Decolonial Narratives in Italy: Muciv and Mudec Between Colonialism and Fascism #1012026

This excerpt is part of the volume Visual Narratives, Aesthetics and Decoloniality: Imagery and the Construction of the ‘Other’. Vol. 1 – Decolonial Aesthetics, Ontologies and Epistemologies, edited by Tomás Cajueiro and Estevão Bosco, published by Ventura Edizioni.



The international debate around museums as contact zones originates with James Clifford’s well-known essay (1997), which takes up the notion developed by Mary Louise Pratt (1991). Pratt described the contact zone as a meeting and conflictual space between cultures marked by profound asymmetries of power, while Clifford highlighted its museological application: museums as sites of negotiation, collaboration, and conflict between Western institutions and source communities. From this perspective, scholars such as Ruth Phillips (2005) and Rhiannon Mason (2006) underlined the role of museums as permeable spaces, traversed by processes of transculturation (Ortiz 1940). The adoption of the postmodern paradigm of new museology (Macdonald 1998) reinforced this vision, privileging education and participation over the sole collecting function.