"The Exhibition of the Colonial Gaze": Deconstructing Colonial Legacies in the Museum

The legacy of the anthropological museum has been entrenched in violent histories rife with domination, civilizing strategies, and power imbalance. The institutions that remain preserve their vestiges alongside an inheritance of privilege, existing as long withstanding monuments of genocide. The employed theoretical framework of this thesis is fundamentally interpretivist, poststructuralist, and critical in theory, with consideration to Affect Theory, phenomenology, Marxist ideology, and Foucauldian power structures, alongside minor influence of structural functionalism. This thesis explores the colonial legacies of museums, museology, and the affective attachments of museum objects through research into the violence of silence, the politics of memory, and the social practices of temporality and spatiality. These concepts, although diverse, are inseparable when considering the circumstances of museums and will be contextualized by primary research interpreted through the qualitative research method of Critical Discourse Analysis. The analytical framework of the primary research is therefore based on critical inquiry and will address the systemic power imbalance within museums. This will include critical inquiry into Canadian colonial settler history and the implications it has on modern museum ideology, the presentation and provenance of the ceremonial Kwakwaka’wakw bumblebee masks that are in the possession of the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology, the institutional governance associated with the masks parallel colonial history, observations of the collaborative installation featuring contemporary artist Marianne Nicolson, and Critical Discourse Analysis of various publications and interviews regarding the masks. This research illustrates the Museum of Anthropology’s applications of coercive governmentality, the intrinsic colonial rhetoric that influences social discourse, and the problematic historical implications of obtaining and maintaining possession of the masks which will correspond to the theoretical engagement in the rest of the thesis. Museums pose a social problem for modern, united, circumstances of collective existence and establishing a solution for the future might be found through delegitimizing the institution and submitting the museum to undergo its own iconoclasm. This thesis ultimately postulates that separating museums from their colonial legacies is impossible, rendering decolonization efforts insufficient, thereby concluding that the monument of the museum should not remain on the Western cultural landscape when it is inherently connected to its colonial legacies.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.