Negotiating Race and Rights in the Museum traces the evolution of pervasive racial ideas, and -post-race- allusions, over more than a century of museum thinking and practice.
Drawing on the illuminating history of the Smithsonian Institution, this book offers an account of how museums have addressed and renegotiated wider calls for inclusion, -self-definition-, and racial justice, in ways that continually re-centre and legitimise the White frame. Charting the emergence of -post-race- ideas in museums, Bunning demonstrates how and why -culturally specific- approaches have been met with suspicion and derision by powerful museum stakeholders against the backdrop of a changing United States of America, just as they have offered crucial vehicles for sectoral change. This study of the evolution of racial ideas in response to Black empowerment highlights deeply entrenched forms of White supremacy that remain operative within the international museum sector today, and s
