Absent Histories and Absent Images: Photographs, Museums and the Colonial Past

摘要

Based on research in a range of UK museums, this paper explores the visibilityand invisibility of the photographic legacy of colonial relations and therepresentation of the colonial past in museum galleries. It explores the conditionsof the 'invisibility' and 'disavowal' of the colonial past in the historical narrativedeveloped by museums, and the anxieties that cluster around such narratives ina postcolonial and multicultural society. The paper argues that the photographiclegacy of the colonial past offers a way into those histories, but it is one that canonly be realized through the critical engagement with photographs themselvesand the work they might be made to do in museums. As an example, it examinesthe active and complex role of photographs played in the galleries of the BritishEmpire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol. It concludes that the failure ofmuseums to integrate colonial pasts into their narratives has worked against thewider liberal agendas to which museums subscribe, and that photographicinvisibility is both a symptom of and metaphor for the 'invisibility' of the colonialpast