Samaila Suleiman (Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria) & Rhoda Nanre Nafziger (McGill University, Montreal, Canada): Managing contested heritage: History wars in museums of national unity The question of how nations are constructed and contested in heritage institutions is far from the concerns of Nigerian historians.
This presentation examines the place of museums in the production and sustenance of national historical consciousness in postcolonial Nigeria. In the aftermath of Nigerian Civil War (1967- 1970), museums of national unity were founded with the epistemological mandate of collecting, ordering and curating discrete cultural resources from a multitude of ethnic groups as microcosm of a national heritage. Deploying evidence from museum guestbooks (1986-2013) and interviews with museumgoers and curators of National Museums Jos, Makurdi and Kaduna, we offer a new reading of museum as a critical site of history wars and identity contestations where different ethnic and religious communities compete for curatorial visibility and symbolic dominance by contesting the official museum discourses
21. Mai 2024, 20 Uhr
HTCE Lectures | Historical Thinking, Culture and Education (unibas.ch)