The End of the Museum: Culture, Colonialism, and Liberation

This provocative book challenges frequently voiced assertions regarding museums as necessary and valued modern institutions. It raises fundamental, existential questions about contemporary museums as products of the modern colonial world order.

Drawing on practical examples of collecting and exhibiting, theoretical research, and critique from diverse countries across the globe, including Chile, India, Korea, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Palestine, Portugal, Sri Lanka and the United States, this book moves beyond the conventional Eurocentric museological framework. This book synthesizes contemporary critiques of museums, while arguing that societies need the sociocultural examinations that museums are capable of facilitating and that radical transformations of "the museum" are fraught with difficulty, but also possible and necessary.