Sentient relics : museums and cinematic affect / Janice Baker.

Includes bibliographical references (page 126-134) and index.

Museum trouble : complicating the "new" inclusion -- Fissures and cracks : unfettering identity from the "new" inclusion -- Outcasting oedipus : the autonomy of affecting experience -- Show time! : psychoanalysing the museum to death -- Dangerous identity : museums in vertigo and the "truth" of false objects -- Museums and cinematic time -- Filmography.

"Sentient Relics explores museums through cinema and challenges the dominant focus of museum theory as an inclusion-exclusion debate. The author responds to the Enlightenment, 'rational' museum of reason contrasting this with the museum of affect and reveals these 'two museums' operating alongside one another in a productive paradox. In structuralist-orientated museum theory the affective realm is often subsumed within the imperatives of Marxist theory and practice, identity politics, feminism, semiology, and psychoanalysis. Sentient Relics, while valuing the insights of ideologically situated meaning-making, turns to the capacity of the affective realm of experience to transform the passive subject and object relation. The author uses museum encounters and cinematic affect to engage with problems of difference, temporality, emotion and the sublime. In so doing the book advances research in museum studies by demonstrating what is at stake in pragmatically working toward a deeper understanding of the museum socially, culturally and philosophically"--Provided by publisher.