Institutions across the globe are increasingly questioned on how their foundations are rooted in colonialism and how they aim to ‘decolonize’. The Future of the Dutch Colonial Past provides an overview of critical scholarly reflections on the history of Dutch slavery and colonization, as well as how this translates into critical cultural practices. It also explores possible futures: What can heritage institutions learn from (international) best practices regarding the ‘decolonizat...

Victorian Jamaica explores the extraordinary surviving archive of visual representation and material objects to provide a comprehensive account of Jamaican society during Queen Victoria's reign over the British Empire, from 1837 to 1901. In their analyses of material ranging from photographs of plantation laborers and landscape paintings to cricket team photographs, furniture, and architecture, as well as a wide range of texts, the contributors trace the relationship between black...

This book asks what it means to decolonize museums in theory and practice. It explores recent calls by activists and artists for social change in and through museums and how museums have responded to these calls and interventions.The point of departure for this volume is the burgeoning global debates around racism that have compelled many museums and public institutions to confront their complicity in colonialism, both past and present. Building on interviews with curators, cultura...

Museum Temporalities analyzes how museums relate to time. It explores the hidden temporal assumptions and practices that define museums. How might these assumptions help us to better understand and address museums’ often problematic and painful relationship to the colonial past? Since the nineteenth century, the globalization of the museum has spread specific understandings of permanence and temporariness that inform museum display, separated the modern from the t...