Refusing the Colonial Gaze: Indigenous Literatures and the Museum - Einzelansicht

Museums are contested sites of cultural memory organization and knowledge production, spaces of historical ordering, and institutions that craft - and attempt to control - narratives of national identity. Museal practices of collecting, sorting, and displaying often take place within highly uneven power structures marked by violence. In North America, museums have been key to erasing Indigenous peoples’ histories and presence by perpetuating the trope of the ”Vanishing Indian”, that is, of Indigenous peoples ‘disappearing’ in the course of settler-colonial history as one of national progress. This narrative of seemingly inevitable cultural loss in turn functions to justify practices of ‘salvaging’ and ‘preserving’ material remainders, both human remains and cultural ‘artifacts’. In Germany, museums that exhibit Indigenous cultures are deeply implicated in these settler-colonial histories, narratives and logics. Additionally, they have to reckon with their very own legacy of ”Indianthusiasm” (Lutz), a German obsession with the ”Indianer” figure, and matters of repatriation.  

Museums are multiple and place-specific, and so are debates about museums and their changing practices. In this class, we will, on the one hand, work to dismantle colonial museums, their structures, practices, and ethics. On the other, we will closely look at museum exhibitions that refuse colonial ways of seeing and knowing. We will analyze museum exhibitions and their representations in literature—specifically Indigenous literatures of Turtle Island (North America)—ranging from such diverse contexts as Canadian and US-American museums, Indigenous-led exhibitions and museums, as well as German museums, such as the Humboldt Forum. We will discuss the role of literature in debates concerning museum ethics and practices, including repatriation and decolonization, questions of agency in museal spaces and their narratives, as well as the status of ‘artifacts’ as ‘objects’ and ways of caring for them.

Such discussions demand careful attention of situated knowledge (production) and of the role of the reader/viewer as a co-producer of meaning, which we will attend to throughout class. Students should be ready to approach the texts and exhibitions with open-mindedness in order to challenge and critically rethink their own assumptions, and to engage with each other in a shared process of learning.

We will discuss a range of short texts forms (from short story to drama) as well as a digital exhibition. We will also visit and participate in a guided tour of the Humboldt Forum’s exhibition ”Ts’uu Cedars: Of Trees and People”, co-curated by the Haida Gwaii Museum at Kay Llnagaay in British Columbia, Canada. The tour will take place in Berlin on June 10, 4-6pm.

Please note that this is a reading-intensive class. All literary and critical materials will be provided in class.

short paper: written engagement with the “Ts’uu Cedars” exhibition, based on the museum visit (graded or pass/fail)

term paper (graded)