ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the problem of the body in current museum theory and practice. It considers what is lost by a museum paradigm that emphasizes visual display over other embodied experiences. The chapter offers a critical counterargument to the visual hegemony that dominates museum discourse. Theorizing the relationship between contact zones and contact points is a key aspect of the much larger project of defining colonialism in relation to the senses. The director of the museum explained that the displays had been completely renovated in 1993. Street protests are not the only instances in which the visuality of the museum has been challenged. The boundaries of the display paradigm have been transgressed not only in the trenches of exhibition controversy but also among the literati of museum design.
