The African Archive Beyond Colonization

This course invites students to critically engage with the complex histories of African cultural heritage through the lens of curatorial practice and museum studies. Centered on the question, “What is an African archive?”, students explore how material traces—from street names and monuments to ancient artifacts and digital media—carry histories of both oppression and resistance. While museums have historically served as instruments of European colonialism, this course asks whether and how they can be transformed into spaces that center African voices and narratives. Students examine ongoing debates around restitution, reparations, and decolonization, while developing hands-on skills in curatorial research and exhibition design. A central feature of the course is a collaborative project with the Brooklyn Museum, where students work directly with curators and archivists to research selected objects from the museum’s African collections. Over the semester, students curate digital exhibitions that interrogate the afterlives of these objects and propose new, decolonial narratives.

Final projects are featured on this website: parsons.edu/africanarchive

View the community portrait video on YouTube