Diasporas of Art: History, the Tervuren Royal Museum for Central Africa, and the Politics of Memory in Belgium, 1885–2014

Abstract

IntroductionChallenges abound as contemporary museums engage the politics and culture of memory, particularly colonial memory, and ways of approaching histories of violence.The South Africa Johannesburg Museum represents one end of a spectrum, with a stark, evocative new building obliging visitors to experience the spaces of apartheid.France, inimitably supple, vaporizes the vexing problem of its colonial past by aestheticization, creating in the Quai Branly a new museum devoted to the highest standards of art across the continents.Belgium's Royal Museum for Central Africa, however, presents a different and unusual case.In 2005, the museum attempted to confront for the very first time a brutal colonial history in the center of a singular institution of official national denial: King Leopold II's palatial Congo Museum, opened in 1910 and never renovated.This article examines the museum's evasive commemoration of 2005 as a springboard to look back, and forward: back to the context of the museum's founding, exploring the architectural structures and imperial mentalities that shaped it, and forward to some of the ensuing controversies and initiatives as the museum undergoes a multiyear closure and major remodeling project.The museum is due to reopen in stages beginning in 2017.Until 2005, the Royal Museum for Central Africa ðRMCAÞ, set in parkland on the king's estate in Tervuren, near Brussels, was little known except to specialists.Operating as a federal unit with limited budgets, the Tervuren museum is enmeshed

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