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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the making of African diasporan heritage in the Swedish Museum of Ethnography. Drawing on an ethnographic material, the study investigates how understandings of these individuals and their entanglements with the museum is organized by museum staff, visitors and collaborators.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses how practices of heritage making in the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm are produced through a logic of entangling. The paper draws on a case study of the project Ongoing Africa, conducted at the museum since 2017. This project aims to raise new perspectives on the African continent with and by Swedes of African descent and it is organized around collaborations with researchers, artists, and activists engaged in questions related to African cultural heritage and relationships between communities on the African continent, in diaspora, and in Sweden. These collaborations in turn produce program activities in the museum, where the historical entanglements of African travelers and the museum are discussed in the public.

The presented travelers and migrants came to various communities in Sweden from the late 18th century until the late 20th century. Some of them left traces in the museum archives, others did not. Drawing on ethnographic observations of the program activities where they have been presented and 19 interviews with staff members and collaborators, this paper examines how understandings of historical entanglements are organized in the present. Through a discourse theoretical perspective combined with affect theory, I analyze how an opening up of the past allows for a re-centering of African subjects, and hence an openness to a shared future between the museum and individuals positioning within the African diaspora. In particular, the paper presents the forming of a counter-discourse, that orients with, against, and away from coloniality, whiteness and Swedish exceptionalism.