Ana Lucia Araujo on Museums and Atlantic Slavery

Conversations in Atlantic Theory

This discussion is with Dr. Ana Lucia Araujo, a Professor of History at Howard University in Washington DC. She is a social and cultural historian writing transnational and comparative history, her work explores the history of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade and their present-day legacies, including the long history of demands of reparations for slavery and colonialism. She has a particular interest in the memory, heritage, and visual culture of slavery. Her two recent single-authored books include Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past (2020) and Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History (2017). She has been a member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Slave Route Project since 2017. She also serves on the Board of Editors of the American Historical Review, the editorial board of the Journal of Slavery and Abolition, and the editorial review board of the African Studies Review. in this conversation, we discuss her most recent book, Museums and Atlantic Slavery published by Routledge in 2021. Our conversation here examines how slavery, the Atlantic slave trade, and enslaved people are represented through words, visual images, artifacts, and audiovisual materials in museums in Europe and the Americas.