Rethinking Immigration with the Ethnographic Museum. A Case Study on Multidirectionality and Implication in the Wereldmuseum

To take responsibility for their complicity in colonial activities and crimes such as creating racialized stereotypes and owning looted objects, European museums have revised their collections and exhibitions and turned towards contemporary issues such as immigration in their exhibitions. In Rotterdam's Wereldmuseum - the case study of this research - the interlacing narratives and histories of colonialism, nation-building, and immigration become apparent. Today, the public debate surrounding immigration, which is strongly connected to histories of colonization, continues to affect the livelihood of immigrants trying to build a life in The Netherlands. This debate often highlights the importance of immigrant integration which ignores the continuities of colonialism and reproduces racialized power structures. To find narratives that go beyond the discourse of integration, this study looks at the role of museums as producers and distributors of knowledge and poses the following question: How does the Wereldmuseum change the dominant narrative of immigrants in The Netherlands? To find an answer, this interdisciplinary research bridges theories from cultural memory studies, postcolonialism, museum studies, and migration studies. More specifically, this research uses Michael Rothberg's concepts of multidirectional memory and implication, which offer the analytical depth and clarity to understand the connections between historical violence and contemporary injustices. This research explores their role and function in the museum space through careful dissection of these concepts and qualitative content analysis. After collecting and investigating hundreds of texts and objects from two exhibitions in the Wereldmuseum, this research finds that there are two meaningful ways in which the museum changes the narrative around immigration: by addressing its own and the visitors' implication in past and present injustices and by showing networks of multidirectional memory in the entangled histories of colonialism and immigration. While further research needs to be conducted studying the effectiveness of the exhibition through, for example, surveys and interviews of museum visitors, this paper already contributes to a growing collection of literature on the aftermaths of colonialism and provides a clear methodological example of how to analyze Rothberg's concepts in the context of an ethnographic museum