The Smithsonian Looks at How the Slave Trade Shaped the World

“In Slavery’s Wake,” at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, looks beyond the United States to tell a global story.

By Jennifer Schuessler, New York Times —

“In Slavery’s Wake,” a new exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, deals in huge themes and vast numbers. Over four centuries, an estimated 12 million Africans were transported across the ocean on more than 36,000 voyages, an epochal forced migration that reshaped societies on both sides of the Atlantic.

But of the artifacts on view in the show, it’s sometimes the smallest that speak most powerfully.

In a case in one corner, there’s a scattering of cowrie shells excavated at Valongo Wharf in Rio de Janeiro, the point of entry for nearly 900,000 enslaved people, which was lost to history until a construction crew stumbled on the ruins a decade ago.

The shells, which may have been carried by people who endured the Middle Passage, are a rare and remarkable survival. But they are also a metaphor for the difficulties of truly grasping the subject of slavery, Johanna Obenda, one of the show’s curators, explained recently during a tour of the exhibition.

“With this history, oftentimes we get lost in the enormity,” she said. “It’s challenging to even process. But when you see artifacts like this, you start to see faces, people.”

“In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World,” which opens on Friday, is one of the most ambitious shows the museum has presented since it opened on the National Mall eight years ago. The product of a 10-year collaboration among nearly two dozen curators at 10 institutions on four continents, it goes beyond the Smithsonian’s traditional American focus to tell a global story of the ways that slavery shaped the modern world.

It’s a story of trade, capitalism, exploitation and violence, but also of the ways that the enslaved and their descendants constantly pushed back, creating their own freedom in ways big and small.

“If we’re talking about violence and attempted dehumanization, we’re also talking about the way people resisted and held on to their humanity,” Paul Gardullo, the museum’s assistant director of history and one of the exhibition’s directors, said.

After closing in Washington next June, the show will travel to partner museums in Brazil, South Africa, Senegal, Belgium and Britain, switching languages — and swapping out some objects — along the way.

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Source: New York Times