The museum’s redemption: Contact zones, government and the limits of reform

Despite a history deeply implicated in an imperial, bourgeois and phallocentric social order, the museum is a cultural institution that can be redeemed from this legacy of racism, classism and sexism. Or so it would seem from reading the now burgeoning critical scholarship on museums. Here, almost all of the museum’s analysts argue that, in some way or another, the institution can be reformed so that it can overcome the exclusions of the past and realize its true democratic vocation. Seduced by the institution’s own rhetoric of its democratic potential, these cultural analysts produce redemptive narratives that ultimately mimic the reformism of the museum’s own political logic. Defending this contention, this article proceeds, first, by demonstrating the persistence of this redemptive narrative as an enduring trope in critical museum scholarship; second, it focuses on two sophisticated variations on this narrative - those articulated respectively by James Clifford and Tony Bennett. Third, drawing on Foucault’s work on subjectivation, this article proposes a critical politics that returns to museums not with the demand that they better represent ‘us’ so that ‘we’ can finally ‘discover who we are’, but rather with the theoretical and political injunction that, as modern institutional sites that subjectivize subjects, museums are one of those key cultural loci where ‘we’ might, indeed must, ‘refuse what we are’.