For many summers before I started college, I worked at a historical park—a battlefield with a small museum. Our training manual contained words along the lines of, “People come here on vacation; they come here to have fun.” Kids would run around the play area dressed up in reproduction officer coats, while adults gathered for the introductory film, milled around the exhibits, and downloaded the park audioguide. Some of our visitors were avid amateur historians, but many probably wouldn’t choose to study history in their free time. Yet there they would stand in front of the wall panels about troop movements and camp followers, willing to engage and learn something.
Museums are commonly seen as places where “learning is fun.” Subjects that might have seemed boring in grade-school lectures—like history or science—become captivating when presented through light-up maps and dinosaur skeletons. Tactile and interactive, museums can infuse education with a sense of “wonder, awe, and discovery,” as a Smithsonian article on the British Museum begins.$^1$ And there’s a good reason for this: from their beginnings in displays of “bizarre” items to today’s “giant IMAX screens,” museums have always walked a fine line between “entertainment” and “education,” according to an NPR story of 2008.$^2$
Yet, as the Smithsonian piece points out, museums and the fun learning they offer also have problematic “origins."$^3$ Even today, museums in America and Europe often present history, art, and cultures from a colonialist perspective, as the growing movement to decolonize them has increasingly revealed. Consequently, the fun of a museum visit isn’t available to all visitors. As Sumaya Kassim writes in an article for Media Diversified*,* “to many white people” museums’ “collections” provide “an enjoyable diversion, a nostalgic visit which conjures up a romanticized version of Empire.” To people of color, on the other hand, they “symbolize historic and ongoing trauma” as their stories continue to be suppressed.$^4$
Tangibly, museums perpetuate colonialism in several ways, as Elisa Shoenburger lays out in a recent article for the website MuseumNext*.*These include museums’ geneses, the kinds of objects in their collections, and their interpretation of those objects. In the first place, the article points out, the time and money used to start museums was often based on exploitation. Hans Sloane, for instance, used wealth accrued from a plantation to build a large collection that he later donated to found British Museum.$^5$ Moreover, some European museums grew out of the “colonial discipline” of anthropology, according to a piece by Dan Hicks for The Guardian. These museums’ displays “institutionalized” the “racist ideologies” of anthropology, which classified non-Western objects as ancient, “primitive art” in contrast to the “civilization” and modernity of Europe.$^6$
Just as Western museums often have troubling origins, the provenance of the non-Western objects in their collections often involves violence and colonial conquest. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts still possesses bronze items from Benin, a major city in present-day Nigeria that was attacked by the British in 1897. The museum’s website explains that the bronzes were acquired due to “colonial occupation” and that some were stolen, but that “we hope to spark conversation about past conflicts and their legacies in a global world” by continuing to display them.$^7$
As Schoenburger points out, even in their presentation of objects, museums often reflect colonial ideas. She brings up museums’ continuing portrayal of indigenous cultures as “no longer living,”$^8$ citing a Norwegian museum director’s observation that indigenous items have frequently been “confined to ethnographic…museums, [they’re] never in art museums.”$^9$ Meanwhile, when the Louvre opened its Islamic Art wing in 2012, an article in the New York Times criticized its misleading organization. The exhibit, according to the article, took “hundreds of works of art from infinitely diverse cultures” and “lumped [them] together under the banner of Islam”— a reflection of the “19th-century construct” of “Islamic art.”$^1$$^0$ Moreover, museum exhibit text can also be extremely problematic, presenting a colonial worldview while being “perceived as neutral [and] authoritative,” as Schoenburger notes.$^1$ $^1$
What are museums doing to resolve these issues and decolonize? Some have returned stolen items. Particularly significant in this respect is France, which under Emmanuel Macron’s leadership has embarked on a program of repatriating objects taken from African nations.$^1$$^2$ Other museums, as Schoenburger discusses, have permanently altered their exhibits. She gives the example of Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History, which installed specially-commissioned works by a modern Native American artist to “contextualize” the older artifacts the museum displayed.$^1$$^3$
Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa, covered in an Atlantic article by Adam Hochschild, finished its redesign process in 2017. Hochschild highlights how the museum’s signage shifted to actively point out the one-sided story its collections tell. The museum’s photograph collection, for instance, is accompanied by a sign that reads, “They were almost exclusively made by white people and mainly show their perspective.” The museum also opened a “‘Colonial History and Independence’ gallery” showing colonial brutality through “atrocity photographs” and “pamphlets and books written to expose the system.”$^1$$^4$
The decolonization movement has also met with resistance. Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, writes against repatriation in a 2004 Guardian article. In a similar vein to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, he claims the British Museum and its collections provide a chance for visitors “to address through objects…questions of contemporary politics and international relations.” He also argues that the museum allows visitors to see the multiplicity of meanings and stories behind objects and works against restrictive national divisions. “Where else can the world see so clearly that it is one?” he concludes.$^1$$^5$
Museums should raise questions, feed curiosity, and provoke wonder. They should make learning relevant and meaningful and, to the extent possible, fun. But they must find a way to balance these goals with the necessity of respecting people’s right to tell their own stories, and to be heard. That is essentially what decolonization is about: “including perspectives at the museum that…historically were not” and ensuring people “have a role in curating their own history,” according to a 2018 Washington Post article. By doing this, museums can hopefully inspire an empathetic, and enduring, enjoyment of learning about difference, rather than one based on exoticism.$^1$$^6$ $^1$$^7$