In Slavery's Wake: Making a Globally Collaborative Exhibition

Abstract

In Slavery’s Wake: Making Black Freedom in the World is a first-of-its-kind exhibition developed by a group of international curators, historians, and cultural practitioners, and is the product of a multi-year collective called the Global Curatorial Project (GCP). The GCP formed in 2014 to address key questions on how we think about, interpret, and discuss the histories of global racial slavery and colonialism with broad publics in institutions around the world. The subsequent exhibition developed by the GCP, In Slavery’s Wake, opened at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. in December 2024. The creation of the exhibition centered the voices of descendants of enslaved and colonized people, through which an archive titled Unfinished Conversations was developed with more than 150 oral history interviews from around the world. The members of the GCP sought to create a model of the vital role that museums and publicfacing institutions can play in fostering and advancing conversations around the legacies of slavery and colonialism on both local and global terrain that reach past conventional boundaries of race, nation, and language. This article explores the transformative process of exhibition creation and collaboration that worked to decolonize the exhibitionmaking process, push institutional boundaries, and forge pathways for future work that decenters the nation-state toward a global understanding of how we continue to live in the wake of racial slavery and colonialism.