Museums in the colonial horizon of modernity

Museums in the Colonial Horizon of Modernity
Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum (1992)
WALTER MIGNOLO

I will argue here that museums in the modern/colonial world (that is, the way of life, economic principles, political structures, and models of subjectivities that originated in the sixteenth century with the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuits) had and still have a particular role toplay in the colonization of knowledge and of beings. The questions then are (1) how to decolonize the museum and (2) how to assess what a decolonial option reorienting the work museums can do (e.g., in a nutshell, reproducing the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality or entering in a spirit of epistemic and aesthetic disobedience undoing what museums did in modern/imperial history:learning to unlearn and to enact museums for decolonization of being and of knowledge).

Epistemic and Aesthetic Disobedience: On Modernity/ Coloniality and the Decolonial Option
Regarding the colonization of knowledge, just remember that at the same time that Europe accumulated money through the extraction of gold and silver in the sixteenth century, and through the exploitation of theCaribbean plantations and the massive slave trade in the seventeenth century, Europe also accumulated meaning. Museums and universities were and continue to be two crucial institutions for the accumulation of meaning and the reproduction of the coloniality of knowledge and of beings. By this I mean a certain ideal of the subject of subjectivity than, in its extreme manifestations, you can see today intelevision, the marketing and advertising in the New York Times or in any equivalent magazine or major newspaper in the world. There is a horizon of expectations driven by the will to possess (cars, watches, brand-name clothing, you name it) and be thin, have a certain figure, lose weight, not to think about yourself except in terms of being successful; and being successful means to
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Walter Mignolo buy a certain kind of watch and car, certain clothing and respond to a certain look. In a nutshell, to be, according to how you would like to be seen in a market-driven society. That is what I mean bycolonization of being. Slavery in the sixteenth century was another form of colonizing beings, and is still in force today on a global scale. One of the tasks before us is to engage in decolonial projects, learning to unlearn the principles that justified museums and universities, and to formulate a new horizon of understanding and of human living conditions beyond the sacred belief thataccumulation is the secret for a decent life. Now, once we analytically unveil the colonizing roles of the museum, what is next? Decolonization, of course, and decolonization of the museum should take place both in scholarship and in museum exhibits and performances. How can museums contribute to the decolonization of knowledge, being as they are in a milieu where the media is in full colonizing mode(with the exception of independent media), and where universities are becoming more and more corporate, losing the space for critical and decolonizing thinking? I will flesh out some of these ideas by looking at Fred Wilson’s 1992 installation Mining the Museum as an exemplary case of a decolonizing perspective, and my own argument will, on the one hand, support the exhibit and, on the other, continueits work in the domain of scholarship. Mining the Museum is indeed an exemplar of epistemic and aesthetic disobedience. I want to foreground the parallels and complicities between the accumulation of money and the accumulation of meaning in the modern/colonial world. The museum, as a western institution, is a paradigmatic example of such a confluence. “Accumulation of money” is a metaphor for...