Jennifer González interviews James Clifford about ‘decolonizing’ practices in museums. Tracing several of Clifford’s key contributions to museum studies, in books such as The Predicament of Culture (1988) and Routes (1997), their conversation briefly traces the early history of scholarly, curatorial and artist interventions in museums in the 1980s and 1990s. Turning to the contemporary moment, the conversation discusses current changes in museum practices of collecting, display and creating relations with diverse stakeholders. Clifford offers a checklist for decolonizing museums, emphasizing the contradictory, precarious ground underpinning all historical and institutional transformations. He advocates a complex, unfinished ‘realism’ of non-guaranteed possibilities.
Jennifer A. González (Wed,) studied this question.