Text in Context Proposal- British Museum

            For my Text in Context paper, I plan to work with Nagra’s British Museum to look at how institutions like the British Museum construct a narrative of British history and identity in conjunction with distinctly non-British cultural art and artifacts. How is the narrative of Empire reinforced by tying it closely to Classical Rome and (to some extent) Egypt, for example, while contrasting it against India and China? Essentially, I want to ask how the British Museum has used the trappings and iconography of other cultures in order to contextualize Great Britain, rather than to contextualize those other cultures, particularly how that reflects the value judgements we make as to which cultures are/were “civilized.” I will likely focus heavily on the organization of space within the museum, and on the way it shapes how the artifacts are viewed, and therefore what sort of metonym they become for their cultures of origin.