Wayne Modest keynote on blackness, museums and the colonial archive: transcript

Key points

• Modest is introduced as head of the Research Center for Material Culture at the National Museum of World Cultures, with a focus on slavery and colonialism.
• He asks whether one can be both black and a citizen, and describes the Black Dutch idea as a framework for citizenship and belonging.
• He tells of being mistaken for a construction worker in London when he arrived to meet as a curator.
• He says ethnographic museums grew out of colonial knowledge and racial hierarchy, and that history, philosophy and art institutions are also implicated.
• He outlines a project on black Caribbean intellectual traditions in the Netherlands, from the 1930s through 1960s-70s student movements to present-day scholars.
• He closes by inviting people to join a museum project on Pan-Africanisms, urging them to change institutions from within, and asking what solidarity with non-black allies looks like.

Chapters

1. 0:06Introduction of the speaker
2. 0:43Blackness, citizenship and belonging in the Netherlands
3. 3:18Being mistaken for someone else at a London museum
4. 5:20Museums and the colonial archive of race
5. 8:43Europe in the afterlife of colonialism
6. 10:35Research project on Black Dutch intellectual traditions
7. 14:52Changing institutions and the Pan-Africanisms project
8. 17:04Solidarity and specificity

Full transcript

0:06We gaan naar onze volgende keynote speaker. Ik wil graag het woord geven aan Dr. Wayne Modest. Hij is hoofd van het Research Center for Material Culture van het Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen. Hij voltooide naar research fellowships bij het Yale Center for British Arts, Yale University en de School for Museum Studies aan New York University. Hij is curator academicus en zijn werk legt hij een grote focus op slavernij, kolonialisme en postkolonialisme. Ik geef het woord aan Dr. Wayne Modest. Ik wil spreken in englisch, en dank u voor inviting me.

0:43Ik wil spreken heel lang, en ik heb 15 minuten, en ik wil spreken. Twee jaar geleden, ik deed een interview met iemand hier. Ik wil hem niet te bedanken, maar hij is hier, met Shari Langford. We waren het over de kwestie van blackness en art production. En Sharon, in de interview, he used a really beautiful statement which eventually became the title for the article in Small Act where he says that he wants to work as an artist in a space where blackness is self-evident.

1:23There's a self-evidence of blackness within the space where he works. That was within the framework of us speaking about what does it mean to be black in Europe? What does it mean to be black in the Netherlands? And is it possible for us to reach a space where blackness and citizenship doesn't seem to be intentioned, but rather that it is the same can I be a black citizen can I just be a citizen and the black that is how I read the question of the ordinary ones I read the idea of black Dutch as a desire for a critical framework to think about citizenship and belonging to this space to this nation state and if it is one thing that

2:29I've learned since I've come here which is just six years ago so it's not so long and I've not learned that much is that the there is still a tension between how we understand European-ness, Dutch-ness, and Black-ness. A kind of exceptionalism, a kind of outside. And what this Black Achievement Month, but also these kinds of conversations, are intended to do, is to make it from self-breakant that one does not have to see them as contradictory, as moving towards, as the unending migrant who never becomes, who is always a migrant no matter what.

3:18but as a citizen so it is within that framework that I'd like to locate Nancy's question to me which is how do I see the cultural archive as having impact on cultural institutions or the heritage sector and perhaps there is very it is hard to I will give a quick story that when I and this is outside of the Netherlands but it shows how we cannot speak I think now about the question within the Netherlands without being mindful that brexit recently also marked a moment to think that people can still ask you when are you going back to your own country so in that regard I will give this example that probably four, no, seven years ago, I had a meeting in the science museum, the big science museum, a massive one in London, and I stood downstairs. I waited for the secretary to pick me up, and the secretary walked up to me, and she walked past me, and she picked up the man next door to me, and she said, Mr. Modest, come with me, please.

4:37And he said, no, I'm not Mr. Modest. And I said, I'm Mr. Modest. And he was the construction worker, and I was the curator. But she could not believe that I could have been the curator. But what was beautiful about the incident is that for the time between our encounter and me reaching the meeting, she was apologizing for a long time. She says, I could not believe that I did that. I am sorry that I did that. I should not have done that. Within cultural institutions as well, one cannot escape the idea that a lot of the cultural institutions that we've come to know have been built within the framework of this archive.

5:20We've been built within the framework of a certain logic of race and racialization. And for museums like my own, the ethnographic museums, we cannot escape the fact that within the Tropo Museum between about 1900 and the 1960s, we had a massive space for Rasconda to study race. Therefore, and also that an institution like mine, like the one with which I work, not only emerges out of that colonial project or in tandem with the colonial knowledge project, But that it also was located in a notion of others.

6:12We were the display for the other, where you could come and see the other. So in that regard, a cultural institution like mine is the result of the cultural archive that Said spoke about. It is the result of the certain hierarchy of the colonial project. And one of the difficulty, or the challenges, or the exciting possibility, is for us to think what might be done with such an institution, and how might such an institution, where that archive of the colonial is so embedded in it, how can it be mobilized to help to fashion another kind of salmolating?

6:53That is how I would like to ask the question. But it would be remiss of me to only focus on an institution where the word race could have been used in the past. And while not calling any names, and it is good that Professor Vecca spoke of the university, one of the difficulties that we've come to do is that very often we've come to see the institutions that are so, or even the disciplines that are so spectacularly embedded in race or racialization as the ones that are complicit. And we overlook the other institutions and the other knowledge formations that are also a part of this. So if one were to look broadly at the heritage sector across the Netherlands or and I would want to see the universities Or the disciplines which we've come to know and which train us as curators, scholars, whatever. Then one has to ask the question, how do we refashion a department of history as well? Or a philosophy?

8:04And how might we think differently about not only the rights museum, which we are, but also the contemporary art institutions as well. Because implicit in the work that we all do is an embedding of the hierarchies that we've come to know that are the bequest of the colonial project. Many people speak to me and they say, because they think I'm the colonial man, that, but colonialism wasn't the only story. There were other stories.

8:43and for me I find that that not it probably is true I don't know but my project is more focused but I find it difficult to see Europe outside of seeing it as living the afterlife of the colonial so when we think of When are you going back? I think of Stuart Hall's, I'm here because you were there. That it is because of that early relationship of conquest and greed, of knowledge formation, that we've come to inhabit the form that we've now inhabit, that we live in as multicultural, multi-ethnic, however we want to call it, Europe today.

9:34and so I take shares our shares interview with an article I wrote recently as well with a colleague and recording around an anxious what we call an anxious politics of the present a politics which seem to think that our societies are in disintegration and that disintegration must be projected onto some other that is causing the disintegration the other that lacks something and is coming to take something and my demand actually and what I want to actually think with today is this is um I'm going to do two things now and then I close one is is a plea a small plea and I keep doing because I've been reading again the work Anton Lecombe and We Slacks of Suriname. And recently I was introduced to, I was looking at Cindy Kersenborn's film of Edgar Cairo.

10:35And also of Martinus Allion. And I've been trying to read in my very bad Dutch the work of Astrid Romo. And what has troubled me, and I've said this already but I'll say it again, Cheryl and I have conversation, what has troubled me is that there has been for the last 15, 20 years a very turgid, beautiful, intellectually savvy, conversation going on around black and Caribbean intellectual traditions which I don't see happening here there is a nice discussion where we quote final season says here please song and we speak about how they have actually worked at a at a decolonial tradition an anti-colonial tradition and their work

11:38are now established as part of a common way of thinking about the world, the post-colonial world. And that also includes people like Stuart Hall and Sylvia Winter. Derek Walcott. So one of the projects that I've started to do right now, and I'm trying to do it, and I'm going to write three PhD positions in it because I also want PhD to be a part of this. And the project is going to be structured around three frameworks. The first one is to ask the question, what does it mean that Anton Lecombe was here in the period of the 1930s when George Padmore from Trinidad and C.L.R. James where it was in England, and all of them were committed to a black struggle, but also committed to a communist struggle.

12:32What does it mean to think that network of intellectualism that was trying to undo the colonial project in that first part prior to World War II? Then I want to move on, and I'm happy that Wendeline is here. Sorry to call you out. But what does it mean as well that there was a student movement black students here that were articulated with other black students in the 1960s and 70s that were also articulating a kind of intellectual project and an anti-colonial project And I want to close my project by looking, and the project that I'm writing, so you can know it now, is about black Caribbean intellectual traditions, about networks, and it's about questions of gender. It's about the political imagination.

13:22And so the last part of the project asks, what does it mean that we have people like Gloria Vecca and Philomena Esed in the present who are also working in that similar form of radical intellectual traditions? Because at the end of this project, what I'm proposing is that what we will write, what we will ask is what does the Caribbean intellectual tradition look like differently when Dutch Caribbean intellectuals are a part of it. And to ask that question, one of my challenges to you all here in this room is that when we speak about Zwarte Netherlands, We also have to speak about the intellectual work that black Dutch people have been doing to try in the anti-colonial struggle.

14:20Because if we don't do that... That we continue to name the names of everybody else without naming the names of the people who have structured an intellectual framework for thinking about what blackness means in the present. And that blackness is one that emerges out of struggle, to fashion hope out of struggle. And I'd like to, I've never met him, but I'd like to tie to Jeffrey Pondag on the other side because he asked the question.

14:52Because one cannot actually understand that network moment in the 19, the 20s, 30s, without understanding that also there were a lot of intellectuals from Indonesia also here. So it is that project that we need to work on to try and think differently. My last, totally last thing, Nancy, as you showed me the one minute already, is to say that if the cultural archive that we've come to know is the bedrock for a lot of the cultural institutions that we have now, then changing them isn't going to be easy.

15:34It took 400 years to create it. It won't take two to undo it, but we have to commit to a project to make it change. And this is where I'm doing my blatant marketing. Because I've already said it to Antoine, that next year, hopefully on March 5, we want to start a project in the museum that looks at questions of Pan-Africanisms.

16:05and the reason for starting that project is that Ghana would have been 60 years on March 5 and therefore we want to invite all of us to think together about what that might mean why I say that to invite you all is that you have to inhabit the institutions in order to change them you have to do what I guess Gloria is doing now with her shoulders bent low because the pressure is hard but you have to be a part of the institution you can't stay outside and expect that it is going to change so I invite you in a takeover to be a part of changing it last last last last last point is I think that I'm thinking about because I think we should try and it goes back to one last question. I think we should try and...

17:04Unpack the question of solidarity a little more, because for the rest of the day I think we need to think about what it means. We would have learned from Schengor, but we also know that the specificity of what happens here in the Netherlands is important for us to think with. I always tell people I think with the Caribbean, because it's a specific way of thinking. So we have to think of what it means to be solidary, but also still think specificity.

17:34And I'm going to make a really terrible statement right now. Within our space here, we also have to think, what does solidarity look like when it also includes non-blackness? Because I think we have to, we're not going to win the battle by ourselves. so we need to think about what it might mean that some that people are solidarity with us even though they're not share the same genealogy Thank you.

Source and licence

Recording: File:Keynote Wayne Modest.webm by Netwerk Slavernijverleden (2017-06-12), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY 3.0.

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.