to funding bodies, reflect current concerns and criticisms of a failure to engage with local and diverse communities.\u201d [1]<\/a><\/p>\n The history of museums in itself is something worth discussing as well, as \u201cmodern museums were formed as part of a general trajectory of British government policy over the past 200 years, a trajectory of reform, based on increased government intervention, democratization\u201d\u00a0[2].<\/a> It is argued by Robin Boast in \u2018Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited\u2019 that:<\/p>\n “The museum as contact zone, is and continues to be used instrumentally as a means of masking far more fundamental asymmetries, appropriations, and biases. The museum, as a site of accumulation, as a gatekeeper of authority and expert accounts, as the ultimate caretaker of the object, as the ultimate arbiter of the identity of the object, as its documenter and even as the educator, has to be completely redrafted. Where the new museology saw the museum being transformed from a site of determined edification to one of educational engagement, museums of the 21st<\/sup> century must confront this deeper neocolonial legacy. This is not only possible but, I would argue, could renovate the museum into an institution that supported the enrichment, rather than authorization, of collections. To do this, however, requires museums to learn to let go of their resources, even at times of the objects, for the benefit and use of communities and agendas far beyond its knowledge and control<\/em>.”\u00a0 [3]<\/a><\/p>\n With more awareness around this (neo)colonial foundation the museum is built upon, calls for \u201cdecolonizing the museum\u201d are increasingly voiced. What is meant with decolonizing the museum depends on the geographical context I would argue. In the United States the notion of decolonizing is linked to the fight by Native Americans against settler colonialism, to make museums more open and community-relevant sites. These museum sites can help with \u2018tribal nation building, empowerment and healing\u2019 is argued by Amy Lonetree in Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums.\u00a0[4]<\/a> She argues that \u201ca decolonizing museum practice must involve assisting our communities in addressing the legacies of historical unresolved grief. Doing this necessarily cuts through the veil of silence around colonialism and its consequences for Native families and communities.\u201d\u00a0[5]<\/a><\/p>\n This idea or concept is of course applicable in imperial European and Dutch context as well, where Eurocentric narratives and representations are the base of the museums of the 19th<\/sup> and 20th<\/sup> centuries. Unchallenged museums reproduce colonial thinking, so interventions are necessary to disrupt the museum as whole. The aim is of course to bring about structural changes, as argued by Simone Zeefuik in a talk with Lex Bohlmeijer, especially in the Dutch context where many colonial practices go unchallenged. [6]<\/a> Decolonization could be seen as the breaking open of certain power structures to show that there is another way of thinking, other than the white Eurocentric narrative. We need to rewrite the narratives to create a collective memory that is for all the people of the Netherlands. This is why it is important to have museums that tell the whole story \u2013 instead of the well-known Eurocentric narrative that often goes unchallenged – to move away from exclusive practices and patterns.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Notes:<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n [1]<\/a>\u00a0Derek Bryce & Elizabeth Carnegie, “Exhibiting the \u201cOrient\u201d: Historicising Theory and Curatorial Practice in UK Museums and Galleries,” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space<\/em> 45, no. 7, (2013):\u00a01739.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n [2]<\/a>\u00a0Ibid.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n [3]<\/a>\u00a0Robin Boast, “Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited,”\u00a0Museum Anthropology<\/em> 34, no. 1 (2011): 67.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n [4]<\/a>\u00a0Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums<\/em> (Chapel Hill:\u00a0University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 4.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n [5]<\/a>\u00a0Ibid:\u00a05.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Lex Bohlmeijer, 2017. “Lex Bohlmeijer – In Gesprek met Simone Zeefuik,” podcast interview. In\u00a0De Correspondent<\/em>. Interview recorded on October 19th 2017, 34:31 min. Soundcloud<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n References:<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Boast, Robin. “Neocolonial Collaboration. Museum as Contact Zone Revisited.”\u00a0Museum Anthropology<\/em> 34, no. 1 (2011): 56-70.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Bohlmeijer, Lex. 2017.\u00a0“Lex Bohlmeijer – In Gesprek met Simone Zeefuik,” podcast interview. In\u00a0De Correspondent<\/em>. Interview recorded on October 19th 2017, 34:31 min. Soundcloud<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Bryce, Derek, Elizabeth Carnegie. “Exhibiting the \u201cOrient\u201d: Historicising Theory and Curatorial Practice in UK Museums and Galleries.”\u00a0Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space<\/em> 45, no. 7, (2013):\u00a01734-1752.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Lonetree, Amy.\u00a0Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums. <\/em>Chapel Hill:\u00a0University of North Carolina Press, 2012.<\/p>\nDecoloniality in the European and Dutch context<\/h3>\n
\n