1st Edition

Museums, Power, Knowledge Selected Essays

By Tony Bennett Copyright 2018
354 Pages
by Routledge

354 Pages
by Routledge

354 Pages
by Routledge

Few perspectives have invigorated the development of critical museum studies over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as much as Foucault’s account of the relations between knowledge and power and their role in processes of governing. Within this literature, Tony Bennett’s work stands out as having marked a series of strategic engagements with Foucault’s work to offer a critical... Read more

Preface; Acknowledgements; List of Figures; Note on the text; Introduction: Museums, Power, Knowledge; PART 1. CIVIC ENGINES; Chapter1. The Exhibitionary Complex; Chapter 2. The Multiplication of Culture’s Utility; Chapter 3. Museums, Nations, Empires, Religions; PART 2. MACHINERIES OF MODERNITY; Chapter 4. Museums and Progress: Narrative, Ideology, Performance; Chapter 5. Pasts Beyond Memories: The Evolutionary Museum, Liberal Government and the Politics of Prehistory; Chapter 6. Pedagogic Objects, Clean Eyes and Popular Instruction: On Sensory Regimes and Museum Didactics; Chapter 7. Exhibition, Difference and the Logic of Culture; PART 3. ASSEMBLING AND GOVERNING CULTURES; Chapter 8. The ‘Shuffle of Things’ and the Distribution of Agency; Chapter 9. Collecting, Instructing, Governing: Fields, Publics, Milieus; Chapter 10. Aesthetics, Culture and the Ordering of Race: Boas and the Boasians; Chapter 11. Re-collecting Ourselves: Indigenous Time, Culture, Community and the Museum; Notes; References; Index

Biography

Tony Bennett is Research Professor in Social and Cultural Theory in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, Australia. His research spans across museum studies, cultural studies and sociology. His contributions to museum studies include The Birth of the Museum (1995), Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism and, as co-author, Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums and Liberal Government (2017).