Decolonizing the museum: Leila Aboulela’s “The Museum”

Abstract

ABSTRACT Leila Aboulela’s short story, “The Museum”, was the winner of the first Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000, arguably the most prestigious contemporary award for African writing. Ben Okri, the chair of the first Caine Prize, praised the story as “moving, gentle, ironic, quietly angry and beautifully written”. This article examines how Aboulela’s story engages the interrelated politics surrounding museums – as institutions of power, sites of knowledge production and of memory and memorialization that construct particular narratives of the past and present, cultural spaces that narrate the nation; and as “contact zones” or spaces of encounter and conflict. Aboulela’s story contributes to the timely discourse about the politics and poetics of museum spaces and practices in the context of the work of decolonizing institutions and knowledges, and serves as a reminder that western museums have not kept pace with the complex realities of a rapidly globalizing and multicultural world.