Lest We Forget: Exhibiting (and Remembering) Slavery in African-American Museums

Abstract

This study examines the dynamics of visual displays that portray African-American slavery across five black-centered museums. I argue that the rhetorics employed by black-centered sites are part of a racialized regime of representation. Taking lessons from the earlier pioneering efforts in museum practices, these black-centered sites are able to make significant contributions and frame the institution of slavery and the experience of enslavement within the tropes of survival, resistance, and achievement. Visual displays outlining slavery can be viewed as mechanisms by which cultural memory is induced as a tool for making meaning while collective identity in museums creates a space for investigating the relationship between the past and the present. Within exhibits that focus on slavery—and other events of the distant past—are contests over the utility of the past for present purposes.