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"Criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom." – Edward Said.Ìý

As museums have become crucial centres for decolonial protest and activism today, the vital role that they have played in the advent of imperialism and solidifying colonial systems of knowledge and representation has brought into question their validity as spaces of collecting, displaying, and cultural knowledge. Are museums obsolete? Is their past still present? What should their role be in contemporary society? Taking the lead from Edward Said's The World, the Text, and the Critic, this course will re-evaluate the museum's place and capacity for social, political, and cultural criticism. A central imperative of this course will be to probe the museum's historic (and continued) relationships to empire, colony, nation, capital, and (art) history. Discussions will explore the museum's origins in the 17th and 18th centuries, its intimate entanglements with European colonialism by the 19th century, and the crucial role it played in processes of decolonization and postcolonial nation-building in the 20th century, with special emphasis given to museums and collections in Britain and South Asia. As we think about and with museums, this course will also consider what it means for art historians to write about, with, and through institutional spaces and whether museums and exhibitions, as archives of materiality, fragmentation, space, and display, can enable different forms of art writing and criticism with the power to decentre our field.