Museums and difference

Museums and Difference offers the perspectives of scholars and museum professionals in tandem, using the concept of difference to re-examine how museums construct themselves, their collections, and their publics. Essays explore a wide range of examples from around the world and from the 19th century to the present, including case studies of special exhibitions as well as broad surveys of institutions in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Essays in part one representing difference: the people and institutions discussed in these essays all considered, or consider, cultural difference or its human avatar, the other to be representable. The second part: representing differently, presents a number of cases that fit into a different kind of history, a story of institutions or moment that questioned the prevailing relationship between exhibitions and difference.