Invisible imperialism: Race, power and the construction of the other in the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, and the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto

I argue that the Royal Ontario Museum and the Canadian Museum of Civilization are two museums that are part of a tradition of the imperializing racist imaginary normalized as state culture in which the racialized Other is relegated to various roles in the construction and regeneration of a white supremacist narrative of state nationalism in the exhibits and the museums' spatial forms. In the Royal Ontario Museum this is spatially enacted through a replication of imperial emblems and historical architecture, and as exhibitions affirming invasion and trade and through stereotypes of Africans and Indigenous Peoples as inferiorized Others. In the Canadian Museum of Civilization, imperialism is made invisible and affirmed in the very prominence of Indigenous content and architecture which work to provide a backdrop for white Canadian state conquest, extractive, and technological culture.