ABSTRACT
Seeing the human subject as a figure drawn to move between different national and cultural settings remains critical for understanding the implications that contemporary global conditions have for museums. The centrality of a global context to a reconceptualization of the human subject was made evident in the last decades of the twentieth century through the conjuncture between post-structuralist thinking and post-colonial conditions. An intense dialogue with the post-structural thought of Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze could be seen in key works by post-colonial thinkers, such as Gayatri Spivak (1988) and Homi K. Bhabha (1990). Equally, post-colonial conditions can be seen to have influenced the thinking in post-structuralist texts, such as those composed by Derrida and Cixous, who were themselves born in the colonial setting of French-dominated Algeria. Indeed, in a piece discussing the ways in which Jews living in Algeria under French rule negotiated their relation to French, Maghreb and Jewish culture, Cixous wrote of ‘a belonging constituted of exclusion and non-belonging’ (Cixous 2004). Such comments emphasize the relation between concerns centred on experiences of non-belonging and questions articulated in the body of post-colonial thought. As such, the relation between post-colonial and post-structural critique provides clues to the ways in which notions of the human subject were reformulated. The particularity of the relation should be regarded as a ‘sword that cuts both ways’.
