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Limbo Time: Museums, Caribbean Temporalities, and the Wounds of History with Wayne Modest
October 31, 2024 at 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM
| Location: | National Gallery of Canada Lecture Hall 380 Sussex Drive Ottawa, ON K1N 9N4 Canada |
| Cost: | Free |
| Audience: | Carleton Community, Current Students, Faculty |
The Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis and the National Gallery of Canada are pleased to present a thought-provoking talk by international scholar, Dr. Wayne Modest, Director of Content from the Wereldmuseum, Netherlands.
During his talk, Wayne Modest draws 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 he will describe as the wounds of history. Modest takes 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, he proposes, would require that museums reorient their approach to temporality, a reorientation that Modest calls limbo time, or the temporality of repair and return. Such a reorientation, he suggests, 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.
Modest will locate his argument within a longer history of scholarly engagement, both from and about the Caribbean, with questions of time. He engages 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.
This event includes a 50-minute keynote lecture followed by a 20-minute Q&A session, moderated by Ming Tiampo of the Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton University.
In English with simultaneous French interpretation
Free. Drop-in activity. No registration needed.
American Sign Language (ASL) interpretation is available for NGC events and programs when requested a minimum of 10 business days in advance of the event. Email info@gallery.ca with the event name, date and time.
About the Speaker
Photo courtesy of the Wereldmuseum, Netherlands.
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.
The Centre for Transnational Cultural Analysis and the Department of Art and Architectural History gratefully acknowledges the following for their generous support and partnership: Migration and Diaspora Studies, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Institute of African Studies, Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture, and the National Gallery of Canada.