When stories are not the same: power and powerlessness in a Nigerian Museum

Abstract

In this paper, we provide an alternative reading to one of the most fundamental claims of the exhibitionary complex, which argues that museums are symbols of power, greatness, wealth, and progress. On the contrary, we adopt Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's (1996) concept of social constructionism and Star & Griesemer's concept of the border object and infrastructure to deconstruct the possibility of the fixity of meaning in Bennett's argument about the exhibitionary complex. We therefore argue that the many museums in Africa are slightly different. Rather than being a symbol of the people's power, wealth, and greatness, they reflect powerlessness and pain, which characterise their history. With histories such as the Transatlantic slave trade and British imperialism, which lasted through the 17th and 19th centuries, we discuss the Badagry Black Heritage Museum as a site not exclusively about power and greatness. The paper concludes that the defining characteristic of museums is their diversity, which offers multiple perspectives on their functionality, significance, and theoretical underpinnings. While Bennett's idea is laudable, there is a need to open up the concept of accommodating the specific features of museums across the world and develop new concepts or ideologies that reflect them.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 1 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.