Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Exhibiting Slavery: Biographical Approaches, Paul L. Arthur, Isobel Smith

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Within museums, interpretation and curation have increasingly employed personal stories and intimate storytelling to present broader narratives about the past. This article explores some of the opportunities and challenges of biographical storytelling in museums and public sites of memory that engage with the issue of slavery, analysing Australian exhibitions alongside international contexts and theories of museology, historiography and memory. It will look at representations of historical and modern slavery in Australia, as well as global representations of the transatlantic slave trade and other traumatic histories such as the Holocaust. The discussion explores the potential for personal counter-narratives, the reimagining of …