What specific exhibition strategies (design, objects, testimonies) have museums used to represent the Indian Ocean slave trade?
Executive summary
Museums have approached the Indian Ocean slave trade through a mix of global-curatorial projects, archaeological recovery, and multimedia storytelling designed to shift public understanding from isolated national stories to transoceanic systems of enslavement and colonialism [1] [2]. Exhibitions combine immersive spatial design, a blend of personal objects and forensic artefacts, and recorded or reconstructed testimonies to connect material wreckage and museum collections with living diasporas and scholarly networks [3] [4].
1. Spatial storytelling and didactic sequencing
Curators are arranging galleries to tell non‑linear, multi-sited histories that link slavery to later colonial domination and global capitalism, deliberately avoiding tidy narratives that end with emancipation—an approach visible in the Smithsonian’s In Slavery’s Wake project, which was developed to shift frames from national to global and to connect slave trading with subsequent colonialism [2] [5]. Large traveling shows and national galleries are using modular, translatable layouts so exhibitions can “switch languages—and swap out some objects” as they tour partner museums in Africa, Europe and the Americas, reinforcing a design strategy that prioritizes adaptability and local resonance [6] [5].
2. Material culture: from ankle chains to ship models and troncos
Exhibitions make heavy use of physical objects to anchor human stories: ankle chains and shackles appear alongside elite portraits and household items to show both perpetrators’ wealth and victims’ bodily restraint, as in the Rijksmuseum’s Slavery exhibition which juxtaposed Rembrandt portraits with ankle chains [7]. Maritime museums draw on ship models, Brookes‑style diagrams and cardboard “memory markers” to represent crowding aboard vessels and to visualize scale, a tactic used by the National Maritime Museum’s Atlantic Worlds gallery [8] [9]. Public displays also foreground emblematic objects such as the tronco (a large tree trunk used in some commemorative displays) with surrounding interactive panels that trace diasporic links across Bangladesh, Suriname, Brazil and West Africa, showing how a single artefact can anchor multiple geographies [10].
3. Archaeology and the forensic turn: the Slave Wrecks Project
Archaeological recovery has become a distinct exhibition strategy: the Slave Wrecks Project trains divers, particularly from the African diaspora, to locate and document shipwrecks tied to the slave trade and then translates those finds into gallery narratives and educational programming [1] [3]. Museums are therefore able to display remnant timbers, recovered artefacts and site maps alongside oral histories and scientific accounts, creating a material‑scientific narrative that links seabed evidence to museum floors and public programming [1] [3].
4. Voices, testimonies and audio guides
Curators increasingly center first‑person testimony—recorded recollections, dramatized voices or descendants’ perspectives—to humanize statistics and objects: the Rijksmuseum audio guide, for instance, includes the imagined voice of Ma Chichi recounting intergenerational memory [7]. United Nations and Iziko‑backed displays emphasize colourful photographs and texts and explicitly foreground stories of people in India and the African diaspora to highlight regional particularities in the Indian Ocean sphere [11]. Audio trails and interpretive labels are also used to amplify abolitionist images and resistance narratives, ensuring that viewers encounter both cruelty and agency [8].
5. Networks, partnerships and ethics of display
Major projects are collaborative by design: the Smithsonian’s traveling In Slavery’s Wake is co‑developed with partners such as Iziko Slave Lodge, Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum and the Royal Museum of Central Africa, reflecting an explicit strategy to share collections, research and curatorial authority across continents [1] [5]. Museums lean on external databases like slavevoyages.org and partner initiatives to expand documentation beyond Atlantic narratives into the Indian Ocean and inter‑American trades, acknowledging gaps in institutional holdings and scholarship [1].
6. Ongoing debates: representation, restitution and terminology
Curators face contested terrain over language, balance and national memory: some institutions avoid reductive words by choosing phrasing like “living in enslavement,” and still others frame exhibitions to be neither purely accusatory nor celebratory but “completer,” as the Rijksmuseum phrased it—a stance that sits uneasily with calls for repatriation, apology and stronger critique of colonial legacies [7] [12]. Critics and African partners also press museums to link slave trade narratives to the longer arc of European colonial domination and contemporary inequities, a demand that has shaped exhibition content and touring arrangements [2].