Will the Musée du Quai Branly show France the way to postcoloniality?

Abstract

France has, arguably, struggled to negotiate its colonial history more than any other former colonial power. This article questions the declared purpose of the Quai Branly Museum to be France's first new museum of the twenty-first century, exploring its conceptualization, the complicated political and scholarly debates its opening triggered. The Quai Branly Museum wants to be a museum, but neither of purely art objects nor of social artifacts (most of which were collected by marine officers, missionaries, and anthropological expeditions during the colonial era). Architect Jean Nouvel has tried boldly to transcend that old disjunction, but his problematic architecture has much to reveal concerning the unconscious ways in which perceptions of non-Western cultures, which naturally informed the colonial expansionist enterprise, continue to inform contemporary debates on cultural and social diversity. The question remains as to whether the museum can evolve into an entity that will eventually foster more egalitarian and more culturally sophisticated aspects of the relationship between France and the formerly colonized.

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