Books in the Decolonize That! series

Behold thesleazy logic of museums: plunder dressed up as charity, conservation, and care.The idealizedWestern museum, as typified by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the BritishMuseum, and the Museum of Natural History, has remained much the same for overa century: a uniquely rarified public space of cool stone, providing anexperience of leisure and education for the general public while carefullytending fragile artifacts from distant lands. As questions about representationand ethics have increasingly arisen, these institutions have proclaimed theirinterest in diversity and responsible conservation, asserting both theiradaptability and their immovably essential role in a flourishing and culturallyrich society.WithDecolonizeMuseums, Shimrit Lee punctures this fantasy, tracing the essentiallycolonial origins of the concept of the museum. White Europeans atrocities werereimagined through narratives of benign curiosity and abundant respect for theoccupied or annihilated culture, and these racist narratives, Lee argues,remain integral to the authority exercised by museums today. Citing pop culturereferences fromIndiana JonestoBlack Panther,and highlighting crucial activist campaigns and legal action to redress theharms perpetrated by museums and their proxies,Decolonize Museumsarguesthat we must face a dismantling of these seemingly eternal edifices, andconsider what, if anything, might take their place.

Few urban critters are more reviled than the hipster. They are notoriously difficult to define, and yet we know one when we see one. No wonder: they were among the global cultural phenomena that ushered in the 21st century. They have become a bulwark of mainstream culture, cultural commodity, status, butt of all jokes and ready-made meme.But frightening as it is to imagine, for more than a century hipsters have been lurking among us. Defined by their appearances and the cloud of meaning attached to them-the cool vanguard of gentrification, the personification of capitalism with a conscience-hipsters are all looks, and these looks are a visual timeline to America's past and present.Underlining this timeline is the pattern of American popular culture's love/hate/theft relationship with Black culture. Yet the pattern of recycling has reached a chilling point: the 21st century hipster made all possible past fads into new trends, including and especially the old uncool. InDecolonize Hipsters, Grgory Pierrot gives us a field guide to the phenomenon, a symptom and vanguard of the wave of aggressive white supremacist sentiment now oozing from around the globe.