Description
The Imperial War Museum, London, rightly self-presents as a global authority on armed conflict. This paper explores how its architecture helps to establish the museum as a space of expertise on political violence, while also unwittingly reproducing racial hierarchies. Distinctively, the IWM is housed in a former psychiatric hospital, the Bethlem Royal Hospital. Just like its predecessor, the asylum, the museum uses architecture to discipline the movement of bodies in space. This organized movement produces categories of meaning relevant to war, peace, and race. For instance, galleries with highly directed movement didactically support the demonstration that some deployments of force (such as those used by Germany during the First and Second World War against white Europeans) are illegitimate. In contrast, galleries with undirected visitor flows introduce other violent activities (those associated with liberal war, but also some militant activities often labelled as terrorism) as requiring a nuanced understanding. While the latter galleries attempt to stimulate critical thinking, they express what Paul Gilroy called ‘postcolonial melancholia’ – a neurotic aversion of the deliquescence of the British Empire and the violence that came with it. The paper concludes that IWM has much to gain from taking on board the insights of postcolonial critiques. Openly discussing the ‘small wars’ of empire would help Britain work through its postcolonial melancholia. In addition, managing space and movement so that non-White casualties of war may be grieved on a par with white ones would make the space more inclusive and supportive of racial equality.
