Marina Cheffe MA
PhD candidate
E-mail: cheffe@eshcc.eur.nl
Area(s) of interest: Art History, Colonialism & Postcolonialism, Heritage Studies, Museums & Collections
Cohort/Start PhD: 2023-2024
Heritage-doing and storytelling around difficult colonial pasts in Brazil: The musealization of slavery heritage in Brazilian historical-cultural museums
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Supervisor(s): Stijn Rijnders, Naomi Oosterman, Amanda Alencar
Duration: December 2023 – December 2027
This research investigates the processes of negotiation of heritage tied to Brazil’s colonial past. This is primarily examined in the stories that are constructed in and around spaces of heritage-doing related to colonization and its after-effects, with a focus on the historical (and ongoing) violence and marginalization against Afro-Brazilian communities. The aim of this project is to examine how distinct stakeholders with different levels of power/authority over authorized heritage discourses (government and cultural institutions, local communities, tourists, cultural producers, museum and heritage professionals) negotiate the memory and the difficult heritage of Brazil’s colonial past within a set of spaces and via various processes of heritage and cultural production. I will be looking at different spaces, or dimensions, in which heritage-doing occurs, the first of which is the museum space, looking in particular at the way in which heritage and heritage narratives connected to the history and legacies of slavery are presented in the museological space by museum professionals and interpreted by museum visitors in distinct historical-cultural Brazilian museums.