Displaying and Storing: (Post)Colonial Narratives in the Colonial Museum of Rome

Abstract

In recent years, activists and researchers have been raising their voices to confront the amnesia of ninety years of colonial memory that affects Italian society. One of the main objects of study, and now an active subject promoting debate, is the Colonial Museum of Rome, a fascist institution for colonial propaganda, which eclipsed into oblivion in 1971, only to be unearthed in 2017.
Reading this museum as a text, this research explores: what narratives concerning colonial memory have been constructed by displaying and storing objects? The question is approached by connecting the wider narratives identified by historians with the displays of the Colonial Museum, through images and historical accounts.
Four phases were identified in the history of the museum. During the first phase (1914-1937), the museum was born and functioned as an unscientific instrument at the service of the colonial mission, exhibiting a broad variety of objects for a universal propaganda. With the advent of the war and the independence of the colonies, the museum remained trapped in an inertia memoriae. It kept perpetuating the same narratives, only stripped of its fascist symbols (1937-1971). In 1971 the doors of the museum closed and remained locked for almost half a century, hindering social awareness and historical research on Italian colonialism (1971-2017). Since 2017, as the deposits were opened again, an ongoing process is re-evaluating and re-exhibiting the collection to problematise its history.
By investigating the narratives shaped by the museum from its origins until the present, this investigation brings attention to the power of storing and displaying in constructing the histories we want to tell today, at the intersection of memory and identity with issues of race, civil rights, freedom of movement and international relations.