Curating the transatlantic slave trade and its legacies in Britain: race, memory and affect in contemporary museum practice

My thesis studies the curation of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in contemporary museum practice in Britain. I use the scholarship around the bicentenary commemorations of the 1807 Abolition Act as a starting point both to argue that approaches to the curation of Transatlantic Slavery need to be updated and as a framework to guide my analysis. My study is also framed by the desire to develop an ontologically focused critical museum studies approach. I do this as it is a more accurate reflection of the operations of the colonial encounter reproduced in museums. More accurate as it reflects the process of dehumanisation and objectification of the colonial Other best represented by the history of Transatlantic Slavery. Prior approaches were limited in their focus on the means of knowledge making and knowing without appreciating the ways museums construct how subjects be in the world of the exhibition space.

By studying the curation of Transatlantic Slavery I develop this ontological approach by focusing on race, memory and affect to trace how museums construct and deconstruct identities. I analyse how this occurs through the institutional memory of the bicentenary, how collaborative curatorial practice has developed, how the experience of enslavement is communicated, and how contemporary abolitionist politics is collected and displayed. By focusing on the interplay of race, memory and affect I develop a range of new theoretical tools and approaches which sees the memory in the museum as multidirectional and an expanded notion of community as interpretive communities and communities of practice. Additionally I propose the concept of Affective Autonomy to understand how enslaved subjectivity is presented as a complex affective being. Finally, I introduce into critical museum studies an analysis of the displaying of the politics and materials of the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK.