Negotiating Race and Rights in the Museum

Negotiating Race and Rights in the Museum explores how museums have addressed and renegotiated calls for inclusion, self-definition, and racial justice, highlighting the emergence of 'post-race ideas and the persistence of White supremacy in the sector.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 168 pages
Publication date: 30 May 2022
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd

Tracing the evolution of pervasive racial ideas and 'post-race allusions over more than a century of museum thinking and practice, Negotiating Race and Rights in the Museum explores how museums have addressed and renegotiated broader calls for inclusion, 'self-definition, and racial justice in ways that continually re-center and legitimize the White frame. Drawing on the illuminating history of the Smithsonian Institution, this book offers an account of how museums have addressed and renegotiated wider calls for inclusion, 'self-definition, and racial justice, in ways that continually re-center and legitimize the White frame. Charting the emergence of 'post-race ideas in museums, Bunning demonstrates how and why 'culturally specific approaches have been met with suspicion and derision by powerful museum stakeholders against the backdrop of a changing United States of America, just as they have offered crucial vehicles for sectoral change. This study of the evolution of racial ideas in response to Black empowerment highlights deeply entrenched forms of White supremacy that remain operative within the international museum sector today, and serves to reinforce the urgent calls for the active disruption of racist ideas and the redesign of institutions. Negotiating Race and Rights in the Museum will appeal to those working in the international fields of museum and heritage studies, cultural studies, and American studies, and all who are interested in the production of racial ideas and White supremacy in the museum.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780367628017