Spectres in the Museum: A Curatorial Case for Hauntology

This article reflects on MUSE (2014), my curatorial intervention into the Banff Park Museum. In particular, I discuss how the exhibition attempted to disrupt the colonialist stasis of a site that the Historic Sites and Monument Board of Canada has termed a ‘museum within a museum’. As a now-anachronistic example of a natural history museum, the Banff Park Museum problematically sustains its colonialist origins in the Canadian West. Working with Jacques Derrida’s theory of hauntology from Spectres of Marx (1994), I explore how the curatorial framing of MUSE ’s interventions dismantled specific ideologies of colonialization and heritage culture.