Seeing museums as criminological spaces of colonialism

This chapter explores how the concept of affect can help reframe museums as criminological spaces to reveal the role of museums in shaping understandings of colonialism, crime, and justice. The chapter first maps the evolution of museums in three phases: the scientific museum, the memory museum, and the human rights museum, underlining how each phase utilises senses and yet is kept removed from criminological inquiry. Here, senses are understood as external stimuli that are capable of producing emotions and feelings, otherwise known as affect. Using two museum visits, to the anthropological museum Museo Ethnographica in Florence and Barbadian-Scottish artist Alberta Whittle’s exhibition ‘Create Dangerously’ at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, the chapter creates a case for the insertion of museums into the discipline of criminology on grounds of the affect they produce. This study explains how museums can enrich and contextualise the relationship between criminal conduct, colonialism, and the State.