Slavery Museums Monuments

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

Why are museums created? What political and cultural work that curators have in mind and what stories do they attempt to tell? What opportunities and challenges do the vast array of collections and exhibitions about slavery shape our knowledge of fraught human relations in the context of slavery? This seminar will explore key theoretical and methodological concerns over the anthropology of politics of space, race, remembrance and heritage given the significance of these museums and their ‘object of memory’. This seminar will focus on slave museums in the Indian Ocean, a sea brimming with racialized histories that involved incalculable numbers of Ports of the trade on its shores. This research seminar will address some of the most complex topics in the humanities and social sciences. It covers wide-ranging academic preoccupations and professional concerns in the act of curating and the selectivity enmeshed in the process. We will consider overlapping interests pivoting around questions of audience, material culture, politics and artistic sensibilities. This seminar will draw on the ever-shifting roles that slavery museums, monuments and houses of heritage play in selected areas of the Indian Ocean, an ocean which only recently started to attract the academic attention it deserves. The seminar’s objectives are promoting critical knowledge and analytical thought about visual exhibits as well as furthering close reading, creative thinking and communication tools through the study of the history and anthropology of these sites of memorialization in Qatar, Mauritius, Zanzibar, Le Reunion and Madagascar. These sites will also be analyzed comparatively with other slave museums in the United States