Towards the Anticolonial Museum

Dan Hicks and Ciraj Rassool talk about the failure of ethnographic museums in the Global North and the need to rethink them in anticolonial terms. Together with Nanette Snoep and Nina Möntmann, they explore the notions of white infrastructures and necrographies that Dan emphasizes in his latest book, The Brutish Museums.

This interview is part of our “Museums in Motion Workshop Series”. Contributions will be uploaded every Tuesday. The podcast series curates dialogues about the future of museums and colonial collections in a global context. Conceived as a workshop, it presents conversations in an ongoing debate with scholars, curators, activists and others across space.

For those who prefer to listen to the podcast on the go, we provide the episode as mp3 file here. After a right click on the audio bar, you can select ‘save file’ and download it to your device.

Dr. Dan Hicks is a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Professor of Contemporary Archeology at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. Dan works on the material and visual culture of the human past, up to and including the modern, colonial, contemporary and digital world, and on the history of Archaeology, Anthropology Art, and Architecture.

Dr. Ciraj Rassool is Senior Professor of History at the University of the Western Cape and directs its African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies. He has published widely on South African public history, visual history, memory politics, and restitution. He was a trustee of the District Six Museum and a Councilor of Iziko Museums of Cape Town.