Trauma and repair in the museum: an introduction

This introduction to the special issue on ‘Trauma and Repair in the Museum’ outlines the issues around reparation that surround the modern museum due to the traumatic legacies of coloniality. Timothy P. Brown’s notion of how the trauma of displacement and dissociation effects both objects and communities is key to our consideration of the museum as symptomatic of trauma, as is Cathy Caruth’s reading of history as trauma. Referring to several artists’ practices, such as Lisa Reihana, Erika Tan, and especially Kader Attia’s concept of repair, as well as a number of museological approaches to restitution, we expand on the complexities of on-going coloniality and its implication with museum as institutions, practices of collection and display, and highly charged psychoactive spaces. Eve Sedgwick Kosofsky’s re-reading of Melanie Klein’s notion of reparation allows us to posit a form of decolonial repair that involves the assembling of damaged part-objects into ‘something like a whole [but] not necessarily like any preexisting whole ’ (2002:128, original emphasis). This approach enables a reckoning with trauma and its legacies that keeps them visible without out-ruling processes of reparation.