This chapter returns to the first theme – cultures and culture wars – and questions as to whose knowledge counts. Here the focus is on cultural strategies for engaging with experiential forms of knowledge, engaging with people's emotions and building empathetic understandings through the arts. The focus is upon learning about slavery, colonisation and decolonisation in this chapter, understanding exploitation and oppression in different ways, touching our emotions and stimulating our abilities to imagine alternative futures.

Chapter 2 explored the contested notion of culture itself, ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’, according to Raymond Williams (Williams, 1988: 87) – cultures as whole ways of life, linked to societies’ productive bases but not in crudely determinist ways. Cultures reflect social relationships and structures of feeling, as Williams went on to explain, with working-class values of mutual aid and co-operation standing in contrast with the hegemonic ideas that Gramsci identified as the prevailing ‘common sense’ (Gramsci, 1968). Previous chapters have questioned these ‘common sense’ assumptions about the status quo and the assumed superiority of the ‘free’ market, along with ‘common sense’ assumptions about the nature of knowledge and whose ideas really count.

This chapter moves on to focus on culture in terms of the arts more specifically too, including museums and galleries. Cultural strategies have been promoted to re-enforce the prevailing common sense, just as they have been promoted to challenge existing norms and values, offering different ways of thinking about the past, as illustrated in the previous chapter's discussion of the display of slave trader Edward Colston's statue. Most importantly, the arts can also stimulate new ways of imagining alternative futures. There have been significant implications here for community education and development, exploring the contributions of the arts, including the visual arts, poetry, drama and song, raising awareness and strengthening solidarity in the pursuit of equalities and social justice during the apartheid years, as outlined in Chapter 5.

Decolonising museums and galleries

Museums and galleries provide illustrations of just such cultural strategies and challenges, testifying to the violence of Britain's supposedly ‘civilising’ mission and the resistance that this has provoked, along with the backlash that has followed in its turn. Battles have been, and are still being, waged over Britain's cultural heritage.