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Alarming environmental shifts and disasters have raised public awareness and anxieties regarding the future of the planet. While planetary in scale, the negative effects of this global crisis are distributed unequally, affecting some of the already most fragile communities most intensely, thus contributing to rising global inequality. The pairing of environmental crises and a sense of inadequacy facing hitherto celebrated models of citizenry informs a current spirit of the times. The contributors to this volume place ethnographic or world cultures museums at the centre of these debates – these museums have been embroiled in longstanding debates about their histories, collections, and practices in relation to the colonial past.

Alarming environmental shifts and disasters have raised public awareness and anxieties regarding the future of the planet. While planetary in scale, the negative effects of this global crisis are distributed unequally, affecting some of the already most fragile communities most intensely, thus contributing to rising global inequality. The pairing of environmental crises and a sense of inadequacy facing hitherto celebrated models of citizenry informs a current spirit of the times. The contributors to this volume place ethnographic or world cultures museums at the centre of these debates - these museums have been embroiled in longstanding debates about their histories, collections, and practices in relation to the colonial past.

"While many claims are made regarding the power of cultural heritage as a driver and enabler of sustainable development, the relationship between museums, heritage and development has received little academic scrutiny. This book stages a critical conversation between the interdisciplinary fields of museum studies, heritage studies and development studies to explore this under-researched sphere of development intervention. In an agenda-setting introduction, the editors explore the seemingly oppositional temporalities and values represented by these 'past-making' and 'future-making' projects, arguing that these provide a framework for mutual critique. Contributors to the volume bring insights from a wide range of academic and practitioner perspectives on a series of international case studies, which each raise challenging questions that reach beyond merely cultural concerns and fully engage with both the legacies of colonial power inequalities and the shifting geopolitical dynamics of contemporary international relations. Cultural heritage embodies different values and can be instrumentalized to serve different economic, social and political objectives within development contexts, but the past is also intrinsic to the present and is foundational to people's aspirations for the future. Museums, Heritage and International Development explores the problematics as well as potentials, the politics as well as possibilities, in this fascinating nexus"--

This essay is an introduction to a special section that focuses on the life and work of Anton de Kom, and especially on his seminal 1934 Wij slaven van Suriname. It forms part of a larger project that explores how a Caribbean intellectual tradition can be thought differently if greater attention is paid to the Dutch Caribbean. The essays included in the section demonstrate the shifting role that De Kom and his book have played—from the 1930s and the anxieties they created for the colonial state; to their international impact on other revolutionary movements, such as in Cuba; to their current mobilization by numerous young people of Surinamese descent in the Netherlands as part of an antiracist activism and politics of belonging. Almost ninety years after Wij slaven was first published, it has become a bestseller and De Kom has been named to the Dutch national historical canon. As more than political activism, the guest editors examine Anton de Kom in this Small Axe platform for Caribbean thought with the hope that these essays will stimulate even more scholarship on De Kom's life and work and on the Dutch Caribbean more broadly, beyond the borders of the Dutch-speaking context.

Matters of Belonging' foregrounds critical practices within ethnographic museums in relation to their diverse stakeholders, with a special focus on collaboration with artists and differently constituted, self-identified communities. The book emerges from the EU-funded project SWICH (Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage) that places ethnographic museums at the centre of ongoing debates about Europe's shifting polity and questions around heritage, citizenship and belonging. Addressing diverse political climates and citizenship regimes, legal frameworks and colonial/migratory histories, the articles seek to question the role of ethnographic and world cultures museums within contemporary negotiations of how to define Europe, Europeans, and European heritage, especially mindful of the region's colonial and migratory pasts.0The book is neither celebratory nor congratulatory, and does not depict a triumphal overcoming by ethnographic museums of their troubled pasts. Its aim is to think critically about these museums' responses, to identify both pitfalls and positive developments, and to sketch out possible futures for museums generally, and ethnographic museums specifically, as they try to locate themselves within discussions about Europe and its futures.0Core to the book's argument is that it may exactly be in their entanglement with the colonial past that these museums can become important sites for thinking about colonial entailments in the present. Facing up to this past is the beginning of addressing these larger legacies. The authors suggest that the ethnographic museum has been the site not just for trenchant questioning of colonial durabilities in contemporary Europe, but also for the development of new practices - of collaboration and authority-sharing, of recognition and belonging. The book explores these models, not as complete, but as a starting point to push forward new practices

Institutions across the globe are increasingly questioned on how their foundations are rooted in colonialism and how they aim to decolonize . The Future of the Dutch Colonial Past provides an overview of critical scholarly reflections on the history of Dutch slavery and colonization, as well as how this translates into critical cultural practices. It also explores possible futures: What can heritage institutions learn from (international) best practices regarding the decolonization of museums? And what role can contemporary artistic practices take in these processes? Through a variety of essays, interventions, interviews, and a roundtable conversation, scholars and cultural practitioners address these complex questions