Enduring Legacies
A Postcolonial Museum? : Legacies of Colonial Histories in Museum Exhibitions in Europe, Africa, North America and the Caribbean View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sarike van Slooten
The past two decades have seen a notable awareness and an outburst of public and academic debates of the legacies of colonial histories. Most of these debates, revolving around issues concerning the acknowledgement and accountability of the enduring impacts of colonisation, challenged museums to rethink their collections and representations of the colonial past in the present. This study explores museum exhibitions of colonial histories through a tripartite approach by examining the relationship between the institution of the museum, the displayed objects, and the visitors’ experiences and perspectives. My main research question is: how are colonial histories represented in museum exhibitions in Europe, Africa, North America, and the Caribbean? In this study, I attempt to answer this question through a comparative analysis of different case studies of museum exhibitions across several colonial geographies within the trans-Atlantic trading route: The Netherlands, Curaçao, England, Ghana and the United States of America. This study yields extensive insights and understandings of museum exhibitions in relation to new museological values, a maximisation of multiple meaning-making or a construction of meaning from a local perspective, and a consideration of suitable museum pedagogy and experience in distinctive colonial geographies. It argues that a better connection between museums and contemporary debates of colonialism can be found through the imagination of the (im-)possibility of the construction of a postcolonial museum, the development of people-oriented and narrative-based exhibitions, and through a bottom-up system of representation that allows communities and visitors to co-create exhibitions.
Contested Narratives: A Comparative Analysis of Ainu-centered Spaces in Japan's Museum Landscape View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christina Spiker, Rika Ito
The Ainu are an Indigenous people native to the northern extents of the Japanese archipelago. Historically, they occupied the island of Hokkaido, the Russian peninsula of Sakhalin, and the Kurile Islands that stretch northeast towards Kamchatka. Despite their long historical roots in this territory, the Japanese government’s recognition of their rights and identities remains a site of contention. Our project follows the adoption of the 2019 Act on the Promotion of Ainu Culture. One outcome of this law was the creation of a new national Ainu museum centered on creating “The Symbolic Space for Ethnic Harmony” (or Upopoy in the Ainu language), which opened in 2020. In light of this new national museum, our project compares and contrasts approaches taken by Ainu-centered spaces at various levels: national, prefectural, municipal, and those run directly by Ainu communities. After three weeks of fieldwork visiting these sites, our paper analyzes the museum's visual, linguistic, and hands-on experiential aspects, with a particular focus on the narratives created at each site. We pay close attention to how museums promote or challenge official discourses and the outdated notion of the Ainu as a “dying race,” a discourse prominent in early twentieth-century Japan.
