Decolonize This Place!

Decolonize This Place! is a radical activist movement, based in New York City, that engages with various social justice issues relevant to museums, such as race and racism, indigenous rights, gender issues, Palestinian rights, and gentrification. Their argument is that museums are symbolically and organizationally associated with various colonial and socially oppressive legacies and that challenging them, by means of public interventions, is a way not only to challenge the governance and programme focus of museums themselves but also the broader issues at hand. Their much-publicized interventions have taken place at museums such as the Brooklyn Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Whitney Museum, and an offshoot has also engaged the Tate Gallery.

The pointedly named Decolonize This Place! is one of the most radical, and controversial, of several such action groups, some of them organized and others more informal, that have in recent years questioned the ideological premises of museums and their connections to historical and present-day socio-economic and political power. Such interventions and the broader debates they have generated have already led to substantive changes in the governance and programmes of museums in North America and Europe, which are now subject to intense public and critical scrutiny in almost everything they do. The debate about restitution of cultural artifacts that were looted during the colonial period, such as the Benin Bronzes, is part of this broader dynamic and has begun to yield concrete results.

Museums, as we know them today, indeed originated in the colonial period and their foundational outlook and functions were directly linked to the colonial project. The activities of exploring, discovering, collecting, and classifying that gave birth to the modern museum indeed emanated from, and supported the ideology that sought to justify colonialism and White supremacy. Although there have been significant efforts to foster change, this legacy still lingers today in terms how museums are governed; their articulated and unspoken guiding philosophies; the priorities reflected in their exhibitions, collections, and programmes; and their manner of engagement with stakeholders and the public. One area of focus in museum activism in North American and the United Kingdom has been the museum boards, and the association of certain members with extreme wealth and privilege, questionable business practices, problematic present-day politics, and historical injustices such as slavery. There have been calls for such boards of trustees to be replaced by community councils, which would make museums more directly accountable to the communities they are supposed to serve.

The question arises as to how all this affects the museums of the Caribbean, as many of the museums in the region are also rooted in colonial history and, undeniably, reflect colonial hangovers. There is, however, no museum activism in the Caribbean that compares to what has been taking place in North America and Europe. There has been some activity in and around Puerto Rico, which has a long history of cultural activism related to its ambivalent, neo-colonial status vis-a-vis the USA, and earlier this year there was a major governance crisis at the Memorial Acte Museum in Guadeloupe, which was vigorously challenged by the local arts community. And there is ongoing uproar in the Barbados artistic community about the delayed opening of their long-announced national art gallery. But other than that, it has been incredibly quiet in terms of interrogating and addressing the ideological premises and social implications of museums of the Caribbean. Many people in the Caribbean simply dismiss museums as inherently elitist institutions that are of limited general consequence but sort of tolerate them, because they also serve as tourist attractions.

In Jamaica, only few appear to be particularly concerned about how colonial legacies live on in local museums such as the National Gallery of Jamaica, National Museum Jamaica, and the other public museums associated with the Institute of Jamaica. The Institute of Jamaica was established in 1879, under patronage of the then colonial governor Sir Anthony Musgrave, and it thus effectively started as a colonial institution. This was challenged from the 1930s onwards, in the context of the anti-colonial, nationalist movement, and the new statute the Institute of Jamaica received in 1978 under the Institute of Jamaica Act represented a major attempt at shedding the baggage of colonialism. The Institute has, nonetheless, never been able to fully shed its colonial image, and remains very “colonial” in its ways, despite the now routinized use of decolonial rhetoric in its programmes, exhibitions and publications.

The organization and its affiliates, for instance, are rigidly hierarchical in their staff structure and operations, and often seem to be geared more towards pleasing the political directorate of the moment than the broader interests of the public. It does not help that its boards are politically appointed, and that most appointees are persons with a significant amount of social, economic, and political capital and hardly representative of the socio-economic diversity of the Jamaican people.

Nowhere are the colonial legacies that haunt the Institute of Jamaica more obvious than in its lengthy and highly officious public functions, although this is a broader cultural problem in Jamaica. The multi-layered ceremonial, with introductions of the introductions of the guest speakers, the messages from the minister and the chairman, the endless and repeated acknowledgements of all the notables present, and the hierarchical seating arrangements, all represent a quite needless genuflection to social power and hierarchy. It makes those who are not so acknowledged, or provided with reserved seating in the front, feel like less welcome and important second-class citizens, who are doomed forever to sit in the back, literally and figuratively. It is an approach to public engagement which causes many people to opt out of our cultural institutions, rather than to draw them in, and it is hardly the ethos one would expect a publicly funded postcolonial cultural institution to display.

It was, for instance, disheartening to view the video on masterpieces in its collection that the Institute produced for Heritage Month last year. What ought to have been an exciting and engaging presentation on the many important historical and cultural treasures held by the Institute of Jamaica, instead replicated, furthermore in a pre-recorded and edited video, the sort of public ceremonial the Institute has become notorious for, with all the salutations, messages, introductions, “cultural items”, and votes of thanks that entails. Of the one-hour video, less than 15 minutes was spent on the selected collection items, in what was an amazingly misguided and topsy-turvy approach to public engagement. It is troubling that the Institute of Jamaica would have thought that this was the right and proper way to approach this project. It is high time for the Institute and its affiliates to recognize and rethink how they engage with the public and what they can do to engage with its audiences in a more inclusive and less hierarchical fashion.

The point I wish to make here, however, is that there needs to be a more thorough and inclusive debate on how Caribbean museums and cultural institutions are governed and operate, to ensure that this is in keeping with twenty-first century needs in postcolonial societies and does not replicate the ideologies and practices these cultural institutions ought to challenge. Decolonizing the cultural institutions of the Caribbean is a matter that requires our urgent and concerted attention, as the lingering colonial legacies have negatively affected the governance, programmes and reach of these institutions and the public perceptions that surround them. Let us decolonize this place right here in the Caribbean!

Dr Veerle Poupeye is an art historian specialized in art from the Caribbean. She lectures at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, and works as an independent curator, writer, researcher, and cultural consultant. Her personal blog can be found at veerlepoupeye.com.