Beyond Exhibiting the Experience of Empire?

Abstract

This article applies Mikhael Bakthin’s concept of ‘chronotope’, understood as the ways in which writers narrate time and space and thus create worlds which enable subjectivities to emerge, to Tony Bennett’s ‘exhibitionary complex’. More precisely, I self-critically discuss two projects questioning the ocularcentric and objectifying chronotopes of museums: a film project on a colonial collection from the Niger Delta, today’s Nigeria, at the National Maritime Museum in London and the curatorial project ‘The Blind Spot’ at the Kunsthalle Bremen in Germany. Both projects depended on the collaboration with anti-racist and diasporic partners who introduced performative ways of narrating colonial pasts, contradicting victimising accounts of colonisation and challenging white visitors to engage with embodied experiences of Empire. Moreover, my collaboration partners insisted on defining themselves and their histories beyond experiences of Empire and on envisioning decolonial futures. Can these chronotopes be brought into dialogue with the museums’ attempts to come to terms with their colonial pasts?