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