Wayne Modest at the National Gallery: ‘Limbo Time: Museums, Caribbean Temporalities, and the Wounds of History’

Thursday, October 31st, 2024 at 5:30 pm to 7:00 pm

In-person event
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON, K1N 9N4
Cost: Free

Contact: Ming Tiampo | ming.tiampo@carleton.ca

In this presentation, I draw on three distinct museological episodes in Jamaican history – the request for the loan (and later the return) of Taino objects to Jamaica from a British museum in the 1970s, the acquisition of a large collection of African Art objects by the National museum of Jamaica in the late 1960s, and the responses by some Jamaicans to the (Great) Jamaica exhibition of 1891 – to argue that thinking with and from the Caribbean may help museums address what I will describe as the wounds of history. I take wounding here to mean both the physical and emotional injury caused by a traumatic event and the temporal fissure, the gap or break caused by this injury. Addressing the wounds of colonial history, I propose, would require that museums reorient their approach to temporality, a reorientation that I call limbo time, or the temporality of repair and return. Such a reorientation, I suggest, would require, first, that museums see colonial injury not as in the past but as part of the folding of time in which past injuries live on in the present; and second, that museums see the potentiality of objects to afford imaginative return, to recover the erasures, to bridge or suture the gaps and fissures that the violence of colonialism created. I will locate my argument within a longer history of scholarly engagement, both from and about the Caribbean, with questions of time. I engage with scholarship on Caribbean temporalities in the wake of colonial violence, specifically Deborah Thomas’s work on prior-ness and simultaneity, then on Caribbeanist work concerned directly with the notion of limbo, specifically that of Kamau Brathwaite and Wilson Harris. This reorientation is, however, not limited to the Caribbean but can help us deal with catastrophic pasts that live on continue to shape our present.

Biography

Wayne Modest is the director of content at the National Museum of World Culture (a museum group comprising the Tropenmuseum, Museum Volkenkunde, and Africa Museum) and the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam in the Netherlands. He is also a professor (by special appointment) of material culture and critical heritage studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. A cultural studies scholar by training, Modest works at the intersection of material culture, memory, and heritage studies, with a strong focus on colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean. He is currently working on several publication projects, including, with Peter Pels, Museum Temporalities (forthcoming). Previous publications include the co-edited volumes, Victorian Jamaica (with Tim Barringer), Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in a Changing Europe (with Nicholas Thomas, et al), and Spaces of Care – Confronting Colonial Afterlives in European Ethnographic Museums (with Claudia Augustat). Among other research projects, Modest is programme leader for the Dutch Research Council funded project: Pressing Matter: Ownership Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums.

Notes

This event will take place in the Lecture Hall of the National Gallery of Canada.