ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the relationship between digital media in collections and postcolonial critique. By working at two scales, a top-down exploration of postcolonial theories of representation (focusing particularly on ideas about instrumentality, mimesis, and agency) and how they may be applied to digital collections, and a bottom-up case study of how these issues are engaged with on the ground in museums and archives (with a particular focus on India), we aim to open up questions about the importance of digital media in challenging the key power relations, and ideas about normativity, that are often implicitly encoded within museum projects as well as to explore tensions between theory and practice in museums and collections.
