Current Issue

For our first online issue, “Curating the Caribbean: Museum Practice and Identity Formation”, we seek to explore the museum, museum spaces, and curatorial practices in the Caribbean Region. We are therefore soliciting scholars, cultural heritage activists, curatorial practitioners and artists interested in contributing to the volume.

The point of departure of the Museum issue is that, in the past twenty years or so, identity discourses, interrogations of colonial contexts and consequences as well as articulations of Caribbean consciousness and poetics have been the focus of much scholarly attention in literary and philosophical fields, History and the Social Sciences. This has entailed sustained interrogations of the notions of history, nation and cultural heritage, interrogations that have left in their wake the (re)appropriation and valorization of heritage sites, the (re)creation of museum spaces and/or the raising of (new) monuments. What remains often unquestioned is the early history of Caribbean museums, founded in the colonial period, and the museological ideologies undergirding their constitution.

A central preoccupation of this special issue is to ask how and why museums in particular, have acted and continue to act as manifestations of identity, whether national, cultural or otherwise. Further, are the technologies of representation in curatorial practice so inextricably entangled in colonial museological ideologies as to only affirm and constitute “old” identities at best and stereotypes at worst? And what is the role of the museum space in the contemporary period where the very foundations of identity are being challenged? And given increasing pressure on Caribbean economies, what connections are there to be made between heritage, conservation and preservation in support of tourism and sustainable development models?

Another important pre-occupation of this special issue is to acknowledge that museums have become crucial sites for the contestation of nation, identity and culture. In other words, what kind of “work” have museum spaces performed in excavating and thus legitimating submerged narratives and receovered memories? How are art practices presented in the museum/gallery space? What are the relationships between popular art forms and the museum/gallery spaces? Is there a conflict between cultural heritage and modern art, and how would that be articulated in relation to the museum space?

Papers may be written in English, Spanish or French and will be peer-reviewed by external readers. Articles should follow the author guidelines that can be found on our website and should not exceed 8000 words.

Please send an abstract to the editors if you want to submit an article.

The editors of Karib
Christina Kullberg (christina.kullberg@moderna.uu.se) and Hans Jacob Ohldieck (hans.ohldieck@uib.no)