Wereldmuseum, Amsterdam, Permanent Exhibition, Opened June 2022

The question of repatriation and restitution looms large in the museum world today, particularly for ethnographic museums in the former seats of empire that house culturally significant artworks and sacred objects from around the world. But beyond the question of which objects to return, and to whom, museums must also question how to display and curate materials that remain in their possession. What are museums to do with the spoils of empire neatly cataloged and carefully stored in Europe's metropoles?

The Wereldmuseum in Amsterdam has attempted to provide an answer, by telling the story of Dutch colonialism—and its bitter legacies—through materials housed in the national collections. The result transforms a silent story of imperial possession into a self-immolating narrative. Our Colonial Inheritance (Onze Koloniale Erfenis) arrived in 2022 on the heels of the renowned Slavery exhibition at the Rijksmuseum (2021), which opened to fanfare. The Dutch museum world is clearly in the process of a reckoning.

As a United States-based scholar of slavery and colonialism, I visited the museum with a goal of seeing a handful of musical instruments included in the exhibition that are central to a book I have now published on music and Atlantic slavery. I did not expect to be confronted with such a monumental exhibition that left me pondering big questions about the future of museums. Our Colonial Inheritance shows how ethnographic museums might transform into interrogations of colonialism itself. The exhibition does so, in particular, by presenting artifacts collected in the context of imperial violence alongside modern artworks, largely by creators of color from, or connected to, the nation's former colonies in Indonesia, Suriname, Curaçao, Sint Maarten, and elsewhere. These creative engagements with the past disrupt the familiar sensorium of the museum hall. Many of us have visited ethnographic museums that present a mishmash of objects from disparate cultures. Contained behind climate-controlled glass and strung from wall-mounts, such displays might tell us where objects came from but not how they got here. Our Colonial Inheritance includes predictable objects like ceremonial masks, headdresses, musical instruments, traditional textiles, and implements of war, but they are framed by history lessons about Dutch colonialism as well as creative artworks and community-centered narratives that highlight genealogies of anticolonial thought. In this way, the exhibition reframes objects that might otherwise be simply exoticized or depoliticized.

One such artwork greets visitors majestically as they pass into the opening installations: an intricately fashioned women's dress in elegant style, made entirely of maps (figure 1). It is a gorgeous, eye-catching garment that viewers immediately appreciate for the fine, intricate craftsmanship. The back of the dress by white British artist Susan Stockwell and commissioned by the museum features a lavish bustle and train—this is a very stately gown. The maps were carefully selected for inclusion, representing key territories of Dutch trade and occupation. The bottom front of the bodice has a hole inside of it, and in the cavity of the dress, where a woman's gut and womb would dwell sails a tiny ship, the mast of which is crafted in the currency of the Dutch Antilles. The drama of the fashionable historically inspired garment combined with the spectacle of the materials immediately defamiliarizes visitors as they enter the lengthy exhibition, making clear that things will not unfold as predicted. The dress conjures interesting questions about gender and globalization, whiteness, femininity, and empire. I interpret the artwork as a rebuke to narratives of imperial conquest that would focus exclusively on masculine domination. Territory Dress asks viewers to remember both women's complicity in conquest and the way that ideals of modern femininity and beauty developed alongside notions of whiteness and nation. Above all, the striking artwork opens visitors’ imaginations to a new story that brings the realities of colonialism to unexpected spaces, like white women's bodies.

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Territory Dress, 2018, Susan Stockwell. Courtesy of Wereldmuseum, 71775-1a.

Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120117

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Detail from the room Wealth from Overseas, in Our Colonial Inheritance. Photograph by Rick Mandoeng. Courtesy of Wereldmuseum.

Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120117

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The dress clarions visitors into a section covering the dawn of Dutch imperialism, where museumgoers encounter period maps and ship models. But they also see a souvenir puzzle from 1934 Curaçao that documents the 300-year history of Dutch rule on the island. This object summarizes how imperial history was taught in a Dutch nationalist frame, with monarchs and sanitized references to Indigenous and African Curaçao. The kitschy map is not the sort of object that would normally be displayed in a museum, but this exhibition treats white European mass culture with the same critical curiosity that is normally reserved for baskets woven by the colonized. Here, the white imagination is on display and under explicit critique.

Just as Stockwell's Territory Dress deploys unexpected but symbolic materials to transform the meaning of a familiar object, so too do sculptures made of cloves, created by inhabitants of the Moluccas Islands of Indonesia, a site of Dutch occupation. These objects, one dated from 1878, call forth the legacies of Dutch extraction and trade in the Pacific region. The two extraordinary miniature models—one of a Dutch ship, and the other of a Dutch colonial house—are made entirely of cloves, a spice at the center of extractive trade in the region. These remarkable artworks, by makers unknown to the museum, emblematize the relationship between global commodities, artisanship, and colonial conquest.

The expansive exhibition includes 500 objects and covers 1,200 square meters. Curators have organized the abundant material into nine distinctive themes, most of which have their own rooms: Prologue; Profitable Trade; Wealth from Overseas; Slavery, Resistance, and Resilience; Racism Exists, Race Does Not; On the Road to Freedom; The Power of Language; This Is My Home; and Epilogue. Each of the thematic rooms tells its own complex story, coupled with distinctive visual design and color palette.

Browsing through the lengthy and varied exhibition, I was particularly struck by the room Wealth from Overseas, devoted to the connections between agriculture, mining, and ecological devastation. In the center of the space, a highly stylized display engages the motif of Enlightenment-era botany, presenting specimens of tobacco, palm oil, sugar, opium, fossil fuel, tin, and coffee (figure 2). Labels explain how these commodities were extracted through labor exploitation and have since gone on to devastate human health and the environment through the effects of pollution, climate change, and dietary impact. Alongside objects tied to industrial history, modern uses of these commodities are also presented as artifact, such as a package of Oreos representing sugar, and a bag of potato chips that contain palm oil.

The choice to group these diverse colonial histories of commodity production into one stylized display advances an exacting argument: the history of colonialism profoundly shapes our economy today as well as our daily lives, from the practice of drinking coffee out of an aluminum can to eating cookies from a plastic package. The mundane commercial objects, once contextualized, speak to massively important legacies of colonialism, such as vast income inequality across the globe, exploitative labor practices, health inequities, and environmental devastation that impact former colonies in the global South far more than Northern Europe.

Throughout the exhibition, impeccable lighting and visual design cultivate a highly saturated aesthetic and modern verve. Room by room, color palettes and visual motifs adapt in harmony with the message of the objects at hand. Sound design, as well, elevates the exhibition, amplifying diverse voices—literally, though QR-coded excerpts that visitors can scan and listen to. I particularly liked this feature and found it refreshing to hear from individuals while touring an exhibition that otherwise would demand much of the eyes.

At the centerpiece of a room devoted, in part, to the story of slavery, musician Vernon Chatlein, along with curators, created a unique audio-interface showcasing musical instruments of the Netherlands’ former plantation colonies in Curaçao and Suriname. Museumgoers step into a circular space visually designed to look like a large boombox, while displaying musical objects grouped by type. To hear each instrument's sound visitors press a button and the case holding the object lights up. One of these items, displayed proudly in the center of the installation, is the world's oldest authenticated American banjo, collected by Scottish-Dutch soldier and travel memoirist John Stedman, in the 1770s.

The installation design highlights the unique characteristics of the musical objects and allows visitors to hear each instrument's sound, making for an engaging and interactive experience. I witnessed the young and old playfully creating musical conversations between the objects’ sounds. The design invites museumgoers to explore the instruments through the practice of sound-making, however, to some degree, the features have an unintended effect of disconnecting the objects from the musicians who would have played them. I found myself wondering if it might have been preferable to combine the interactive element with other media portraying the instruments in performance with specialists, like Chatlein and his collaborators who recorded music for the installation. There are considerable challenges inherent in sonifying historic musical instruments since most of them cannot be played due to their fragility. The creative efforts of the display are largely successful in bringing sound and musical performance to life while highlighting the substantial role of African-descended musical artists throughout the Dutch Caribbean and broader American slave societies.

Throughout, Our Colonial Inheritance showcases diverse knowledge traditions that transcend media and languages. In the thematic section on The Power of Language, I was struck by one sculpture of a young student hunching studiously over a wooden desk (figure 3). The simple, yet thought-provoking design by British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare perfectly encapsulates the legacies of colonial education, a subject so often explored in the writing of postcolonial authors questioning the forces of compulsory assimilation. The student wears a garment made of Vlisco cloth, which is produced in the Netherlands yet derived from Indonesian techniques and popularized in West African fashion. The history of the fabric encapsulates the global mixtures of colonial trade and art, emphasizing the survival and circulation of non-Western knowledge traditions even in the face of European institutionalization.

One of the foremost accomplishments of the exhibition is to thread narratives of Eastern and Western Dutch colonialism together, highlighting similarities and distinctions. While this approach introduces some confusion around historical matters and some visitors might find themselves unclear about the overall timeline of Dutch imperialism, in my view, what may be lost in the approach is worth the gain, which is to tell a coherent story that centers on what the Dutch did, to whom, and what the consequences were. This hearkens to the exhibition title, which I am told was debated rigorously among museum staff. The use of “our” in Our Colonial Inheritance unflinchingly implicates the Dutch of the past and modern Dutch people in the exhibition's narrative. For those who are racially or culturally marked as being descended from colonized peoples, the inheritance is, of course, never in doubt. It is self-evident. So, the move of the “our” is to encompass the whole—the entire Dutch populace—into a shared understanding. Restitution and repair may be distant, or even impossible goals, but at least, the exhibition suggests, we might begin to agree on a narrative of what, exactly, happened.

The exhibition includes many contributions from white Dutch people, including artworks and audio excerpts that examine family histories and Dutch identity, which I believe is important for showing how all Dutch citizens, and indeed, all citizens of the Western world may begin to confront the histories of slavery and colonialism and how it shapes our lives. If only artists and activists of color are asked to engage with the subject, then the result can be a tokenizing suggestion that the work of critiquing and understanding must always fall on the shoulders of victims rather than perpetrators. Subtly, but emphatically, the exhibition asks people of white European descent to interrogate these legacies as their own, rather than as something that must be understood only by people who endured colonialism and slavery. At the same time, the exhibition also celebrates and centers the experiences, ideas, and artworks emanating from former colonies and sites of colonialist violence. The method entails a delicate balancing act, but one that targets a worthy goal of asking white Dutch people to take “ownership” of their role in colonialism's legacy.

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Planets in My Head, Literature, 2010, Yinka Shonibare. Courtesy of Wereldmuseum, TM-64271a.

Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120117

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The building housing the exhibition was designed from its inception to preserve and showcase the nation's colonial collections. Originally called the Koloniaal Museum (colonial museum) from its founding in 1864, the institution was until quite recently known by the more euphemistic term Tropenmuseum (tropical museum). In late 2023, the museum's name was officially changed to reflect a dramatic reconfiguring of the nation's network of ethnographic museums. Sibling museums in Leiden and Rotterdam now all share the name Wereldmuseum (world museum), while the former Afrika Museum in Berg en Dal has closed its doors. These changes are all part of the museum's stated efforts toward “decolonization,” which include acts of repatriation such as the return of 485 objects to Indonesia in July 2023. But as Managing Director Marieke van Bommel explained in a press release, for the Wereldmuseum, “restitution is about more than just returning objects. It is about taking responsibility for our own history, acknowledging injustice, and finding a path to recovery” (Wereldmuseum 2023). This message is born out effectively in Our Colonial Inheritance, however, I would have liked to see the museum address its own relationship to colonialism more explicitly in the landmark exhibition itself. Carine Zaayman makes a similar argument in her review of the Slavery exhibition, which was held at the nearby Rijksmuseum, noting that it, too, might have taken a step further to address the role of the museum in these legacies as well as the larger art world's deep entanglements with imperialism and racism (Zaayman 2021). This is something the Wereldmuseum addresses explicitly throughout its website and in a related exhibit on the ground floor of the Wereldmuseum Amsterdam entitled What's the Story. As the museum explains, it is “a former colonial organization set up to show off Dutch colonial objects. The museum played a role in the common perception that people from formerly colonized countries were inferior. This is still visible in the decorations covering the building. Moreover, part of our collection dates back to that time and came about through colonial power imbalances” (Wereldmuseum n.d.). It may have proven too complicated to weave the meta-narrative into an exhibition already tasked with conveying multiple complex histories. Ultimately, the exhibition does an excellent job of interrogating colonialism through the objects and histories on display.

Yet, it remains an open question whether revised historical narratives can or will bring about greater social and economic equity for people and nations bearing the lasting effects of colonialism and slavery. In December 2022, the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte apologized for slavery on behalf of the national government, but some criticized the statement, including Silveria Jacobs, Prime Minister of the Caribbean Dutch territory of Sint Maarten, who argued that symbolic statements do not go far enough to repair the ongoing harms of colonialism and racism (Henley 2022). Likewise, as museums begin to revise their own narratives, they must also continue to address the injustice of dispossession in efforts of restitution and repatriation. One effort, without the other, would bring little in the way of justice.

Mary Caton Lingold

Virginia Commonwealth University

Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira

We bend our shoulders beneath the notion that words are merely units of information. But something in us—something which sings when the moon is up—knows this to be a lie.

—Paul Kingsnorth

Considering the significance placed on emotion within radical queer community archives, interdisciplinary feminist scholar Ann Cvetkovich observed the “invisibility that often surrounds intimate life”—the personal and ephemeral nature of feelings do not lend themselves to documentation or conventional archiving (2002: 110–112; 2003: 241). Yet much recent literature argues emotion is central to our reasoning, memory, and understanding of what constitutes heritage (Campbell and Smith 2015; Campbell et al. 2018; Waterton et al. 2016). Contemporary curators in archives and libraries are facing the same practical challenge reshaping curatorial practice across the wider galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) sector—how to meaningfully collect and make accessible a plurality of voices. In her book chapter “Toward a Pedagogy of Feeling,” Andrea Witcomb suggests the change observed within museums goes further than simply understanding a new role in providing pluralized representation, it extends to museums understanding “the need to also build bridges across those pluralities” (2015: 325). What, then, does an increasing awareness of the significance of emotion mean for the purpose and practice of an archive actively collecting manuscripts? How might harnessing the power of emotion to connect archives with the world outside be achieved in practical terms? In Love & Loss, Nina Finigan, Manuscript Curator at Auckland Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira, sought community contribution and mined the museum's archival collections to employ emotion as a means to both envisage a new role for the archive and to seek connections on a profound level between the museum and a broadly conceived public.

Love & Loss took an expansive view of archives and their purpose, placing at the exhibition's center the emotional capacity of the written word. Displayed for eight months during the COVID-19 pandemic, the exhibition's accessibility was heavily affected by localized lockdowns of Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau.¹ Therefore, I find myself in the unusual position of reviewing an exhibition I did not physically attend. Instead, I am something of an archival researcher myself, piecing together a picture of an archival exhibition from its own history and record—the museum's documentation, its online life, and Finigan's own writing. This review first surveys the recent development of emotion and affect theory within Museum and Heritage Studies and GLAM fields before focusing on two recent texts by Andrea Witcomb (2015) and Marzia Varutti (2023) exploring the intersection of affect theory and exhibition theory and practice. I then examine the creation and physical exhibition of Love & Loss, considering the exhibition and Finigan's intent within a wider context of archival purpose, museum practice, and the possibilities of emotion for creating meaningful public connection.

The academic study of emotion, affect, and the closely related topic of empathy has historically been perceived as outside the realm of serious museological study—or even as a threat to the museum project itself. “Museums’ newfound sensitivity to empathy leaves them at the mercy of those who would bend them to national or tribalist aims,” states David Lowenthal, “or, still worse, enlist them in the generalized politics of memory . . . Empathetic concerns have their place. But they should not be allowed to overshadow the detached distancing that enables museums uniquely to serve, and to be widely seen, as reliable vehicles of public illumination” (2009: 29–30). Scholars and practitioners have argued that emotion has historically been pushed outside the paradigm of legitimate and trustworthy knowledge by being deemed too subjective, too irrational, too female [emphasis added] (Finigan 2021b; Halilovich 2016: 77). Noting how emotion has been perceived “as somehow ‘dangerous’ to achieving a balanced understanding of the importance of the past in the present,” Gary Campbell and Laurajane Smith contend that market-led research has “problematized engaging with emotion” due to institutional goals of increasing visitor revenue, which “cultivated suspicion by some that promoting affective responses through heritage and museum interpretations was part of the so-called ‘Disneyfication’ or commoditization of the past” (2015: 447–448). Gary Campbell, Laurajane Smith, and Margaret Wetherell have also linked the earlier lack of serious museological study of emotion and affect to the rise of heritage tourism in the 1970s and 1980s, which within museum practice reinforced “the legitimacy and moral duty of experts not only to act as stewards for the safeguarding of the physical ‘fragility’ of heritage resources,” but also to defend heritage from the perceived threats of increasing cultural nostalgia and commercialization (2018: 7). Emphasis was placed on protecting collections and “the assumed innate historical values and meanings that heritage resources represented” (Campbell et al. 2018: 7).

In recent years an understanding of emotion and affect as a legitimate and significant subject within museology has developed, heavily influenced by a broadening of perspectives in the wider humanities and social sciences. This “palpable, visceral shift” has been fueled by “a groundswell of research” (Waterton et al. 2016: 1), and an understanding of how affect, “a force that creates a relation between a body and the world,” is at the core of how we form relationships and identities (Cifor 2016: 8). Campbell, Smith, and Wetherell contend that despite an emerging consensus on the importance of emotion in constituting heritage, “dilemmas about how to theorise and investigate affect are much less resolved” (2018: 1). In recent decades scholars have drawn on sociology, social psychology, tourism and leisure studies, geography, and feminist and cultural studies to develop critical theory on the role of emotion in heritage meaning-making (Bagnall 2003: 87; Campbell and Smith 2015: 449; Campbell et al. 2018; Haldrup and Larssen 2010: 3). Noting the impact of tourism studies theory and research on performance, Michael Haldrup and Jonas Larsen label this shift in heritage theorizing the “performance turn,” which “dislocates attention from symbolic meanings and discourses to embodied, collaborative and technologized doings and enactments” (2010: 3). The performance turn places human experience at the center of understanding heritage meaning-making, moving “from the visual/symbolic consumption of objects and sites towards the actual (co-)presence of living, breathing, sensing and doing bodies with the objects and material settings provided” (Bærenholdt and Haldrup 2015: 53). Sociologist Gaynor Bagnall argues visitors are not passive—emotions and imagination are key to understanding the meanings made, which include the “role of memory, life histories, and personal and family narratives,” the “personal and cultural biographies” individuals bring with them to heritage experiences (2003: 87–89). In Bagnall's study, visitors who could relate to the sites or performances through imagination and memory—personal or inherited—often made meaningful connections to the heritage being displayed or performed (2003: 90–91).

Although studies of how emotion and affect theory may be used to develop new forms of exhibition theory and practice remain sparse, significant recent contributions have been made by Witcomb (2015) and Varutti (2023). Witcomb, writing from Australia, positions her work on the topic as part of a movement in museum studies that has developed beyond recent issues of representation and access, and which allows space for “the poetics as well as the politics of museum work” (2015: 321). The use of emotion and affect in considerations of exhibition is portrayed as a development of theory that harks back to the earliest modern museums. Reflecting on Tony Bennett's use of the term “a pedagogy of walking” (Witcomb 1995) to describe the techniques used by nineteenth-century museums to “contribute to the formation of citizens” in early nation-states, Witcomb uses a “pedagogy of feeling” to describe the contemporary exhibition practice of staged affective encounters (2015: 322–324). These encounters, Witcomb notes, “use a range of devices to promote sensorial experiences that encourage introspective reflection on the part of visitors” (2015: 323). She envisages emotion, and the effective use of affective practice in exhibitions, as a means to question collective memories—especially in colonized nations—and “produce new relationships between past and present” (2015: 322). Through “a dismantling of received narratives,” Witcomb suggests, a “pedagogy of feeling” in exhibition practice can lead to the breaking down of boundaries, and a more empathetic understanding of citizenship (2015: 339–340).

Building on the notion of an “affective turn” in museums, Marzia Varutti develops the concept of “affective curatorship” to encapsulate the variety of recent curatorial approaches specifically aiming to affect visitors emotionally (2023: 61). Offering a European and East Asian lens, Varutti notes that museums “have long been sites of affective engagement,” stating that “what is new and noteworthy in the current ‘affective turn’ is the purposefulness with which affect and emotions are being leveraged in museums” (2023: 61). Using the term “affective encounters” to describe the intersection of museum input, curatorial intervention, and visitors’ subjectivity, Varutti contends that the “experience of memorable affective encounters in the curated environment of museums is often (though not necessarily) the result of careful, precise curatorial intervention, in other words, affective curatorship” (2023: 62–64). The possibilities of affect have brought curators “to experiment with approaches that place emotions and emotional engagement at the heart of the exhibition project,” with the desired affective impact embedded in physical layout, atmosphere, selection of objects, themes, and storytelling devices (Varutti 2023: 71). Exhibition design turns “emotional responses into prisms that filter how visitors will encounter and make sense of exhibits,” where feeling becomes “a doorway to meaning” (Varutti 2023: 67). Although objects may not be particularly new or “exotic,” curators can “literally make objects anew by creating around them fresh, engaging epistemological, aesthetic, sensory and emotional frameworks” (Varutti 2023: 72).

While elements of explicitly affective engagement are frequently used in museum exhibition practice (Varutti 2023; Witcomb 2013, 2015), emotion as a central exhibition premise outside of art is rare. The COVID-19 pandemic appears to have been a catalyst for, or significant element within, the few recent exhibitions centering emotion. Love & Loss was positioned as a “timely exploration of our unchanging need to say what we must, even when time and distance hold us apart” (Auckland Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira 2020: 4). Joy was exhibited at London's Wellcome Collection, a cultural science center and library focusing on human health and well-being, over the same July 2021 to March 2022 period as Love & Loss. Although Joy used art as a basis for exhibiting “a diversity of euphoric experiences and the effect of positive emotion on the body,” the exhibition also included elements of poetry, science, and historical objects in an imaginative and wide-ranging exhibition of “the many paths to joy that different communities have sought, even in difficult times” (Wellcome Collection 2021). Varutti also singles out the Museum of Contemporary Emotions, an “interactive website-exhibition” funded by the Finnish government in response to COVID-19 where online visitors can view and contribute material reflecting the fear and anxiety caused by the pandemic (2023: 5). Seeking to “support the activities of people and society and their coping in a crisis situation, and to reinforce their mental resilience” through communication, in 2022 the project was expanded to include feelings relating to climate change and the war in Ukraine (Museum of Contemporary Emotions 2022). Both the Museum of Contemporary Emotions and Joy can be viewed as reflecting the raison d’être of the organization that conceived them. Love & Loss, however, seeks to broaden the scope of museum purpose, challenging the power structures inherent in conventional archival practice, and questioning the purpose of the archive itself.

Central to an understanding of the role emotion may play in collecting, interpreting, and exhibiting archives is a historical understanding of archives as neutral and objective spaces, a notion critiqued by postmodern scholarship that positions the archivist as a “constructor” of the knowledge archives contain (Cifor 2016: 13; Doylen 2006: 552). Finigan contends that emotion is a “driver of empathy and action,” and centering emotion in curatorial practice is therefore “essential to developing inclusive, open and self-reflexive archives” (2021b). “What words come to mind when we hear the word ‘archive’?” Finigan asks, “Perhaps: academic, static, exclusive. What if instead words like emotion and empathy came to mind? Emotions are a fundamental part of human experience, helping us understand the world and connect with each other and our histories” (Finigan 2021b). Citing the “exclusion and privilege” inherent in archiving, archive access, and object interpretation, Finigan further contends that these power dynamics have historically formed a duality in which emotion is seen as antithetical to objectivity (2021b). This argument is supported by scholars writing on grief in archives, who argue that the positivist traditions of early archival theory “encoded ideas” of objectivity, neutrality, and detachment, a focus that left the emotional and affective unacknowledged (Alisauskas et al. 2022: 6–7; Halilovich 2016: 78).

A thread of affective thought within archival theory also suggests a path forward, perhaps reflecting a closer relationship to practice than wider heritage studies. The archivist and academic Marika Cifor argues for an “affective value” appraisal criterion as “a corrective force to address power inequities in archives,” stating archivists are already “deeply implicated in webs of affective relations” (2016: 9–13). Finigan has stated that although emotion forms a “vital backbone” in archival collections, “often serving as a primary motivation for their collection and preservation before entering the institutional context,” emotion remains “largely unexplored” by museums (2021b). Noting the disconnect between the emotion which manuscript donors often attached to the meaning of materials, and the lack of an “explicit framework to legitimise emotion” on the part of the museum, Finigan has begun using emotion as an appraisal concern in her own practice (online discussion with author, 10 November 2023).

Love & Loss and the companion publication Archives of Emotion² can be seen as examples of Varutti's assertion that “curators are drawing upon—and forging—a more creative, evocative, affective curatorial vocabulary” (2023: 72). In internal museum exhibition concept and design documentation, creators of Love & Loss describe presenting manuscript collection items as “more than just archives for historical enquiry” (Auckland Museum 2020: 4). Rather, they sought to explore the value of archived writing “as intimate spaces, sites of emotional expression and exchange between individuals that get to the heart of what it means to be human,” encouraging visitors to “reflect on similar objects in their own lives and their relationships to them” (Auckland Museum 2020: 4). Emotional and affective possibilities were seen as key to decisions of item selection and exhibition design. “The focus of interpretation will be on surfacing emotion in the collection,” the concept design document states, and emotion will be “at the core of the visitor experience: visitors will feel these emotions viscerally as they move through the spaces and experiences. They will laugh, smile and hopefully—cry” (Auckland Museum 2020: 4). The museum made a public request for materials and received hundreds of responses, with loans from the public providing half of the twenty-eight “stories” on display (Nina Finigan, online discussion with author, 10 November 2023).³ Finigan attributes the level of public interest, in part, to the pandemic and the strict lockdown regulations in New Zealand Aotearoa. There was a widespread feeling of disconnect, Finigan says, which produced a renewed interest in diaries, letters, and other written mediums of human connection (discussion with author, 10 November 2023). The theme also appears to have struck a chord. Public loans provided some of the most moving materials in the exhibition, and although the museum did not collect visitor data, the exhibition received notably widespread coverage from media, ranging from national news outlets to arts and culture magazines.⁴

Spread across two elegantly designed gallery spaces, Love & Loss featured a broad interpretation of the written word, including emails, text messages, Facebook threads, and large projections of audio-visual letter readings and interviews alongside tangible objects.⁵ Finigan notes both an interest in the effects of modern technologies on our processes of grief, and the desire for the physical exhibition to be “more than two-dimensional objects in cases” relying on visitors reading screeds of text (online discussion with author, 10 November 2023). Thoughtful interpretation panels provide a succinct context to each story, often reproducing a short key extract from the physical material. Gallery sections are thematic, with an emphasis on similar feelings across time. In the “Grief” section of the Loss gallery, an archived 1863 letter from a grieving widow to her sister laments the inadequacy of words to provide solace. On the same wall, a Facebook message is displayed as a framed mobile phone facsimile. It shows a message from the woman who loaned it to the museum, Rose, to her recently deceased mother.

It's six months today since you passed; I want to say left me but I know that is not fair—I'm sorry for thinking it. But I miss you mummy so much. I'm so sorry that I'm selfish about you going but I would give so much for one more talk with you. I love you mummy—I love you I love you I love you xxxx

—Rose Powell, Facebook message (extract), 13 June 2018

Nearby is a hiapo (Niuean barkcloth) work by artist Cora-Allan Lafaiki Twiss and researcher Jessica Pasisi.⁶ Collected in 2021, the work is displayed alongside bilingual interpretation, and features a poem by Pasisi—Koe Higoa Haaku Hiapo—imagining the uplifting of the cloth from its home, across the ocean, to a foreign museum. The hiapo is misunderstood, kept behind glass, and then locked away in storage; “I cried for my home, for my mother, my people.” The poem concludes with a Pasifika girl, visiting the museum collection, managing to slide off her glove and lay her hand on the cloth. She whispers “Hina-e! Hina-o! Hina… come home hiapo.” There is an element of deliberate performativity to the space. In the corners of the gallery, screened booths contain letter writing materials, inviting visitors to put pen to paper themselves. Writers are asked to choose between sending their letters, anonymously sharing them on the wall, or destroying them in the shredder provided.

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Part of the Love-themed gallery space, in the exhibition Love & Loss. Courtesy Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira.

Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120117

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The Love gallery is a more open space. Sheet music of a dedicated love song is displayed beside diaries, love notes, letters, and the pressed flower one contained. One publicly loaned email facsimile is from a woman to her husband in prison. Exploring anger, sorrow, and lust, the “highly intimate” text produced some blushing reactions in the gallery (Nina Finigan, online discussion with author, 10 November 2023). A series of short films of public lenders discussing and reading their letters are projected, several meters wide, across a gallery wall. “Rather than explain how letters can affect us, we want to show it,” an internal museum planning document states, “[we want to] see people's faces as they read, their hands as they hold the paper, the moment their breath catches. We want to see them embarrassed, sad, coy, tender, falling in love all over again, or simply paused in reflection between lines” (Auckland Museum 2020–2021). The result is exceptionally effective, and testament to Finigan's conviction that affective, personal stories can transmit historical meanings without the “big moment, big narrative” materials illustrating a grand historical arc (discussion with author, 10 November 2023). In one film, letter writer Welby Ings relates his story of traveling from his small town to Auckland in 1983 and there meeting Kevin. Welby's brief trip had been suggested to him by his employer after his spate of “gay political graffiti writing.” At a time when homosexuality was criminalized, Welby explains how phone lines could be listened in on and letters used for blackmail.⁷ He reads from a letter he wrote to Kevin the day after they met, when Welby's train returned home at 3:00 a.m.: “Kevin, I love you. In all of my life I have never felt so sure of someone and that, my mate, means something new and wonderful to me.” Welby and Kevin were together for six years, before Kevin contracted AIDS. Welby “tried to nurse him, but I couldn't.” Kevin died in 1998. Later, going through the objects left behind, Welby found Kevin had kept their first letter, which found its way to Love & Loss. The letter ends: “Gazing out of the window, watching the clouds move across the star-torn night, I wonder where you are now.”

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Video still from online version of short film featuring Welby Ings. Courtesy Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira.

Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120117

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In her study of radical community archives created by and for the queer community, Cvetkovich argues a “radical archive of emotion” can address the “traumatic loss of history” communities have faced, asserting “the role of memory and affect in compensating for institutional neglect” (2003: 241). Archivists appear to be increasingly embracing the possibilities of emotion and affect, driven by both practical experience and an expanding critical literature pointing to the significance of emotion in human understanding. So why is emotion still so rarely a theme of museum exhibitions? In developing Love & Loss, Finigan notes a persistent concern that the entire project would be perceived as “somehow silly” [emphasis added] (discussion with author, 10 November 2023). This recalls the “dualism of emotion and objectivity” that Finigan argues was institutionalized in the creation of the modern archive, where rationality is “coded as objective, authoritative, neutral, male,” while emotion is “subjective, untrustworthy, irrational, female”; a dichotomy of what type of knowledge and inquiry is legitimate, and what is not (2021b). Archives themselves, Cifor contends, are “spaces, manifestations and instruments of power” (2016: 13), and Robert Janes has criticized the persistence of “the fallacy of authoritative neutrality” within museums (2016: 243). While Love & Loss raises practical problems (What is the burden on the visitor—might it contribute to “museum fatigue”? What is the burden placed on staff dealing with traumatic themes?⁸), it is notably successful in charting new ways of connecting archives and people, providing space for Witcomb's “poetics as well as the politics” of museum work (2015: 321).

Finigan likens the words displayed in Love & Loss to alchemy, a transmutation where “shapeless thoughts” come into being through ink and paper (2021a). By reframing letters, diaries, emails, and text messages, materials “often dismissed as ordinary and everyday,” as “artifacts that hold our emotional lives” (Finigan 2021c: 6–7), a curator of documentary heritage may contribute much to the meanings documents can hold. The role of the curator here is a social one, a conduit between record, memory, feeling, and us; a kaitiaki⁹ of the personal lives of others. This is an open, generous view of the archive, and the product of a conviction that the written word—a “space of unbridled possibility”—has a unique capacity to connect across space and time (Finigan 2021a). While discussing the exhibition with Finigan, it was noticeable how rarely she referred to the document type; the letters, diaries, emails, and text messages that made up the exhibition were usually referred to as “stories.” Near the end of Archives of Emotion, Finigan notes her own inspiration:

Museums and archives are full of things—objects, documents, photographs. But beneath this “thingness”—the physicality of objects within the world—lies something very simple: people and their stories. Long ago I realised that this is what draws me to museums and archives in particular—they are filled with voices. People may think of archives as quiet spaces but they aren't—they are loud. (2021a: 48)

Love & Loss was conceived as a way to “listen to the voices and bring them out into the world,” transmitting recorded memory through feeling (Finigan 2021a: 48). What remains of the exhibition is partly personal memory too, scattered across those who took the time to read, watch, listen, or write. While writing this piece, I mentioned emotion as a museum exhibition theme to a group of prospective museum studies students. A woman from Auckland Tāmaki Makaurau immediately recalled her visit to Love & Loss. Her enduring memory was of two other visitors at the exhibition, quietly crying.

Camus Wyatt

Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington

American Museum of Natural History, New York

This article¹ focuses on the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), New York, and the “reimaging” of the historic Northwest Coast Hall. The review reflects on the redisplay, co-curation, and community engagement in the context of the recent revisions to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA 1990, 2023).

Our visit to the AMNH in April 2024 coincided with the implementation of the new revisions to NAGPRA. The Biden Administration responded to critiques of the more than 30-year-old legislation with new federal regulations that aim “to finish the work of repatriating the Native human remains in institutional holdings, which amount to more than 96,000 individuals, according to federal data published in the fall” (Jacobs and Small 2024). The AMNH was one of the museums under scrutiny as it has “repatriated the remains of approximately 1,000 individuals” but “still holds the remains of about 2,200 Native Americans and thousands of funerary objects” (Jacobs and Small 2024).

The new regulations mark a shift in authority, as they require institutions to gain permission from the appropriate Native American communities to display or research human remains or cultural belongings. This change, while US focused, means the museum is legally required to acknowledge what Co-Curator Haa'yuups stated at the opening of the Northwest Coast Hall in May 2022: “When we look at the collection of these materials, it's not a trite political stance on my part to say, ‘We still own them. You [the museum] possess them, we own them’” (Haa'yuups quoted in Kulkarni 2022).

In response to the new legislation, the AMNH has closed the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains Halls, nearly 10,000 square feet of exhibition space, with no published timeline for reopening. The museum has also closed all access to Native American collections in storage, with the exception of individuals with written permission from the associated Nation or Tribe to access specific belongings. While the principle is good, the practice is challenging given poor provenance details in collection records and the fact that many Indigenous Nations traverse modern settler-colonial borders.

Sean Decatur, the Museum's president, wrote to staff to say: “The halls we are closing are artifacts of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples . . . Actions that may feel sudden to some may seem long overdue to others” (quoted in Jacobs and Small 2024). As a result, the Northwest Coast Hall is now the only representation of Indigenous North America on display at AMNH, making the messages it conveys even more powerful.

The Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, New York

New York City's Museum of Jewish Heritage boasts a remarkably diverse collection of objects, ephemera, and film recordings. Its robust holdings range from a festila or kerosene lamp kept by a Kalderash Roma couple during their two-year incarceration at Crivoi concentration camp in Transnistria¹ to Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler's annotated copy of Hitler's Mein Kampf, inscribed with a personalized note to Himmler from his father (1927). Under the care of curators from within and outside the institution, the Museum opened its new permanent exhibition, The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do, in 2022. The two-story, 12,000-square foot exhibition space spans fifteen galleries, highlighting over 1,250 artifacts and testimonies from its 30,000-object collection as material and oral witnesses.² The project is immense, as is the burden of its mission to both memorialize and contextualize histories of loss and survivance in the wake of the Shoah.³

The urgency of the exhibition's message is perceptible not only through the overwhelmingly rich examples of historical documentation, personal effects, and testimonies on display, although the nearly encyclopedic breadth of its eclectic collections certainly shines through. Nor is its acuteness made exceptionally evident by the largely chronological narrative that situates individual stories within global contexts and their local implications. Rather, it is in the paradoxical excesses of hope and despair as they are bound together throughout the exhibition that the weight of the Museum's mission to serve as a living memorial to the Holocaust is most distinctly felt.

This tension is not unique to the Museum of Jewish Heritage. In Holocaust Memory Reframed: Museums and the Challenges of Representation, Jennifer Hansen-Glucklich frames her opening chapter, titled “Zakhor” (Heb., remember), within the context of Holocaust remembrance as a matter of historical representation as well as a reckoning with the sacred (Hansen-Glucklich 2014). Hansen-Glucklich's text presents a deeply reflective discussion of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, which, like the Museum of Jewish Heritage, is known as a “living memorial to the Holocaust.” Points of connection and distinction between the Museum of Jewish Heritage's What Hate Can Do exhibition and the sites discussed by Hansen-Glucklich are indicative of the popular reliance of such memorial institutions (including in Poland, Germany, and elsewhere) on their relevance to the communities and societies in which they are situated. In the case of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, a New York/US survivor-centered narrative provides the foundation for further investigation of the Holocaust's historical and contemporary relevance. Its collections contain materials that showcase the long-standing and complex relationship between Jewish people and the notion of home and homeland.

The significance of remembrance in the context of systemic denial of Jewish peoples’ human and civil rights in much of Europe through the end of World War II is punctuated by what Hansen-Glucklich calls “the sacred duty of remembrance in Judaism” (2014: 8). For survivors and their descendants, many of whom produced, curated, and are featured in the exhibition, this duty to remember “transcends purely secular, historical concerns” (2014: 8). And while the memories of survivors who made it to the Americas and Mandatory Palestine after the war are paramount to the exhibition's mission to remember those who did not, it is imperative that the rhetorical connections between oblivion and exile (or Diaspora) on the one hand and remembrance and redemption (vis-à-vis Zionistic expressions of nationhood) on the other be made explicit (2014: 8). This is important not only for historicity's sake, but also for the possibility of reconciling the multiplicity of Jewish and non-Jewish attachments to Israel/Palestine in the context of a widely attended educational and cultural institution.

By reframing the tenuous separation between past and present, “there and then” versus “here and now,” this exhibition represents an invitation not only to consider the world events leading up to and following the Holocaust, but also to investigate what it is that hate can do. It asks the painfully pointed question of what implicit prejudices, explicit bigotry, and silence can do when enacted in the context of ancient, deep-seated hatred and directed toward perceived differences that reach beyond the lines of religion, ethnicity, and sexuality. Framed within the context of a Jewish heritage museum, the Holocaust becomes a site of commemoration, mourning, as well as preservation. In this light, we might consider Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett's suggestion that heritage operates “as a mode of cultural production,” which, having “recourse to the past,” also produces something entirely new (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2005: 1).

Passing through a dark and narrow hallway, visitors enter the exhibition surrounded by black and white photographs and film recordings of families, young couples, and children who lived in the 1930s. A bar mitzvah boy stands tall with hands clasped and a tallis⁴ draped across his shoulders in Latvia, 1928. In 1939, a two-year-old child in a fitted cap grins cheekily on a family vacation in Lithuania. There is a kids’ birthday party in Germany (1931) and a couple posing in an orchard in Palestine (1926). A fleeting cut of film on loop catches a smiling girl as she shrugs at the camera, her eyes squinting in the sun. Marianne Hirsch describes these kinds of images as “ordinary snapshots and portraits, family pictures connected to the Holocaust by their context and not by their content” (Hirsch 1997: 20). In other words, their meaning in the context of the exhibition goes beyond the fact of their makers’ documentary intentions or their subjects’ Jewish identities. Here in this space, they stand as representatives of the many severed worlds cut down in the Holocaust.

The entrance hall of portraits mirrors the exhibition's exit on the second floor, with some notable differences. Both galleries hum with the echoes of Hebrew songs and prayers played from vintage audio recordings.⁵ Each acts as a sonorous threshold between worlds that no longer exist, worlds that could have been, and worlds that might yet be. In both cases, these spaces of entry and exit are the leaky valves that insist on presence even while overflowing with absence. They serve as reminders of the invitation, or rather the obligation, to depart its galleries changed. Visitors are met with haunting epigraphs at the end of each hallway that signal a call to witness and not to forget. Ushered toward the exhibition's core galleries by an opening declaration that reads, “Many of these Jews were murdered by April 1943,” visitors eventually take their leave through a bright passageway lined with both black and white and color photographs that concludes with a quote by Elie Wiesel: “When you listen to a witness, you become a witness.” The color photos become witnesses to themselves and to the ones in black and white, as they feature people who survived the Holocaust and their descendants, whereas those recorded in the latter did not.

Returning to the exhibition's beginning, visitors are greeted by walls lined with photographic portraits from twenty countries, which together are intended to reflect the vibrancy of prewar life in the “Jewish Diaspora.” This space sets the tone for the constant tension between themes of singularity and multiplicity, as well as belonging and unbelonging, that weave throughout the exhibition. Long histories of anti-Jewishness and “what hate can do” in relation to the Holocaust in particular are prefaced by an insistence on both the variability and precarity of Jewish lifeworlds in Diaspora in the years preceding World War II. Reaching the end of the entrance gallery, photographic renderings of lives being lived suddenly register as a foreshadowing of the dangers on the immediate horizon. In the following gallery entitled “April 1943,” visitors are confronted with a snapshot of events that occurred in a single month in 1943.

This room, according to curator Rebecca Frank, indicates the “what” of the Holocaust.⁶ The space expands outward from the contracted entranceway into an atrium-like hall, drawing one's attention immediately upward to a series of enlarged photographs hanging overhead, which feature the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, New York City's “We Will Never Die” memorial pageant at Madison Square Garden, Crematorium II at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and Passover holiday festivities in Tripoli, Tehran, and Tel Aviv. In contrast to the galleries that follow, the tone of this room, invoked by the mashup of April 1943—dated content on display and the curatorial voice that frames it reads like a telegraphic script or a blast of news headlines. Its focus on Jewish armed resistance and perseverance in the face of mass murder, incarceration, and deportation is marked “a study in contrasts,” in which the indifference of bystanders and the silence of “most of the free world” belie the atrocities that would persist across and beyond Europe for another two years.⁷

Beyond the “April 1943” gallery, the hall titled “Jews and Judaism” offers something in-between an homage to Jewish diversity across time and space and a cultural history lesson in “what Jewish can mean.” It brings together diverse media and storytelling modes to create an immersive backdrop for visitors who are yet to engage the more harrowing aspects of the exhibition in the following galleries. While no exhibition of “Jewish life and culture” (as if it is a singular thing) could possibly serve as a comprehensive representation of all Jewish lifeways and cultures, this entrée into the lives of Jews from around the world—mostly represented by objects and stories either acquired or loaned from local families whose ancestors immigrated to New York City before, during, or after World War II—is chock full of material culture ranging from ritual and magical to legal and quotidian.⁸ The power of this historytelling, however, is in the story (Trouillot 1995: 2).

The whole of the exhibition, from its collections to its donor recognition, is truly a compendium of Jewish storytelling forms. Preserving a record of places and names, where people lived and who they were, is only one aspect of its commemorative effectiveness. There is also a layering of the preliminary memory work required for keeping a record of this kind in the first place, plus the impossibility of its completeness or totality. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi posits in his seminal text Zakhor, “modern Jewish historiography can never substitute for Jewish memory” (Yerushalmi [1982] 1996: 101). Arranged within a double-paneled rotunda, the “Jews and Judaism” gallery holds Yiddish language playbills, a Syrian bride's mikveh clogs,⁹ typewriters, children's protection amulets, and a German Jewish cookbook. At the center of the room is an enormous set of hand-painted canvases by Aryeh Steinberger (1920s–1930s) made to form the walls of a sukkah, a temporary, open-air shelter used on the holiday of Sukkoth (Festival of Booths) and hidden during the war at Budapest's Great Synagogue. The wall-covering envelops the viewer with images from the Hebrew Bible and early twentieth-century life in Budapest. Tracing subjects such as “Jews from birth to death,” Jewish learning, religion, and languages beneath a giant, hovering Star of David, visitors are cast on a tour of persecution, systematic obliteration, and eventual “redemption” from an essentially ethnographic launching point.

Archival photographs of children at Hebrew school, a young couple's wedding portrait, and an illustration of a dying man's Viddui prayer¹⁰ line the gallery walls and speak to the close relationship between life and death, as well as remembrance. One of the most striking facets of this gallery is the interplay between storytelling traditions and those of passing down family records, whether in the form of material goods, photographs, or oral histories transmitted from one generation to the next. The issue of qualifying Jews and Judaism in the past tense notwithstanding, places and times represented in this space are designed to contextualize Jewish identities across sectarian, genealogical, and geographical lines.¹¹

According to the exhibition's introductory text, Jews are a “Diaspora people” whose “ancient homeland is the Land of Israel.” Judaism, as is prominently conveyed in gallery 2, is the defining feature of Jewish identity. It is presented as a “religion of sacred time” that informs Jewish thought and practice, while Jewish culture since “modern times” often extends to the secular in areas such as “literature . . . arts, sports, and other fields.” Like the framed images displayed in the exhibition's opening hallway, the majority of the objects, beliefs, and ideas on view in the “Jews and Judaism” gallery are presented in relation to their diasporic roots. For example, the “Jewish Languages” text panel explains that Jews, having lived in “many cultures and lands,” spoke “other languages [that] formed as Jews fused local tongues with Hebrew.” Featured languages include Aramaic, Yiddish, Ladino, and Hebrew, with explanations provided for their geographical origins and cultural significance. All of these languages are still (my emphasis) spoken today, as the text asserts, as if one might otherwise automatically assume that they are not.

Stretched in large letters along a sizable panel in the center of the room, phrases in each language are inscribed and translated from the original Merubah, Rashi, and Latin scripts: Djidiyo, siempre Djidiyo / A Jew, always a Jew (One can't escape one's fate) and S'iz shver tsu zayn a Yid [my transliteration] / It's hard to be a Jew. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Yiddish is described as “the most prominent” Jewish language and as the old language of Ashkenazi Jewry, many of whom spoke it in Europe on the eve of the Holocaust. Hebrew, Aramaic, and Ladino are also “still” around, although the former, like Yiddish, is showcased as having experienced a renaissance that Aramaic and Ladino have not. ¹²

Hebrew is presented as both “the ancient Jewish language of the Torah (Bible)” and the national language of the Modern State of Israel. In contrast to Yiddish, which was the language “most spoken by Jews on the eve of the Holocaust” (much like Ladino, which was spoken in great numbers across the Sephardic Diaspora until 1945), Modern Hebrew has become one of the “new” languages of Holocaust survivors, “invigorated with new vocabulary for everyday life” even as it retains its status as the “holy language of prayer” (gallery text). Issues underlying this Hebrew-language bias are amplified by a misrepresentation of the diversity of languages spoken by Jewish communities since antiquity, for example those of Sephardic heritage both prior to and following the expulsion of Jews from Iberia.

While communities of Iberian Jews in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries spoke the Ibero-Romance languages of their neighbors (including medieval Spanish and Portuguese), they also spoke and wrote in Catalan and Arabic, which is not mentioned. Ladino is represented here as the language of pre-Expulsion Spanish Jews who “brought [it with them] to new communities in North Africa, Turkey, and parts of the Balkans” (gallery text). The use of the term “new” here is confusing and, in fact, Ladino is itself a Sephardic Diaspora language that only flourished as a distinctive Jewish language outside of Spain as a result of the Expulsion (Bunis 2016: 51). Over time, it has incorporated linguistic and stylistic elements from surrounding Jewish and non-Jewish languages, like Haketia in North Africa, Yevanik or Romaniyot (Judeo-Greek) in Greece, and Juhuri (Judeo-Persian) in the Caucasus, none of which are included in the exhibition's list of Jewish languages.

The majority of the objects in the “Jews and Judaism” gallery have some connection to individuals, families, and places that were impacted by the Holocaust and anti-Jewish persecution leading up to it, however, the representation of Jewish communities and identities does not conclude here. It continues with the telling of “Historical Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism” and “Modern Jewish Responses from 1881–1933,” before entering the era of Nazism that culminated in the death of millions deemed undesirable, not only Jews, by the Third Reich and its allies. It also appears in stories of Jewish organizing and resistance from the time before the war to the present day, as in the case of the “Hitler Megillah” from Casablanca, Morocco (1943–1945), which features the phrase “Cursed be Hitler, cursed be Mussolini . . . cursed be Himmler, cursed be Göring . . . Blessed be Roosevelt, blessed be Churchill, blessed be Stalin, blessed be de Gaulle.”¹³ In-between the composite depictions of Jewish culture and religion in the second gallery and those of decimation and liberation during and after the war in galleries 4 through 13, is a room split in two that outlines a dense and protracted history of anti-Jewishness in Europe since the eleventh century and the ways in which rising antisemitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries impacted Jewish life across Europe, North America, and the Middle East.

In the first half of this third gallery is a letter signed by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella, in December of 1492 that elicits instructions to Governor Rodrigo del Mercado of Medina del Campo regarding the treatment of property formerly held by Jews who were either expelled or murdered and of the people who remained under his jurisdiction following the expiry date of the Alhambra Decree, signed in March of the same year. On display nearby is a 1551 proclamation requiring Jews in Germany to wear a yellow badge, presented to Herman Göring on his birthday in 1940 by Reinhard Heydrich and the Security Police of the Third Reich, as well as original copies of the fictional Protocols of the Elders of Zion printed in multiple languages (Portuguese, French, English), one of which was published and circulated by Henry Ford of the Ford Motor Company in 1920, for which Ford was sued by Herman Berstein.¹⁴

Beyond the portentous room that centers historical anti-Jewish decrees, events, and public attitudes from the First Crusade in 1096 to massacres in Ukraine (1648–1655), Algeria (1805), Iran (1839), and Kiev (1881), time moves quickly. Chronology and geography are compressed. Rather than conforming to neat thematic, spatial, or temporal categories, each room slips into the next. Both curatorial content and design lead visitors through a labyrinthine series of moments in time, which flows in multiple directions and seeps into the cracks between the hope of new worlds and despair over lost ones. Portraits and uniforms of Jewish soldiers who served in both Germany and the United States armies in World War I mingle with tableaus of German, Polish, and American Zionist youth organizations and depictions of prominent Jewish citizens of Weimar Germany, one of whom drafted its constitution.¹⁵ Jewish socialist and Zionist movements are described as stemming from a “national spirit,” meanwhile antisemitism and economic hardship are cited as catalyzing a dramatic exodus in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when nearly one-third of Eastern Europe's Jewish population fled to Europe, the United States, and Palestine.¹⁶

Racialized impositions of Jewish difference are by no means a twentieth-century phenomenon, as gallery 3 illustrates. Neither are historical discourses of difference tied to the explicit distinction of Jews as “others” by non-Jews. Eric Goldstein explains that from the 1870s, Jewish communities in the United States began to invest in a renewed social, political, and sometimes racialized insistence on notions of Jewish nationhood and Jewish identity beyond religion, even in tandem with the “desire for Americanization” (Goldstein 2006: 17). Conceived largely outside the scope of later Zionist political movements, much of the early discourse concerning the preservation of a collective Jewish “peoplehood” vis-à-vis anxieties around American assimilation relate to the “Jewish nation” as a “dismembered,” “portable” one, “independent of every soil” (2006: 17). The imminent emergence of Zionism as a nation-building project with strong ties to Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is palpable in almost all of the Museum's galleries in the form of artworks, information pamphlets, and advertisements targeting potential immigrants fleeing oppression across the globe. Through these objects, many of which are presented as alternative advertisements to those featuring the United States as a land of prosperity and possibility, promises of Jewish national reconstitution are grafted onto redemptory narratives of freedom, liberation, and self-determination.

The first person is used throughout the exhibition, both epigraphically and in video recordings. In the remaining galleries, broader historical, social, and political narratives framing the exhibition are threaded as the weft through the warp of survivor and witness testimonies. Great emphasis is placed on Jewish social and political organizing and resistance in the time leading up to Hitler's election as chancellor, and even before, as well as during and after World War II. An 8 February 1943 copy of the New York Times advertises the Committee for a Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinian Jews plea for support. Shabbat¹⁷ candlesticks fashioned from melted Nazi helmets, used in the Bergen-Belsen Displaced Persons camp, are displayed alongside Herman Göring's accordion, which he personally gifted to his survivor-interrogator while on trial in Nuremberg. While invocations of resilience do not temper the forces of hate, apathy, and tragedy that track simultaneously, its recognition in spiritual, sociocultural, and political forms makes room for maintaining the humanity of the Holocaust's victims, survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders, without which the educational message of the exhibition would be lost and its memorial affect muted. A somber dynamism emerges from the continuous looping of the personal and familiar around the immeasurable and unimaginable, a pattern that also repeatedly pulls the past into the present and vice versa.

In addition to the color coding that moves visitors from the garish red walls of the Nazi Germany–themed gallery to the pebble-lined and metal and wood-paneled installations in the galleries titled “Ghettos,” “The ‘Final Solution’ in the German-Conquered Soviet Union,” “Roundups, Deportations, and Factories of Murder,” and finally to the stark white and pale blue that shades the final room, “Death Marches, Liberation, and Beginning Again,” light and sound shift drastically across the exhibition's sensorial landscape. Echoes of recurring video recordings travel between rooms, heightening the spectrality of the objects and written testimonies on display. Artifacts and digital projections are supplemented by maps and timelines of various scales, including an interactive database of killing sites in the German-conquered Soviet Union, official maps of pogrom sites and death camps, and personal documentation projects such as Werner “Fritz” Fürstenberg's 1935 photographic “Motorcycle Album” of antisemitic signs in Germany and the annotated map of a death march by Abraham Melezin, who pencil-marked his journey from Stutthof to Nawitz each night.

Posing the question by providing the evidence of what hate can do, the Museum of Jewish Heritage aims to teach the dire significance of the Holocaust to a broad audience with varying degrees of familiarity with the historical and social circumstances that situate it. The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do is neither an attempt to make sense of the world(s) out of which the events of the Holocaust were born, nor is it an answer to the moral discrepancies of the world that witnessed it in real time, or of that which is now charged with its memory for that matter. Far beyond the issues of linguistic and cultural representation, there are unmistakable tensions and slippages, both temporal and ethical, in the exhibition's framing of religious, racial, and ethnic difference and discrimination. For example, the genocidal campaigns of settler colonialism that continued to rack indigenous families, communities, and nations across the United States throughout the Allies’ long silence concerning the Nazis’ “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” are markedly absent, as is the US government's internment of American citizens with Japanese ancestry in “war relocation camps” and its Jim Crow and Native blood quantum laws that served as a model for the Third Reich's own Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935. There is, however, an original copy of the publication The Science of Eugenics and Sex-Life, Love, Marriage, Maternity: The Regeneration of the Human Race, written by American eugenicist Walter J. Hadden and printed by Martin and Murray Company, Inc. of New York in 1927, on view in the Nazi Germany gallery that reminds visitors of parallel American trends in justifying anti-Black and anti-Jewish racism in the social climate of the interwar period.

The concluding gallery attends to the end of the war, the liberation of stateless and incarcerated peoples by the Allied armed forces, and the “Birth of Israel,” which the exhibition signals as the culmination of hope for hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors who would immigrate there in the coming years. In this room, reference to the US Displaced Persons Act, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, all signed in 1948, are cited together with a life-size photograph of a celebration for the establishment of the State of Israel in Garmisch, Germany (1948), in the background. Whereas Jewish life in Diaspora prior to the Holocaust is represented in terms of its dynamism and vulnerability, postwar Jewish immigration to Palestine and the ensuing establishment of Israel as a nation-state represents a kind of existential liberation, as well as a form of cultural resistance and even retribution against the Nazis and their supporters. While considering the State of Israel's establishment in the immediate context of the post-Holocaust is crucial, the glaring avoidance of its difficult history vis-à-vis Palestinian displacement and dispossession is another missed opportunity for critical historytelling.

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Racial Determination Tables from Munich, Germany (1935). 2014.31.1. Donated to the Museum of Jewish Heritage by Ian R. Lawson in honor of Lieut. Col. Robert C. Thomson. Courtesy of the author and the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120117

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Government of Palestine Identity Card for Yoel Goldfarb dated 1 May 1947, Tel Aviv. 2001.A.54. Donated to the Museum of Jewish Heritage by Ada More-Benerofe and Irit Aviv. Courtesy of the author and the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120117

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Perhaps intentionally, there are mixed signals and suspended ironies embedded within the exhibition's representation of a “free world” that watched and did nothing, in which “the enormity of the tragedy that had befallen the civilized world” was realized only after the fact (gallery text, my emphasis). Viewed from an historical perspective, the hatred and hope that inform the exhibition's many stories can be followed along an interminably circuitous continuum. Its viscid trail is easily traced from medieval blood libel accusations in Norwich (1144), which presaged the expulsion of Jewish people from England in 1290, to analogous claims made in twentieth-century Massena, New York (1928). The persistence of anti-Jewish attitudes in Poland following the war, where in July of 1946, forty-two Jewish people were murdered in a pogrom in the city of Kielce, sheds further light on the profound and incomprehensible, although undeniably persistent, state of violence (rather than isolated flashes or events) that stems from enduring, collective hate.

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“What the World Knew and Did” gallery view, Museum of Jewish Heritage. Courtesy of the author and the Museum of Jewish Heritage.

Citation: Museum Worlds 12, 1; 10.3167/armw.2024.120117

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The exhibition begins and ends with fragments. It brings forth the call to remember and to remember well. Closing with video recording of survivors’ testimonies, much like its counterparts at the Polin Museum in Warsaw, the Jewish History Museum/Holocaust History Center in Tucson, and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, it is the ones who lived it who have the last word.¹⁸ Visitors are charged with the weight of their memories, which are preserved in perpetuity as proxies for so many lives lived and lost. Their messages and those conveyed by the hundreds of articles on view produce an eternal excess, an infinity of absences. What Hate Can Do is a question without an answer. Its offerings flicker between simultaneous redemption and decimation, between individual survival and the possibility for humanity's survival. It is a memorial to and a warning of irrevocable loss that cannot be mended through storytelling, museum visits, or candle-lighting alone. It is a reminder that the world was never free, that we have to make that world, and that “our memories are not simply our own” (Lepselter 2016: 162).

Jaimie N. Luria

Cornell University, Ithaca

Katrin Antweiler. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023.

Katrin Antweiler's book Memorialising the Holocaust in Human Rights Museums was timely and relevant when it was written and published and is even more so today. The relation between remembrance of past atrocities and universal human rights, which Antweiler calls the “Holocaust–human rights nexus,” as well as how we teach and learn about this relation, are not going to disappear in the near future. Museums, as inherently political institutions, are deeply entrenched in this discourse, and this is especially the case for human rights museums and memorial museums. Nevertheless, as the book shows, there is something in the very nature of the museum institution that calls for difficult and unsettling discussions about pasts, futures, and humanity (humanness) in general.

This book is a bold and honest effort to bridge concepts and disciplines with respect to their differences: these include the memory studies field and Holocaust education; museology and international human rights law; and, most importantly, studies of governmentality in different theoretical frameworks and the decolonial critique that holds it all together. As one of the subchapters suggests, the book can be conceptualized as a “decolonial study of memory from the perspective of global governmentality” (53), examined by the case studies of three human rights museums. Antweiler brings an important theoretical lens to the ongoing debates on what the moral grounds are for memory institutions to address the history (and contemporaneity) of mass atrocities, genocide, and crimes against humanity, continuing the critical discussion that emerged recently across academic fields of memory studies, museology, and heritage studies (see David 2020; Macdonald 2016; Rothberg 2009, 2019).

The book is organized in a way that first provides a reader with an overview of the existing theoretical frameworks in these fields. Antweiler not only introduces the theories, but also skillfully weaves these threads together in a consecutive way. In the text, the Foucauldian studies of governmentality being assessed through the lens of decolonial critique, evoke deep and thoughtful discussion of how the techniques of the self and the politics of global citizenship are being conditioned by the ongoing coloniality of the contemporary world. One of the aspects of decolonial theory that is especially relevant in the book's overarching analysis is Aníbal Quijano's (2007) colonial matrix of power where the Western paradigm of rational knowledge is one of the central concepts of the ongoing colonial condition. It allows for the analysis of the efforts to educate “the global citizen” as the “proper human” (36) and brings forward the notions of universal time and progress, which are also assessed critically in the book. The analytical tool crafted from governmentality studies and decolonial critique is then applied to the field of memory and museum studies to derive a research strategy for investigating the relationship between memory politics and the politics of citizenship. This synthesis results in the analytical concept that serves as the foundation for the whole book—the Holocaust–human rights nexus—and contributes to the theoretical repertoire traditionally used in this field. By untangling the Holocaust memory and the human rights project from each other and scrutinizing their interdependence, Antweiler lays out the basis for the five analytical chapters of the book: one which describes global Holocaust education endeavors, three focused on the case studies, and the interpretive chapter which probes “current Holocaust memory politics in light of their tendency to become politics of citizenship” (17). The Holocaust–human rights nexus in Antweiler's critical reading impacts, indeed, the formulations of global citizenship and its values; however, the book focuses on the institutions of memory (human rights museums) more than on other aspects of memory politics, which makes this volume also an important contribution in the field of museology.

All three case studies examined in the empirical chapters “seek to protect democratic values and, in particular, to champion human rights” (82). The selection of museum cases brings forward the global perspective: Memorium Nuremberg Trials in Germany; the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) in Winnipeg, and the Johannesburg Holocaust and Genocide Centre (JHGC) in South Africa. All three institutions have specific approaches and local contexts they refer to, however, the overarching narrative of “human rights museology” (Carter and Orange 2012) and “moral remembrance” (David 2020) is evident in each case. The book delves into the relationship between memorializing the Holocaust and its effects on formulations of citizenship, taking as the starting point the global programs in Holocaust education and awareness as well as international bodies such as the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance), which has an imperative of promoting the “historical understanding” of the past with aspiration of “critical thinking,” which will help to prevent violence in the future (86).

As Antweiler demonstrates, this way of progressivist thinking about the “lessons of the past” imposed through the museum institutions works in line with the fundamental value of Holocaust education efforts, that is becoming “active” and aware citizens aimed to “counter the influence of historical distortion, hate speech and incitement to violence and hatred” as well as to “preserve democratic values and pluralistic societies” (80). By analyzing this method of knowledge production with the toolbox of governmentality theories and, more importantly, the notion of museums as governmental apparatuses (Bennett 2015), one can see how human rights museums work in the new paradigm of socially relevant museology and perform Holocaust education as a global citizenship education project.

When we are talking about museums in the Foucauldian sense of power, knowledge, and governmentality, however, it is important to remember that these apparatuses allow also for putting on display the very mechanics of their discursive work. As Beth Lord puts it, the “museum has certain Enlightenment capabilities—including critique, autonomy, and progress—and can use those capabilities to question and overcome the power relations that have historically been based on them” (2006: 11). Museums as institutions were (and still are, mostly) complicit in producing the ongoing coloniality of knowledge in the modern world. However, they can also highlight and question these conditions due to their specific mode of work; museums are among the few public spaces open to doubt. What Antweiler's book adds to Lord's argument, though, is another form of governmentality imposed on these institutions (paved with good intentions of democracy, social justice, and global citizenship), which tends to override their capability to question modern ways of knowledge production. This form provides the point of (negative) universal reference in educating global citizens—the Holocaust–human rights nexus of remorse, atonement, and moral remembrance.

The international memorial museums’ charter (adopted by the IHRA in 2012) names “the danger of the politicisation and nationalisation of memory” (86) and the importance of the universal Holocaust education programs to confront these tendencies, as “morally educated” citizens would be able to engage critically with the “wrong” uses of history. However, as Antweiler correctly points out, museums engaging citizen-subjects in global educational programs in the name of democracy is already a political act (89). The depoliticization of the Holocaust–human rights nexus leads to its usage as an empty signifier in diverse global contexts (for example, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, both sides of the conflict referenced the Holocaust in their rhetoric to describe the real or imaginary crimes of the opposing side). As I argue elsewhere (Zabalueva 2022: 139), the question of “democratizing” museums relates not to the form of governmentality, but to a productive understanding of institutional politics, the tensions and relationships that lie at the foundation of museum work. Antweiler suggests a new way of “thinking museums politically” by deconstructing the overarching hegemonic discourse of moral remembrance in museums that curate difficult knowledge and engage with difficult heritage: she claims that “what connects Holocaust memory with human rights and vice versa is a multilayered complex of memory politics” (158). The book neither debunks nor denies the optimistic, positive view on this interplay or the accomplishments of human rights museums in the fields of reparation, reconciliation, and justice. However, it suggests a deeper and more nuanced interpretation of how these museums are contributing to the normalizing of certain conduct, and how they call for humanitarian action without questioning the conditions and political causes for human suffering in the first place (160). Antweiler's critique is directed to the depoliticization of memory and falls into the tenets of decolonial critique. As she puts it, the “moralisation of political life . . . replaces political responsibility for systemic change with moral responsibility for suffering individuals” (174). This—very much neoliberal—model of individual approach to the political, which benefits active citizenship of each citizen-subject obscures structural inequalities and power imbalances in the global contemporary world. In the case of Holocaust remembrance and human rights museums, it is also balancing on the verge of obscuring the reasons and the contexts of the past atrocities, focusing instead on the “lessons” of how to be more humane, tolerant, and responsible citizen-subjects. In a way, it avoids formulating the problems facing society in a political way. If the first public museums as part of the Enlightenment project were to foster and nurture an ideal citizen (according to governmentality theory in museum studies), the human rights museums described in this book are supposed to bring forward another ideal figuration: that of a “historically aware human rights activist” (169) who has a “duty to engage.” Moral sentiments, invoked by the Holocaust–human rights nexus, are “understood as emotions that point us to the misfortunes of others and make us want to alleviate them” (171). Museum institutions operating in the framework of this nexus put such sentiments into the call for action and are supposed to educate visitors on how to perform active citizenship individually, making the “Never Again” motto a duty and a responsibility of everyone—and, consequentially, no one. As Antweiler points out, such an approach renders “highly political issues, such as structural racism, as problems resulting from individual misbehaviour” (173), therefore, if individual museum visitors will be educated in how to be tolerant and “unlearn” their own prejudices and stereotypes, “Never Again” and a more just society will happen as a matter of fact. This belief, apart from following neoliberal and colonial logic, is deeply grounded in the concept of universal time and progressive development foundational for European modernity, and here is where the theoretical repertoire of decolonial thinking employed by Antweiler as an overarching conceptual framework becomes especially helpful for analysis.

The other important point of the book is how the memory of the Holocaust, which can be considered a “door-opener to engagement with today's human rights issues,” can also displace other memories, such as the awareness of apartheid or the subjugation of First Nations (190)—working, therefore, against the grain of the productive “political solutions” in the future. This approach to the Holocaust memory as the means of displacement and the whole discussion on the possible comparisons of past violence and mass atrocities follows Michael Rothberg's argument on multidirectional (Antweiler suggests “pluriversal”) memory and is, unfortunately, very timely in the polarized political discussions nowadays. Memory politics, according to Antweiler, risk “contributing to the project of colonising the political imagination, even where their aim is to contribute to a more just world” (192), making the case for “defuturing” in Madina Tlostanova and Tony Fry's terminology (2021). What is the way out of this entanglement?

Antweiler suggests to the reader “a thought experiment” she calls the “Museum of Doubt.” It follows the trend of thought that calls for “unlearning” imperialism and colonial history (Azoulay 2019), for new political imagination in the time of ongoing global crises (Tlostanova and Fry 2021), and for “different ways of remembering” in the realm of multidirectional memory as a non-zero–sum game (Rothberg 2009). The imaginary Museum of Doubt would try to “avoid universalisation as much as closure and instead emphasise the impossibility of stitching the images of history into one coherent narrative” (197), it also denies the normativity of morality and the single story of the universal human rights narrative. The Museum of Doubt seems to be an answer to the final research question that guides both the author and the reader through the book: “Can Holocaust memory preserve its notion of disobedience despite its universalization in the human rights project?”

Starting from Jean Améry's concepts of “resentment” and “self-mistrust,” Antweiler looks for ways to unsettle the conventional positionalities of victims and perpetrators of violence, in line with Michael Rothberg's notion of the “implicated subject” (2019). And I must say, for this reader, the Museum of Doubt concept is extremely persuasive, as it allows for uncertainty, doubt, and self-mistrust—options not available for the ones who wish to stay “on the right side of history.” Memory, in Antweiler's book, can truly “contribute to more pluriversal utopian thinking” (201), to re-futuring the political imagination, and to constant productive dialogue that can help to reintroduce the political into museum institutions. It also allows for a “horizon of hope” which will help to decolonize the imaginary (203) and resist the self-celebratory closure of the past traumas. This (kind of) museum can leave us “unsettled and full of the resulting questions” (210), yet it also encourages further museological debate on reflexive and self-conscious museum institutions. There is a growing field of studies of empathy and affect in museum theory and practice—Antweiler herself dwells on the concept of empathy and how it is used as a pedagogical method in two of the museum institutions she studied (CMHR and JHGC). In this field of studies Andrea Witcomb, for example, suggests “pedagogy of feeling” (2015) as an adequate tool for museums to meaningfully reach their audiences. She describes it as a way museums can use “affective encounters” in issues concerning memory, identity, aesthetics, and sensory forms of knowledge production, and points out the importance of such encounters in civic spaces that “can lead to political activity and thus to an enactment of citizenship” (340). This argument, despite referring to the notion of radical democracy, still aligns with the educational premises of the Holocaust–human rights nexus. There is also a pitfall of uncritical performances of affective methods that can be traced, for example, in Antweiler's chapter on CMHR practices (such as the “Action Counts” game that urges the visitor to perform a neocolonial act of charity). Following Antweiler's argument, I would settle on “pedagogy of doubt” instead, which addresses the reason and emotions simultaneously and provokes difficult questions to oneself and to structural issues ingrained in our contemporary world.

Olga Zabalueva

Umeå University

Jarracharra: Dry Season Winds at the National Crafts Museum, New Delhi (1–17 March 2023)

Anthropologists have long recognized the diplomatic power of cloth. Cloth is a powerful “metaphor for society” (Weiner and Schneider 1987) and when circulated thoughtfully, can act as an “envoy” (Kreamer and Fee 2002) for values and interests across distances that are difficult for people to traverse themselves. However, such diplomatic endeavors are rarely straightforward, as interpretation introduces both opportunities and risks. This principle was demonstrated at the exhibition of Indigenous Australian textiles, Jarracharra: Dry Season Winds, which took place at the National Crafts Museum in New Delhi from 1 to 17 March 2023. This exhibition showcased 36 textile objects crafted by artists from Bábbarra Designs in Arnhem Land, Northern Australia, and represents a pivotal moment in the group's global diplomatic agenda. After an inaugural display at the Australian Embassy in Paris in 2019, the textiles were exhibited at prestigious galleries across Europe and the Middle East during 2020 and 2021, before being showcased in the Indian fashion industry's commercial hubs of Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, and New Delhi in 2023.

Reflecting a growing interest among Indigenous cultural producers in positioning their expertise within the fashion industry—a global field with distinctive institutions and regimes of value—Jarracharra demonstrates Indigenous Australian women's efforts to establish a shared culture of slow, sustainable, and accountable fashion production. Discussion of how the exhibition was received in India—a postcolonial state with a long history of textile-centered cultural activism—becomes especially significant for understanding the transnational valences of textile expertise and some of the layered cultural–political processes into which Indigenous design objects are being drawn.

A Permanent Exhibition at the Museum of African Art

The representation of African arts and cultures in world culture exhibitions, from modern Universal Expositions to global “universal” museums such as the British Museum and Musee du Quai Branly, has been commonly discussed in the context of postcolonial museums’ reinterpretation of non-Western cultures (Loumpet-Galitzine 2011). Postcolonial museums in countries that colonized Africa tend to embrace and raise questions about changing representations of African culture in a given historical moment. By targeting global audiences, they attempt to re-display past colonial collections. To avoid “colonialism's long arms” and “perpetuating historical harms,” contemporary museum practice pays special attention to “counter-narratives to Western dominance” (Fraser 2022: 477) and engages the non-dominant community. Universal museums have tried to de-colonize the old institutional paradigm by eliminating colonial interpretations through reconciliation with the present.

Representing culture is not about displaying a fixed product with “legitimacy” but a process of changing an already constructed static representation (Loumpet-Galitzine 2011: 141). In a broader sense, what are the implications of this postcolonial museum practice for museums in countries historically unrelated to colonial Africa? How do museums in these countries interpret African cultures? South Korea, a nation with no direct historical ties with Western colonialism and almost no museum discussion of the responsibility to re-represent colonized African culture, is arguably a good example to address the aforementioned questions.

In contemporary South Korea, African nations have habitually been described as a counter to South Korea's economic success in the 1960s–1970s, with phrases such as “the South Korean nation suffered from poverty with a lower GDP than ‘African nations’ in the 1950s but transferred its international position from the recipient to the contributor of foreign aid” (National Archives of Korea 2022). The Museum of African Art (MAA) in South Korea (figure 1), with the largest number of African objects in Asia (approximately 2,200), was established in 2006 with an explicit mission “to dispel the stereotypes of African culture” (MAA 2024). This review examines the curatorial method that MAA employs to represent African culture based on the museum's mission to provide an empirical purview of interpretation in an international museum context. Teaching at the World Arts and Cultures Institute at the current university in Seoul, I visited the MAA twice in 2022 and 2024 to conduct fieldwork and investigate African culture's representation in Korea guided by the research questions: how does the MAA exhibit and visually represent African culture? How do the interpretations of Africa address the museum's missions and goals?