ABSTRACT
The chapter identifies some of museums’ inherited borders and the colonial frontiers of museum action inflicted by modernity, aiming to propose an exercise for their deconstruction. This chapter draws on a genealogy of the borders that define museum classifications and our ways of perceiving the world through the colonised eye and in the mind of a universal subject invented in the West, by critically looking at the “postcolonial” discourse of Musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, in Paris, France. What we understand here as a “colonial divide” involves the compartmentalisation of the material world, aiming to produce forms of knowledge that can be dominated by the rational thinker. Such a colonial domination involves the appropriation of material culture followed by the domination of entire populations and the subjugation of marginalised groups. Looking at the division of the world by museums and their experts, which involves the modern separation between raw experience and discipline founded on rationality, I will argue that by relegating human experience to the borders of museum-authorised knowledge, museology has excluded certain subjects and their ways of thinking.
