TLRH | The Death of the National Museum of Brazil: Slavery Heritage on the Edge

Monday, 22 March 2021, 7 – 8:15pm An online lecture as part of the
Out of the Ashes Lecture Series, with Professor Ana Lucia Araujo,
Howard University, Washington. This lecture examines the history of
the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, which was destroyed
by fire in September 2018. Araujo explores the connections between
the museum's building and the formation of its collections
associated with the history of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery
in Brazil, the country that imported the largest number of enslaved
Africans (nearly five million) during the era of the Atlantic slave
trade. The museum housed the oldest collection of African artifacts
in the country. Several of these artifacts were given as gifts to
the Portuguese Prince Regent (who later became king) by the king of
Dahomey, in the context of transactions to facilitate the trade in
enslaved Africans between Brazil and the West African Kingdom of
Dahomey. In the past two decades, the museum, like a few other
Brazilian institutions, was investing in reorganizing its
exhibitions to bring to light the links between Africa and Brazil,
a dimension that until recently remained absent from Brazilian
museum institutions. Araujo shows that the destruction of the
museum as a result of federal government's neglect reveals a
reality that affects many other big and small museums whose
collections derive from the country's long history of slavery. The
event will also feature a short response to the lecture from Lar
Joye, Port Heritage Director at Dublin Port, former Chair of the
Irish Blue Shield, and a member of the board of the Irish Museum
Association. About the speaker Ana Lucia Araujo is a full Professor
of History at the historically black Howard University in
Washington DC, United States. She holds a dual PhD in
History/Social and Historical Anthropology from Université Laval,
Canada, and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, France
(2007) and a PhD in Art History from Université Laval, Canada.
(2004). Her recent single-authored books include Slavery in the Age
of Memory: Engaging the Past (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020),
Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and
Comparative History (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), Brazil Through
French Eyes: A Nineteenth-Century Artist in the Tropics (University
of New Mexico Press, 2015). She is a member of the International
Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project. She also
serves on the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review
(the journal of the American Historical Association) and the
editorial board of Slavery and Abolition. She is a member of the
executive board of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide
Diaspora (ASWAD), the editorial review board of the African Studies
Review, and the board of the blog Black Perspectives maintained by
the African American Intellectual History Society. Currently, she
is working on two book projects: Human in Humans in Shackles: An
Atlantic History of Slavery in the Americas (under contract with
the University of Chicago Press) and The Gift: How Objects of
Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism (under
contract with Cambridge University Press). She just finished
Museums and Atlantic Slavery, a short-format book to be published
in the Spring 2021 by Routledge in the series Routledge Museums in
Focus. Learn more at: https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/