The development of large metropolitan museums in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was closely tied to the European colonial project and implicated in the construction of race and ethnicity as well as national identities in the colonial world order. The independence of the colonies posed serious challenges for conventional ethnographic museum displays, but postcolonial developments have provided an impetus for a rethinking of museums and museology in a new world order where cultural heritage is commoditized and identity is political. Museums are privileged sites for the performance and contestation of postcolonial identities.