ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how museums reshape their colonial heritage using the museum as a space for recognition and historical reconciliation. The postcolonial turn has been accompanied by the claims of cultural minorities for identity recognition all around the world, subjecting ethnography museums to new critical perspectives in terms of their goals and roles. The iconic image of the Queen Mother India that is reproduced at the exhibitions entrance, a coveted piece in the British Museum, sets the tone for a presentation that takes a global point of view, in as much as it is relative on the one hand to the museums own collection. The Colonial Theatre offers an inversion of how the world was visualised in colonial museum culture by adopting the use of the diorama to stage anew the layout introduced into the museum in 1938 to celebrate the forty-year reign of Queen Wilhelmina.
