Paper short abstract:

To what extent have museum-community collaborations fostered change in museum collections and practice? What are their limits and potentialities in overcoming the coloniality embedded in ethnographic museums’ practices, and re-imagining collections with colonial, troubling legacies?

Paper long abstract:

In the past several years, debates around the colonial legacies of museums and especially ethnographic museums, have intensified. Given these museums’ colonial and problematic legacies, scholars have questioned the future of these museums, as they were created within hegemonic contexts of white supremacy, racialising disciplines and colonialism. In Europe, Africa and elsewhere, museums with these troubling origins have taken steps to rethink their collections and exhibitions. For example, in Zambia, at the Moto Moto Museum, the major project to redo “old, colonial exhibitions” was undertaken between 2007 and 2013. As part of these processes of “undoing”, the museum engaged different stakeholders, including members of the communities where the missionary and founder of the museum Fr Jean Jacques Corbeil (1913-1990), made the collections. In this paper, I explore the experiences in the museum/community collaborations during this major project of attempting to transform the museum. To what extent did it successfully foster the envisaged change in the museum’s permanent exhibition? What were the expectations of the different stakeholders in these collaborations, and were these resolved? What are the limits and potentialities of these museum-community relations in overcoming the coloniality embedded in ethnographic museums’ practices, fostering change, and thus re-imagining collections with colonial legacies?