Inherited “Ancestors’ Collections” of a Devoted Curator: The Museum of African Heritage in Georgetown, Guyana
This essay traces the development of the Museum of African Heritage (MAH) in Guyana, which opened in 1994. The vision for the Museum, however, emerged over a decade earlier within contexts of decolonial cultural nationalist movements in the circum-Caribbean and African diasporic world at large. Expl...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Stockholm University Press
2018-06-01
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| Series: | Karib |
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| Online Access: | https://www.karib.no/articles/39 |
| Summary: | This essay traces the development of the Museum of African Heritage (MAH) in Guyana, which opened in 1994. The vision for the Museum, however, emerged over a decade earlier within contexts of decolonial cultural nationalist movements in the circum-Caribbean and African diasporic world at large. Exploring particular histories and contemporary functioning of this museum reveals insights into cultural politics of Guyana’s postcolonial nationalist formations, as well as into ways in which museums navigate their often-incongruous political and cultural roles in societies. Museum Director, Jenny Daly, has since the MAH’s inception been the main force behind this institution. Understanding this Museum’s past and current relationships to cultural-nationalist struggles is instructive for historians of Caribbean politics, Africanist scholars, and museologists more generally. Noting how Daly describes her own professional and personal growth realized through relationships forged with artists, their works, and their various communities of engagement can be illuminating. Daly recalls how art served as an effective medium through which she began to engage meaningfully with aspects of her own ancestral heritages, recognizing a profound correspondence between her involvement with the arts and with local Guyanese iterations of African-derived religiosity. Performing and visual arts provide conceptual and practical bridges between African-inflected expressions of devotion, which are generally marginalized in Guyanese society, and positive self-conceptions among African Guyanese individuals and communities. Through didactic means, art holds potentials to demystify stigmatized culture. The MAH is especially well-situated to harness such educational capacities of art, making African Guyanese histories and cultural expressions more accessible to all. |
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| ISSN: | 1894-8421 2387-6743 |