Informal spaces to learn, find joy, and dream are necessary in re-shaping an increasingly dangerous world. Colonization, domination, surveillance, punishment, and hate rule the world we currently inhabit. Black queer and feminist thought encourages us to dream, to re-imagine a world that centers people over materiality and power. bell hooks, critically acclaimed author, professor, and activist, dreams of a world that relinquishes the understanding of love solely as a romantic noun. hooks urges us to understand love as an ethic in opposition of domination. In Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (1994), hooks writes on love, in hopes of a “progressive cultural revolution”. In chapter 20, “Love as a Practice of Freedom”, hooks teaches the idea of a love ethic. Through separating ourselves and our culture from colonization we allow ourselves the ability to "surrender participation in whatever sphere of coercive hierarchical domination we enjoy individual and group privilege."3 When thinking of surrendering our cultural ties to colonization, I wonder how museums, as cultural institutions, can be separated from colonial influence? In this essay, I explore the museum’s past, present and future in the context of a love ethic. By examining love’s place in the museum, and where it lacks, we are able to re-imagine a future where places of informal learning do not stem from nor center on colonialism.

---

[1] “Love as a Practice of Freedom”, bell hooks.
 

full essay coming soon. email me if you’d like to read more!


 Resources 

Almeida, Nora and Jen Hoyer. “The Living Archive in the Anthropocene,” in Libraries and Archives in the Anthropocene, eds. Eira Tansey and Rob Montoya. Special issue, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 2, no. 3, 2019.

Apoh, W, “Sankofatization And Decolonization”: The Rapprochement of German Museums and Government with Colonial Objects and Postcolonialism. Museum Anthropology, 43:(29-44), 2021. 

Mitchell, Timothy. “The World as Exhibition,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, (217-236), 1989.

Cahan, Susan. “Harlem on my mind at the Metropolitan Museum of Art” in Mounting Frustration: The Art Museum in the Age of Black Power. Durham: Duke University Press, (31-108), 2016.

Classen, C. and Howes, D. “The Museum as Sensescape: Western Sensibilities and Indigenous Artifacts.” In Edwards, Gosden, and Phillips, Sensible Objects, Oxford and New York, 2006.

Crang, Mike. “On Display: The Poetics, Politics and Interpretation of exhibitions” in Cultural Geography in Practice, edited by Jon May, Taylor & Francis Group, 2003.

Hooks, Bell. “Love as the Practice of Freedom.” Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representation, 1994.

Morse, Nuala. “The Problem of Engagement” The Museum as a Space of Social Care. Routledge, (29-65), 2021.

Moser, Stephanie. ‘The Devil is in the Detail: Museum Displays and the Creation of Knowledge’. Museum Anthropology (22-32), 2010.

Pallasmaa, Juhani. “Museum as an Embodied Experience” in Levent, N. and Pascual-Leone,  A. (eds.) The Multisensory Museum: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory, and Space, Maryland, Rowman and Littlefield, (29-44), 2014.

“The Power of Sankofa: Know History.” Carter G. Woodson Center, 20 Nov. 2017, https://www.berea.edu/cgwc/the-power-of-sankofa/.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. “The Power in the Story.” In Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, (1-30), 1995.

Witcomb, Andrea. “‘A Place for All of Us’? Museums and Communities” in Museums and Communities. Ed. Sheila Watson, London: Routledge, (133-156), 2007.

Vielot, Maggley. “All About Love book review”.

Inspiration :: the precarity of white narratives in storytelling

work in collaboration with:: Social Lives of Museums (Anthropology course with Dr. Urmila Mohan, NYU)