Abstract
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.
Presenters
Sarike van SlootenStudent, Doctorate, NHL Stenden University of Applied Sciences, Groningen, Netherlands
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
POSTCOLONIALMUSEUM,MULTIPERSPECTIVITY,VISITOREXPERIENCE
