UCLA

Museums are significant mechanisms that contribute to the creation and maintenance of social norms and ideologies. With calls for increased representation, repatriation, and in the most extreme cases complete extermination of cultural institutions, museums are experiencing an unyielding crisis. My project emerges from this crisis and turns to African and Indigenous knowledge systems that present a counter model to hegemonic epistemological practices in museums. I conducted fieldwork in S�o Paulo, Brazil to analyze the Museu Afro Brasil, as a case study. The case I examine explicitly centers the lives and histories of Afro-diasporic populations. My research poses several important questions: In what ways does colonialism persist in any given museological institution? How can a focus on non-Eurocentric ways of knowing change how museums operate? Can Afro-Indigenous frameworks allow new types of museums to emerge? This dissertation calls for a paradigmatic shift in how we discuss and understand decolonizing museums. I argue colonial ideals of individualism and universalism are antithetical to decolonial processes and must be replaced by ideologies that center collectivity. I close the dissertation by encouraging museum leadership to reflect on their own unique circumstances and from that reflection develop specific strategies that can assist in their own museological institutions.