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 genealogy of the public museum, offering an account of its nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century development that has been constantly alert to the politics of museums in the present.
Museums, Power, Knowledge brings together new research with a set of essays initially published in diverse contexts, making available for the first time the full range of Bennett-s critical museology. Ranging across natural history, anthropological art, geological and history museums and their precursors in earlier collecting institutions, and spanning the eighteenth to the twenty-fi
