Troubling Southness in museology: reflections on a funded cultural project

This essay presents a reflection on a funded cultural project focused on museum work in the Global South (2020–2024), and raises questions about power, hierarchy, and legibility in the contemporary museum landscape. Focusing on the ways in which knowledge is produced about museums, and drawing from the published material developed through the project, the authors analyse how “southness” as framed within this project speaks to broader interpellative structures within a global cultural knowledge economy. The authors locate tensions between embedded and localized museum work practised by museum-workers in complex and turbulent social contexts (such as Maputo, Bahia, Ahmedabad), and the imperative to make museum-work legible within a larger discursive network or knowledge economy. Ultimately, the authors point to the limitations and inadequacies of existing museological terminology and concepts, which remain tethered to larger imperial structures of thought, and argue for a recourse to experimental and bold practices of translation and imagination within museology and cultural work.