Authors

Mollie Arbuthnot¹;  ¹ University of Cambridge, UK

Discussion

In the 1920s and 30s, museum curators in Central Asia grappled with how to redefine the role of a museum in the Soviet age. Some new museums established textile workshops to bring indigenous expertise into museum space, while others discarded categories that divided (local) “craft” from (European) “art.” Curator-scholars such as Boris Denike (1885–1941) advocated for retrieving a premodern “authenticity” and emphasised the value of craft as an educational tool. This paper takes as its case study the Main Central Asian Museum (Tashkent), and considers attempts to revolutionise, even decolonise, the museum. Many innovations in Soviet museology aimed to disrupt the Eurocentric values of the imperial museum, with a strikingly contemporary understanding of the museum as a multivalent site of knowledge production. This paper takes the anti-imperial potential of these changes seriously, without losing sight of the profound Eurocentrism of Soviet cultural projects, nor of lingering Orientalism within the museum as an institution. Categories of imperial self and other, Soviet and ‘national’ were particularly fluid and contested in this period, and these categories were made and staged in museums, and navigated by artists and makers, in contradictory ways. This paper shows, therefore, how the self-consciously anti-imperial ideology of early Soviet socialism partially challenged and reinvented, but also partially perpetuated, imperial power imbalances and hierarchies of knowledge.