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A History of Black Museums in the United States: An Ecology of Museum Knowledges as 'Wake Work'
Bajorek, Lauren Haley
Bajorek, Lauren Haley
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Abstract
In this thesis, I track the history of African American museums in the United States to build a digital humanities-based project called A History of Black Museums in the United States. This project is intended to be used as a tool, a starting point, rather than a closed-circuit archive, to actively include Black museums in museological historiographies as well as situate Black culture and history within the broader dominant narrative. I propose a theoretical lens to approaching museum and digital humanities work called an ‘ecology of museum knowledges’ that draws from Christina Sharpe’s wake work, Mary Pratt’s contact zones, James Clifford’s museums as contact zones, Gatekeeper Theory as explained by Laura-Edythe Coleman, Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ ecology of knowledges, Roopika Risam’s writings on postcolonial digital humanities, Abdul Alkalimat’s explanation of Sankofa Principle, and Kelly Baker Joseph and Roopika Risam’s collection for the Digital Black Atlantic. This paper calls for museum professionals, digital humanities practitioners, and scholars from across the humanities to fill the digital cultural record with the stories of communities thus far marginalized, ignored, forgotten, and erased by the dominant cultural record, and to do so urgently, critically, and with goals oriented towards cross-cultural engagement, ever-evolving archives of stories, the decolonization of storytelling within cultural heritage institutions, facilitating truth and reconciliation, and utilizing community-specific frameworks.
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Date
2022-05-31
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University of Kansas
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Keywords
African American studies, Museum studies, Black Arts Movement, Black Museum Movement, Black museums, digital humanities, ecology of knowledges, wake work