Behold the sleazy logic of museums: plunder dressed up as charity, conservation, and care.

The idealized Western museum, as typified by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum, and the Museum of Natural History, has remained much the same for over a century: a uniquely rarified public space of cool stone, providing an experience of leisure and education for the general public while carefully tending fragile artifacts from distant lands. As questions about representation and ethics have increasingly arisen, these institutions have proclaimed their interest in diversity and responsible conservation, asserting both their adaptability and their immovably essential role in a flourishing and culturally rich society.

With Decolonize Museums, Shimrit Lee punctures this fantasy, tracing the essentially colonial origins of the concept of the museum. White Europeans' atrocities were reimagined through narratives of benign curiosity and abundant respect for the occupied or annihilated culture, and these racist narratives, Lee argues, remain integral to the authority exercised by museums today. Citing pop culture references from Indiana Jones to Black Panther, and highlighting crucial activist campaigns and legal action to redress the harms perpetrated by museums and their proxies, Decolonize Museums argues that we must face a dismantling of these seemingly eternal edifices, and consider what, if anything, might take their place.

Reviews likely: The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, The London Review of Books,

Interviews likely: The Los Angeles Review of Books, Salon, Warscapes, Radical Books Collective

Excerpts likely: The Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, Africa Is a Country, In These Times

Book launch in New York

About the Author

Shimrit Lee is a writer, curator, and educator. Her research lies at the intersection of visual and cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and critical security studies. Her essays and reviews have been published in a number of cultural journals and art magazines. She completed her PhD in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at NYU in 2019, and currently teaches at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

Bhakti Shringarpure is editor-in-chief of Warscapes magazine. She is the author of Cold War Assemblages: Decolonization to Digital and co-editor of the forthcoming Insurgent Feminisms: Women Write War. She has written for The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Africa is a Country, among other places.

Reviews

"Shimrit Lee's provocative and lucid book is part-investigative report where the museum resembles a crime scene and part-polemic that grapples with what it would look like to upend the current ways in which museums are organized and function. Lee makes the convincing argument that museums must fall, and it is time we start taking this imperative seriously."
- Sean Jacobs, founder and editor of Africa Is a Country and author of Media in Postapartheid South Africa

"This book takes us through, and far beyond, the museum as a contested space, raising urgent and complex questions about its future. Through her historically insightful and comprehensive take down, Shimrit Lee asks us to reconceptualize the museum in its entirety. She tears down the facade that museums were ever neutral, tracing their role in shaping, and perpetuating, structures of racial capitalism. Lee shows us that decolonizing museums revolves around creating an expansive sense of justice that moves us beyond its walls. Getting it right, she reminds us, means nothing less than liberation for us all."
- Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Assistant Professor of Black Diasporic Art at Princeton University and author of Black Bodies, White Gold

"... in-depth research, which interrogates the foundations of museum and curatorial principles, makes Decolonize Museums an abundant read-it should be stocked in every museum gift shop worldwide."
-Full-Stop

Book Information
ISBN 9781682193150
Author Shimrit Lee
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint OR Books
Publisher OR Books