The postcolonial museum and nonsynchronous heritage

Abstract

This essay proposes a concept of “nonsynchronous heritage” to reimagine the role of the museum in postcolonial times. Current discourses on the postcolonial museum have focused on important questions about decolonizing contested heritages, the restitution of looted artefacts, and making the space of the gallery relevant to minorities and non-hegemonic groups. However, these discourses cannot be detached from the problem of the museum as a cultural enclosure, a space born in an age of colonialism and capitalism. In postcolonial times, the aesthetic form of the museum shifted from an encyclopaedic exhibitionary complex to the sensorium of a capitalist utopia, embodying the extractive operations that also underlie formal subsumption and the international division of labour. From this point of view, the museum epitomizes a capitalist modernity fraught with inequalities and reflective of the expanding process of combined and uneven development. The heritage that museums conserve and appropriate cannot be reduced to the synchronicity of the present or a scenario of total commodification. As aesthetic form, the postcolonial museum rather testifies to globalization as a process of dialectical interlocking of different regimes of temporality. This nonsynchronous heritage can complicate the dilemmas pitting universalism against restitution, globalization against nationalism. A notion of nonsynchronous heritage drawn from the philosophy of Ernst Bloch can help rethink the role of the postcolonial museum. By no means external to the unevenness of capitalism, the contemporary museum displays a contested field of differing temporal strata and surviving historical ages still active in a turbulent and incomplete present.