“Colonialism, in both its settler and imperial formations, refuses to be consigned to the past. Heated debates over representation, remembrance, restitution, and reparation—over social justice—have compelled museums and other public institutions to face their complicity in both historical and contemporary forms of colonialism.
This book examines this reckoning and studies museums—and heritage more broadly—as sites of contestation and transformation spurred by the practices of artists and activists. The reckoning is both transforming the museum as a public institution and shifting public and political debates about what to do with the afterlives of colonialism.”
“Building on interviews with curators, cultural practitioners, activists, and artists, as well as the authors’ ongoing involvement with movements aimed at decolonizing museums, this volume explores how antiracist activism and artivism have transformed museums, as well as the broader social and political significance of these transformations.”
Decolonizing the Museum (2026)
This book examines this reckoning and studies museums—and heritage more broadly—as sites of contestation and transformation spurred by the practices of artists and activists. The reckoning is both transforming the museum as a public institution and shifting public and political debates about what to do with the afterlives of colonialism.”
“Building on interviews with curators, cultural practitioners, activists, and artists, as well as the authors’ ongoing involvement with movements aimed at decolonizing museums, this volume explores how antiracist activism and artivism have transformed museums, as well as the broader social and political significance of these transformations.”
Decolonizing the Museum (2026)
Decolonizing The Museum: Art, Activism and the Question of Race
2026
Academic Volume
Published by Routledge Art (London)
by
Chiara de Cesari
Wayne Modest
Marta Pagliuca Pelacani
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003356530
Author’s Field Notes. Jan 2025. Marta Pagliuca Pelacani.Chiara De Cesari is Professor of Heritage, Memory, and Cultural Studies and Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research explores how forms of memory, heritage, art, and cultural politics are shifting under conditions of transnationalism, postcoloniality, and decoloniality. She is particularly concerned with the ways in which colonial legacies live on today, especially in museums and cultural institutions. She is the author of Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine (2019) and co-editor of two key volumes in memory studies (European Memory in Populism, Routledge, 2019; Transnational Memory, de Gruyter, 2014). Committed to transnational and transdisciplinary collaboration, she has been and is involved in several major international research projects, connecting universities across the globe with different social partners, museums, and cultural institutions.
Wayne Modest is Director of Content of the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands, a museum group with locations in Amsterdam, Leiden, and Rotterdam, and including also the WereldLab in Nijmegen. He is also Professor (by special appointment) of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. A cultural studies scholar by training, Modest works at the intersection of material culture, memory, and heritage studies, with a strong focus on colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean. His most recent publications include the edited volumes: Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in a Changing Europe (with Nicholas Thomas et al.) and Spaces of Care—Confronting Colonial Afterlives in European Ethnographic Museums (with Claudia Augustat).
Author’s Field Notes. Jan 2025. Marta Pagliuca Pelacani.
Marta Pagliuca Pelacani is an artistic researcher and doctoral candidate at University College Cork (UCC). Her research explores peasant heritage, storytelling, and the intergenerational transmission of knowledge. She works with anticolonial ontologies, anarchival methods, and socially engaged art, with a focus on curatorial approaches to archives and the epistemologies of historically dispossessed communities. She is co-convenor of UCC’s Memory, Commemoration, and Uses of the Past research cluster and has taught at the University of Amsterdam.