Museums, power, knowledge : selected essays / Tony Bennett.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 289-318 )and index.

Few perspectives have invigorated the development of critical museum studies as much as Foucault's account of the relations between knowledge and power, and their role in processes of governing. Within this literature, Tony Bennett's work stands out as having marked a series of strategic engagements with Foucault's work to offer a critical genealogy of the public museum, providing an account of its nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century development that has been constantly alert to the politics of museums in the present. 'Museums, Power, Knowledge' brings together new research with a set of essays initially published in diverse contexts, making available for the first time the full range of Bennett's critical museology. Ranging across natural history, anthropological, art, geological and history museums and their precursors in earlier collecting institutions, it discusses museum practices in Britain, Australia, the USA, France and Japan. By doing so, the book offers a compelling account of the shifting political logics of museums over the modern period.