Cultural Memories, Museum Spaces and Archiving

Th e purpose of this article is to investigate the museum as a site of cultural powers and traditions in the light of a postcolonial critique that highlights the histories, cultures and bodies that have been structurally repressed in order that a particular representation of modernity—that of the West—passes as the unique measure of the temporal and cultural coordinates of today’s world. Going on to argue that the past is never really past, and that memories and archives are not the site of dead matters, a radical reconfi guration of the museum and its institutional confi guration of knowledge is proposed. Turning time around, the prospect of a past—negated, refused and repressed—that comes to meet us from the future takes up residence in the critical, heterotopic space projected by the postcolonial museum; here it traces the possi