Decolonizing the Smithsonian: Museums as Microcosms of Political Encounter

This article investigates the relationship between politics, decolonization, and museums. It explores the curation of the Asian and African collections at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, 1950–1970, in the context of U.S. involvement in the “end” of European empire, Third World nationalism, and the Cold War. Close analysis of museum archives reveals the diversity, dynamism, and occasionally progressive nature of museum anthropology during a period often considered uninteresting and even moribund. It demonstrates the myriad entanglements between museums and U.S. government policy, and how cultural representation in the U.S. was influenced by the specificities of colonization and independence in different regions of the Global South. Museums are positioned as agents in mediating wider political change. In focusing on the cultural realm, the article reveals the denial and stasis involved in decolonization, even as it was understood in the ostensibly anticolonial U.S. By mapping museum practice onto global politics, and applying recent scholarship on political and cultural decolonization to museums, understandings of decolonization in the museum sector are also challenged: where “decolonization” in museum studies is most commonly used to refer to progressive, postcolonial policies, here it is framed as a more tentative, contradictory, and conservative phenomenon.

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