Cultural Heritage and Slavery: Perspectives from Europe

In the context of the global Cultural Heritage boom, where local, national, and global identity constructions are involved and intertwined with interests in cultural tourism, sites of memory of colonialism and slavery related with notions of accountability or liability are a field of social conflicts.

The tensions between different groups of actors and interests around the central issue of how to deal with the slavery past and the legacies of the enslavers and colonizers became visible in the global Black Lives Matter Movement in 2020 and found their expression in the toppling of statues and monuments. The workshop approaches these topics from an interdisciplinary perspective including scholars, museum experts, and scholarly activists working on the European context.