Museums in Britain, Brazil, Ghana and Dominica are redeveloping their slavery exhibitions, and this project will directly shape what they display and how they involve communities in that process. The problem is that museums and heritage sites have long presented slavery’s history as a settled story—a wrong that was abolished—while protest movements like Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall have exposed how racial slavery built modern societies and still shapes inequality today. Yet the voices of people in the global south, who experience slavery’s afterlives differently from those in the north, have been largely absent from these debates. The project fills this gap by bringing together curators, historians, filmmakers and sociologists from Britain, Brazil, Ghana and Dominica to map local and global contestations, then co-create exhibitions, films and content with the communities most marginalised by these histories. If successful, the research will change how three key museums—at points of the transatlantic triangle—curate slavery’s material culture. It could shift curatorial practice from top-down authority toward inclusive, reparative approaches that acknowledge multiple, sometimes conflicting, meanings of the past.
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In the run up to the bicentennial of the abolition of the slave trade at the start of the twenty-first century, many in Europe and the US assumed there was a ‘we’ who agreed on the defining wrong of slavery, and the appropriate ways in which it can be represented in museums, heritage sites and other public spaces, and by whom. Today, those assumptions are publicly contested in multiple ways. Protest movements, including Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter, have foregrounded the arguments of critical race theorists concerning the foundational role of racial slavery in the development of the modern social and political order in Europe and the United States, and its continuing impacts. This has prompted a questioning of the ways in which the past of slavery and antislavery, and the continuing afterlives of slavery, are (and are not) publicly narrated, visualised and memorialised. In line with recent shifts in museum work towards centring audience authority and participatory practice, some curators have begun to respond by including in audience-led content creation communities that, in their specific national context, are most marginalised by these histories. However, the history of slavery was simultaneously global, national and local. It generated multiple and diverse injustices and divisions, and can hold different meanings in different contexts, even amongst those most marginalised by it. Moreover, its living legacies are not necessarily experienced in identical ways in global south and north, yet global south voices have been largely absent from debate on the presence of slavery’s undead past. Our mission is to include, amplify and differentiate marginalised voices from south and north in the process of researching, developing, testing and evaluating novel ways of curating the material culture and spaces of memory associated with transatlantic slavery. With its emphasis on inclusivity, diversity and equality, the Thrive model of team convening is ideally suited to research on how curators of museums and heritage sites can remember, narrate and represent the multiplicity and diversity of slavery’s past and afterlives, and develop ways to curate ‘against the grain’ of asymmetries in both north/south and racialised power. The project brings together a diverse team of curators, filmmakers, historians, anthropologists and sociologists from Britain, Brazil, Ghana and Dominica, to: map contestations around slavery at local, national and global levels; deploy pluriversal, collaborative, participatory methods with research participants from communities most marginalised by histories of slavery in those countries to develop and test inclusive methods of engaging multiple and diverse stakeholders; disrupt hierarchical top-down processes of meaning-making, and explore possibilities for forging reparative connections between places and people divided by histories of transatlantic slavery by bringing our research participants into dialogue with each other; with participants, co-create outputs in the form of content, film, and exhibitions that will afford a unique lens on global and local social justice. Slavery museums partners in Ghana, Brazil and Britain are redeveloping their exhibitions over the next three years, so the project will directly influence curatorial practice at three key points of the transatlantic triangle.
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