“Changing up” the museum: cultural translation and decolonial politics

Abstract

This paper argues that the dialectic of colonial / decolonial is both too comprehensive and too polarizing to be useful in the granular work needed to change up the deep structures of Western museological practice. It proposes that we think instead of the museum as a site of cultural translation that deploys approaches of “foreignization” and “thick translation” as theorized within the field of Translation Studies. The generative potentials of recognizing mistranslation and untranslatability are explored as well as the relationship of critical hybridity to the ongoing need for re-translations that respond to changing societal needs.