Flipping the narrative: Historical collections as sites of cultural diplomacy

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

The world’s museums feature extensive collections of cultural material made by Indigenous Australians, collected over extended periods in the context of disciplinary inquiry. The disciplines, their methods, and museums themselves today face a kind of public reckoning that not only questions the historical processes involved in the making of these collections, but also poses the question of what it means to maintain such collections and institutions. Underlying these questions is often the presumption that institutions operated and continue to operate without Indigenous agency, power, or control.
This article seeks to explore a different presumption: it considers museum collections as containing forms of historic cultural diplomacy enacted by Indigenous people themselves – as expressive of their desire to extend and deepen knowledges of culture and experience across cultural worlds. If we are prepared to recognize this as a legitimate form of agency, we can re-frame the world’s museums, from sites of ongoing colonization and dispossession to sites of cultural strength with the potential to shape and inform stronger, intercultural futures.

This article is based on a lecture given in honour of the late Yolngu leader W. Wanambi in conjunction with the exhibition Madayin: Eight Decades of Aboriginal Australian Bark Painting from Yirrkala.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)13-27
Number of pages14
JournalHumanities Research
VolumeXX
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 30 May 2024

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