Routledge Sentient Relics: Museums and Cinematic Affect

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, semiology and psychoanalysis. Sentient Relics, while valuing the insights of ideologically focused 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. Review Sentient Relics is an astonishing book: a veritable crystalline artifact endlessly refracting countless impressions. Not only does every phenomenon she considers, whether cinematic or museological, foreground the theatricalities of affect, but Baker makes extraordinarily clear exactly why Plato was right about why mimetic artistry of any kind is deeply dangerous to the souls of citizens: precisely because it calls attention to the artifice, fabricatedness, and contingency of what any hegemonic power projects, promotes, and enforces as social, cultural or theological truth. - Donald Preziosi, Professor Emeritus, UCLA, USA About the Author Janice Baker is a lecturer in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia.