Decolonizing the museum: Leila Aboulela’s “The Museum”

ABSTRACT

Leila Aboulela’s short story, “The Museum”, was the winner of the first Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000, arguably the most prestigious contemporary award for African writing. Ben Okri, the chair of the first Caine Prize, praised the story as “moving, gentle, ironic, quietly angry and beautifully written”. This article examines how Aboulela’s story engages the interrelated politics surrounding museums – as institutions of power, sites of knowledge production and of memory and memorialization that construct particular narratives of the past and present, cultural spaces that narrate the nation; and as “contact zones” or spaces of encounter and conflict. Aboulela’s story contributes to the timely discourse about the politics and poetics of museum spaces and practices in the context of the work of decolonizing institutions and knowledges, and serves as a reminder that western museums have not kept pace with the complex realities of a rapidly globalizing and multicultural world.

KEYWORDS:

• Decolonization
• postcolonial
• Africa
• museums
• memorialization
• Leila Aboulela

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Journal of Postcolonial Writing anonymous reviewers for their kind feedback and insights, from which this article has benefited.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This scene has received some excellent online commentary. See pieces by Ragbir (2018), McCauley (2018), and Haughin (2018).

2. As De Angelis et al. (2014) note in their introduction to The Postcolonial Museum, “[m]useums will have to reinvent their language to face the challenge of the contemporary, an epoch massively informed by migrations, planetary interdependence and networks of fluxes and information, and yet still deeply scarred by old and new colonialisms, marginalization, economic and political inequality, racisms and sexisms” (11).

3. The Caine Prize is a Britain-based £10,000 prize that was founded in 1999 with the intent to “to encourage the growing recognition of the worth of African writing in English, its richness and diversity, by bringing it to a wider audience” (quoted in Attree 2013, 36).

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Anupama Arora

Anupama Arora is professor of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. She is co-editor of the open-access Journal of Feminist Scholarship, and on the editorial board of Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Her work has appeared in South Asian Popular Culture, The Journal of Postcolonial Writing, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, Women’s Studies, and Early American Literature, among other journals and collections.