Slavery, Museums & Monuments explores the multifaceted role of slavery museums and their method and context of curation in influencing the understanding of the history of slavery and memory. Museums are curated to narrate stories that usually have specific political or cultural aims. It is the story that the museum wants to tell which curators play an important role in telling by first deciding what story to even tell, the accuracy of those stories, and who these stories belong to. They correlate and perpetuate social, political, and cultural agendas and narratives concerning slavery and its history. The course heavily discusses how slavery museums, especially those in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, communicate multiple forms of interrelation and shared histories by comparing many museums and their methods of curation. This course teaches us about what goes into representing the difficult histories of slavery and the many challenges that they face in doing so.
What I learned from the seminar's evaluation of slavery museums and their curation is the ability of constructed narratives and their presentation to deeply impact the viewer’s knowledge of history and context. While the seminar does focus on slavery museums, the valuable lesson learned is how these themes of creating narratives, influencing audiences, and the politics of representation are all extremely related to how the media portrays female politicians are equally relevant to analyzing how media depicts women in political roles. I got to see the similarities between museums and their curation of exhibits and how the media chooses and shapes the images and stories of female political participants, and these stories can promote biases about women or challenge them. It is the way one chooses to tell a story and present their perception of the facts that sets the tone for the narrative of what is portrayed, and that applies to both curation or media representation. In addition, that media representation in of itself is political since just like museums being a space for cultural and political discussions so can the media in its purely political approach to representing women. Another helpful form of knowledge that teh course provided me is how to carefully assess language. Within the mere title of an exhibit or artifact, a lot is said, and this emphasizes how the words used in curation or representation carry a lot of weight in the history told and its reception. The same can be applied to the media in that the choice of language used matters immensely and analyzing the language used in the media can reveal underlying biases and other challenges in accurate and positive representation. By comparing curatorial techniques in both museums and media production, I have obtained better insight into how stereotypes or narratives about female political participation are constructed, spread, and received, as well as their effects on society.
