How did museums help construct race?

Añadido: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]After the Black Lives Matter movement gained international attention in 2020 following the police murder of George Floyd, scholars have increasingly reckoned with the institutionalized structural inequalities in their fields, such as in my case in museums. Using pre-modern critical race [music] theory and methods in material culture and intersectionality, my research looks at images [music] and objects in museums representing black people in order to understand how race and gender was constructed through visual tropes and stereotypes. These objects are created in the early modern period from roughly 1640 to 1780, a time marked [music] by colonialism and enslavement. By researching these representations of blackness found in print culture, portraiture, porcelain, and tapestries, and in famous museums such as the Rijksmuseum, the Louvre, and the V&A, we can not only get a better comprehension of how the concept of race was created, but we can also begin to recontextualize these objects more successfully. This is highly important as museums often construct national narratives, and by making race [music] part of these narratives, we take a step closer towards quality, inclusivity, and diversity.