In Slavery's Wake
A Global Curatorial Project
Mission
The Global Curatorial Project (GCP) is a network of scholars, curators and community educators who are committed to creating critical new knowledges and innovative forms of public history about the historical experiences and the contemporary legacies of racial slavery and colonialism. The GCP creates exhibitions, public programming, academic workshops, and digital programs and seeks to collaborate and transform museum practice with international publics and audiences.
Partners
Spearheaded by the Center for the Study of Global Slavery at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ) at Brown University, the GCP has carefully developed partnerships around the world.
Current partners include:
- Iziko Museums Slave Lodge, South Africa
- Royal Museum for Central Africa, Belgium
- The Shackles of Memory (Les Anneaux de la Mémoire), France
- Château des ducs de Bretagne, France
- Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire, Senegal
- International Slavery Museum, United Kingdom
- Legacies of British Slave-ownership Project, United Kingdom
In June 2019, GCP representatives from NMAAHC and CSSJ visited Senegal under the direction of Dr. Ibrahima Thiaw from IFAN, conducting research and outreach.
In Slavery’s Wake
The GCP’s primary focus for the next five years is to create an international exhibition in partnership with communities and a global network of museums, non-profits, and university partners focused on the history and afterlives of slavery from 2023-2027. Tentatively entitled In Slavery’s Wake—Slavery, Freedom, and the Making of Our World, the exhibition will travel to Africa, Europe and the Americas, shifting the way we think about, talk about, and represent the history of slavery, race, and globalization and the continuing relevance of these histories to our world today.
Need and Relevance
Through this project, the GCP partnership will establish long term vision of and forum for global collaboration. This forum seeks to reshape understandings and connections between slavery’s past and the present and to transform as well as decolonize museum and scholarly practice through ongoing work with scholars and communities in Africa and around the globe. It will work to forge new relationships amongst museums as well as between public institutions and their audiences in order to make museums into sites more relevant to addressing questions of repair, reckoning, reconciliation, and justice.
