In Curating Worlds: Museum Practices in Contemporary Literature (2025), literary studies scholar Emma Bond forays into urgent debates concerning the future of public museums. On its face, a literary theorist’s intervention in museum studies discourse—and operational museology at that—might appear inconsequential. Experienced museum professionals have and continue to grapple with the nuts and bolts of steering their institutions from one crisis to another—the frequency of which has only accelerated in the 21st century. Bearing this reality in mind, what solutions, exactly, can the study of literature contribute to the survival of the public museum?
Bond’s book opens with clear-cut argumentative parameters. Curating Worlds neither aims to be prescriptive, nor does it hyper-valorize interdisciplinarity as the public museum’s saving grace amidst its crisis of representation. Alternatively, Bond’s book invites readers from various disciplines with a shared interest in the sustainability of academic and cultural institutions to consider the value and capabilities of cross-institutional intellectual dialogue and collaboration. For Bond, the survival of the public museum—along with other kinds of institutions—hinges on its adaptability to ever-heightening, global-wide political, social, economic, and environmental insecurity. Rich in comparative analysis and elegant close readings of novels that play with the museum as a representational form, Curating Worlds makes a strong case that world literature may provide strategies of reading that extend outward to strategies of collecting, curating, interpreting and preserving the material culture of globalization, tangible and intangible alike.
Bond’s approach to museum studies as an interdisciplinary scholar is exemplary in its scholarly humility, which is key to its argumentative rigor. Bond states plainly in the introduction that public museums have been in crisis from their inception, and thus, Curating Worlds’ ingenuity does not depend on presenting a brand-new problem. As scholar Barbara J. Black details in On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (2015), literary interest in museums as both a muse and potential threat has a long tradition.1 Writers of the Victorian Age often channeled anxieties about globalization and mass culture’s dissolution of the high vs. low brow binary—a division the museum was trusted to uphold—into experimental novels featuring vertiginous experiences of gallery spaces in which time protracts, and word and image collapse into one another, emblematic of the modern experience of culture. While Bond does not draw explicit thematic linkages across literary periods, her concept of the “museum novel,” a hybrid form narrating the complex web of people, places, historical time and objects, clearly has precedent, albeit insufficiently explored until now.
Bond’s categorization of the museum novel draws from the singular issues facing the twenty-first century museum, mirrored by contemporary novelists’ exploration of the effects of late-stage capitalism on the novel form, arguably nationalist, bourgeois and anthropocentric in origin. Bond argues that novelists belonging to the cadre of world literature writers have drawn from the museal form as a means of adapting the novel form to the crises of signification and its imperiled corollary: the project of liberal humanism. In the wake of transnational corporatization, forced migrations, frayed social relations triggered by late capitalism, and the forced reckoning of humanity with the myriad effects of climate change, Bond conjectures that the novel form has become museal by necessity, featuring experimental approaches to characterization, perspective, plot structure, setting, narrative time, and, most importantly, the fluctuating relationship between people and objects. As historicized by notable scholars such as Arjun Appadurai, Jane Bennett, Bill Brown, Daniel Miller, and Igor Kopytoff, globalization has and continues to render cultural objects subject to unpredictable circuits of movement and risks of erasure, and yet they are, nevertheless, signifiers of historical and cultural meaning and individual/collective containers of memories, especially those traumatic and unspeakable in nature. As such, Curating Worlds argues that the relevance and credibility of the public museum depends on its capacity to employ new strategies of object accession, documentation, exhibition, and interpretation that keep pace with the innumerable permutations of socialities comprising human-object relationships (artificial, natural, tangible, and intangible) that structure the contemporary world.
The anxieties of contemporary material culture (and material cultural studies), Bond argues, manifest in the public museum’s existential crises of the twenty-first century. Bond frames such crises within the story of the public museum’s origins. While Bond is not a museum studies scholar by training, she demonstrates broad, substantive knowledge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century museum history, along with well-chartered debates within the field about the role and function of museums. Bond’s rigorous application of interdisciplinarity bears out in her understanding of the limits of both representational forms at stake in her project, the novel and the museum. Bond proposes that the literary imagination, particularly as manifest in the novel form, facilitates reading and interpretative strategies that query the memory/history binary, the former of which has grown more important in the age of globalization with its constantly shifting constellations of meaning.
The array of topics covered in Bond’s study are in complicated relation, necessitating a nimble interdisciplinary method that can zoom in and out to capture nuances of history, hyperlocal and global scales, and the compression of space and time under late capitalism. As Bond insists, comparative literature invites theorizations of translation, transculturation, acculturation, and cultural hegemony. Ironically, then, comparative literature, a discipline experiencing similar existential threats as the museum amidst academic funding cuts, shows itself in Bond’s work as invaluable, if not critical, to understanding the museum in the age of the Anthropocene, during which relationships among peoples, places and things must be radically interrogated and retooled for the sake of planetary sustainability and collective, transspecies survival.
Thus for Bond, the museum novel as world literature curates miniature worlds of their authors’ making, a convention that Bond suggests may offer new exhibitionary strategies. This argument jettisons the fiction of an uncontestable, objective, stable, and completely knowable “History” for a radical openness toward the truer fictions of the twenty-first century world, abundant with rivaling historical accounts, the survival and authentication of which depends heavily on the object world: gifts, inherited valuables, private diaries, instruments of war, prized possessions damaged by war, and audiovisual media, to name just a few examples appearing in the novels comprising Bond’s close-reading driven analysis.
In Chapter 1, Bond recounts her visit to the San Sabba Rice Mill National Monument & Museum, a ricehusking factory in Italy that functioned as the only Italian Nazi concentration camp, named Risiera di San Sabba. Bond pairs the study of the musealized Risiera di San Sabba with engaging analysis of Croatian writer Daša Drndić’s 2012 novel Trieste, the plot of which is similarly palimpsestic in nature. Inspired by the Holocaust museum, Trieste details a collector’s fervent pursuit of the names of Italian Jews imprisoned at Risiera di San Sabba. Bond examines collecting as an innately unfinished project whose depiction in the novel impacts the modes of narration and the function of plot, which fails to deliver a cathartic conclusion. What is notable in this chapter is Bond’s incorporation of what Duncan Grewcock phrases as “reflexive museology,” an approach to studying museums that is self-reflective and self-referential.2 Bond frames each chapter around her own visits to museums and cultural institutions, providing first-person, thick description of the travel to and through the institutions, sharing her observations along with candid photographs.
In Chapter 2 Bond examines how curation puts together a “multi-stranded narrative world” (52). Bond turns to Claudio Magris’s 2015 novel Blameless to discuss the War Museum for Peace, emphasizing how spatial conditions necessitated a decentralized, non-authoritative approach to curation. In Chapter 3, Bond considers Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s intermedial project, The Museum of Innocence (2018) novel and built museum. Bond’s intellectual rigor is lucid in this chapter in its refusal to draw false equivalences between the forms of the novel and museum, treating them as distinct cultural forms although facing similar challenges. In this way, Curating Worlds avoids traps of the discursive turn in museum studies, wherein the museum is read in the light of structuralism/poststructuralism as a decodable text operating according to a system of encoded signs. An exploration into the “web[s] of rationality” (55), Pamuk’s novel allows Bond to clarify the boundaries between the novel form and museum form, as certain background information missing in the novel is made apparent in the physical museum, which opened in 2012. Such discrepancies between the reading and viewing experiences of the plot of The Museum of Innocence suggest that while novels can behave like museums, they are not museums. As such, while museums may have much to learn from novels in terms of world-building, story-telling, and language, the novel form is not a substitute for the museum as a distinct form comprising three dimensional objects and built space among other distinguishing representational elements.
In Chapter 4, Bond explores the architecture of Depot Boijmans van Beuningen, a museum that invites its visitors to activate open storage collections with the aid of technology. Bond juxtaposes this case study on virtuality in museums with a reading of Valeria Luiselli’s 2019 mixed-media inspired novel based on the US-Mexico border crisis titled The Lost Children Archive (2019). In the book’s fifth chapter on “Conservation,” Bond explores posthumanism through the lens of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights (2007) and the Josephinum collection of wax models. In her sixth chapter on “Restitution,” she examines the speculative function of the novel through a “reparative reading” (24) of Maaza Mengiosea’s Shadow King (2019), which enacts a form of symbolic restitution akin to a “reworlding” (144). Finally, Bond’s conclusion tackles the controversial practice of deaccession, the process through which a museum sells works in its collection, oftentimes with the goal of procuring funds to acquire objects that fill key gaps in a museum’s holdings. Such gaps have been brought to attention by a bolder, more globally-oriented museum public bent on keeping institutions accountable as reflections of their social realities.
Recent conferences and publications in museum studies following the heels of the Covid-19 pandemic attests to the fact that the 21st century museum is reckoning with an unparalleled level of existential crisis. Programs have included ICOM’s 2021 conference titled “The Future of Museums—Recover and Reimagine,” ICOFOM’s 2024 conference in Qatar, titled “The Future of Museums and Museology Practices in a Changing World,” the AAM’s “Future of Museums” virtual summit (2023), as well as edited books such as András Szántó’s The Future of Museums: 28 Dialogues (2020).The exploratory quality of the conferences and collections is matched by more declarative titles that toe more of a defensive line, including Why the Museum Matters by Daniel H. Weiss (Philadelphia Museum of Art CEO), and Tate director Maria Balshaw’s Gathering of Strangers: Why the Museum Matters (2024). Such discourses demonstrate a strong faith and investment in the founding ideals of the public museum. To its benefit, Bond’s Curating Worlds appears to share similar sentiment and speculation about the public museum as a critical site of memory activism in a global era during which state-sanctioned, reactionary politics has rendered societies—and their possessions— alarmingly susceptible to historical and cultural amnesia.
: :
Endnotes
- Barbara J. Black, On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (University Press of Virginia, 2000).
- Duncan Grewcock, Doing Museology Differently (Routledge, 2014).
Lucy Mensah