MUSEUM TRANSFORMATIONS DECOLONIZATION AND DEMOCRATIZATION Edited By ANNIE E. COOMBES AND RUTH B. PHILLIPS Museum Transformations: Decolonization and Democratization addresses contemporary approaches to decolonization, greater democratization, and revisionist narratives in museum exhibition and program development around the world. The text explores how museums of art, history, and ethnography responded to deconstructive critiques from activists and poststructuralist and postcolonial theorists, and provided models for change to other types of museums and heritage sites. The volume's first set of essays discuss the role of the museum in the narration of difficult histories, and how altering the social attitudes and political structures that enable oppression requires the recognition of past histories of political and racial oppression and colonization in museums. Subsequent essays consider the museum's new roles in social action and discuss experimental projects that work to change power dynamics within institutions and leverage digital technology and new media.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations ix Editors xiii General Editors xiv Contributors xv Editors’ Preface to Museum Transformations and The International Handbooks of Museum Studies xvii Introduction: Museums in Transformation: Dynamics of Democratization and Decolonization xxv Annie E. Coombes and Ruth B. Phillips Part I Difficult Histories 1 1. The Holocaust Memorial in Berlin and Its Information Center: Concepts, Controversies, Reactions 3 Sibylle Quack 2. Ghosts of Future Nations, or The Uses of the Holocaust Museum Paradigm in India 29 Kavita Singh 3. The International Difficult Histories Boom, the Democratization of History, and the National Museum of Australia 61 Bain Attwood 4. Where are the Children? and “We Were So Far Away …”: Exhibiting the Legacies of Residential Schools, Healing, and Reconciliation 85 Jonathan Dewar 5. Recirculating Images of the “Terrorist” in Postcolonial Museums: The Case of the National Museum of Struggle in Nicosia, Cyprus 113 Gabriel Koureas 6. Reactivating the Colonial Collection: Exhibition-Making as Creative Process at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam 133 Mary Bouquet 7. “Congo As It is?”: Curatorial Reflections on Using Spatial Urban History in the Memory of Congo: The Colonial Era Exhibition 157 Johan Lagae 8. Between the Archive and the Monument: Memory Museums in Postdictatorship Argentina and Chile 181 Jens Andermann 9. The Gender of Memory in Postapartheid South Africa: The Women’s Jail as Heritage Site 207 Annie E. Coombes Part II Social Agency and the Museum 227 10. An Ethnography of Repatriation: Engagements with Erromango, Vanuatu 229 Lissant Bolton 11. Of Heritage and Hesitation: Reflections on the Melanesian Art Project at the British Museum 249 Nicholas Thomas 12. The Blackfoot Shirts Project: “Our Ancestors Have Come to Visit” 263 Alison K. Brown and Laura Peers 13. “Get to Know Your World”: An Interview with Jim Enote, Director of the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center in Zuni, New Mexico 289 Gwyneira Isaac 14. The Paro Manene Project: Exhibiting and Researching Photographic Histories in Western Kenya 311 Christopher Morton and Gilbert Oteyo 15. Reanimating Cultural Heritage: Digital Curatorship, Knowledge Networks, and Social Transformation in Sierra Leone 337 Paul Basu 16. On Not Looking: Economies of Visuality in Digital Museums 365 Kimberly Christen 17. Preserving the Physical Object in Changing Cultural Contexts 387 Miriam Clavir Part III Museum Experiments 413 18. The Last Frontier: Migratory Culture, Video, and Exhibiting without Voyeurism 415 Mieke Bal 19. Public Art/Private Lives: The Making of Hotel Yeoville 439 Tegan Bristow, Terry Kurgan and Alexander Opper 20. Museums, Women, and the Web 471 Reesa Greenberg 21. Möbius Museology: Curating and Critiquing the Multiversity Galleries at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia 489 Jennifer Kramer 22. When You Were Mine: (Re)Telling History at the National Museum of the American Indian 511 Paul Chaat Smith 23. Against the Edifice Complex: Vivan Sundaram’s History Project and the Colonial Museum in India 527 Saloni Mathur 24. Can National Museums be Postcolonial?: The Canadian Museum for Human Rights and the Obligation of Redress to First Nations 545 Ruth B. Phillips Index 575