Decolonizing the Future through Archival Museum Fictions: The Case of Untold Microcosms

Calls for metropolitan museums to repatriate cultural objects have multiplied in recent years, but they have hit numerous legal roadblocks and political hurdles. Against the backdrop of these obstacles in terms of reparation politics, the short story collection Untold Microcosms: Latin American Writers in the British Museum (2022) proposes a symbolic form of reparation by reimagining and reactivating part of Latin America's forgotten cultural heritage that lays dormant in the museum storage. The article first discusses three different modes of narrativising museum objects. Engaging with the archival turn and cultural memory studies, it then analyses the collection's opening story, an Indigenous futurist tale on a boot-shaped vessel written by the Mixe writer Yásnaya E. Aguilar Gil.