Thesis
What Remains?: Decolonization and Erasure of Memory in the History of the AfricaMuseum, 1897-2020
Washington State University
Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
01/2022
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000004461
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/125281
Abstract
The Museé Royale de l’Afrique Centrale in Tervuren, Belgium purports to have the richest collection of African cultural artifacts in the world. Constructed at the height of the Belgian King Leopold II’s reign of terror in Congo, the museum stands as both a testament to and memorial of Belgian state and monarchical colonial legacies. The museum, relatively unchanged since its reimaging at the turn of the 20th century, closed its doors in 2013 to undergo a five-year decolonizing renovation designed to repair the museum’s relationship with Belgian memory and international morality. The deconstruction of colonial ideologies across European institutions is an increasingly important movement across multiple fields of study. Incorporating elements of Museum Studies, Indigenous Studies and Methodologies, Memory Studies and History, this project engages and critiques the troubling myth of decolonizing a fundamentally colonial space by placing in context the newly renamed AfricaMuseum’s renovation policies, strategies, and consequences. By engaging multiple disciplines, I believe my work can provide an important contribution to the emerging conversation about representation in memory spaces, and by comparing the museum’s contemporary remodel to its predecessor I have found the AfricaMuseum still to be lacking in contextual awareness. Ultimately, my findings suggest that the immensely colonized spaces represented by institutions such as this continue to dominate the commemorative recognition of colonial atrocity and undermine national efforts to effectively diversify understandings of colonial history.
Metrics
15 File views/ downloads
73 Record Views
Details
- Title
- What Remains?
- Creators
- Kyley Elise Canion Brewer
- Contributors
- Raymond Sun (Advisor)Susan Peabody (Committee Member)Jeffrey Ostler (Committee Member)Robert McCoy (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- History, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 119
- Identifiers
- 99900881631201842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Thesis