1Recent discussions in museology have urged museums to move away from a stance of neutrality and instead acknowledge their active role in shaping social ideologies and facilitating discussions on contentious histories. Bruno Brulon Soares (2021), for example, emphasizes a threefold process of deconstructing, reconstructing, and redistributing in museology, highlighting that this process must occur in a specific order. The critique he presents is that current discourse on museum decolonization often focuses solely on the redistribution aspect, neglecting the foundational steps of deconstruction and reconstruction. He argues that this oversight has political implications, because simply redistributing heritage without addressing the underlying regimes of value and knowledge, which are often rooted in coloniality, rationality, and violence, will not lead to meaningful change.
2In the context of Anglophone Caribbean museums, this discussion is highly relevant. Many Caribbean museums grapple with colonial legacies in their collections, narratives, and methodologies. Addressing these legacies requires more than superficial changes; it demands a deep re-evaluation of the underlying structures that perpetuate colonial ideologies within museums and the broader field of museology. This includes rethinking how knowledge is produced, whose voices are centered, and how heritage is valued and presented. Only through a comprehensive and critical approach to decolonization can Caribbean museums truly reflect diverse perspectives and contribute to meaningful social and cultural transformation. It is essential to recognize that within these contexts there must be critical examination of the predominance of museum theories originating from Europe and their colonial legacies within the development of Caribbean museums.
3Caribbean museums have historically adhered to chronological and reductive interpretive models, often perpetuating the absence of critical discourse on race and colonialism, thus reinforcing the colonial ideological framework. For instance, the Barbados Museum & Historical Society’s interpretive narrative until the 1980s largely overlooked the period of enslavement, despite the collection and occasional display of objects related to slavery prior to that time. The museum’s permanent exhibit, established in 1985 to address this history, focuses primarily on the period following the Emancipation Act of 1834, with limited interpretive content on resistance, rebellion, or the lived experiences of enslaved communities beyond their role within the plantation system. Similarly, heritage tourism museums like Sunbury Plantation and St. Nicholas Abbey in Barbados often gloss over or entirely ignore their involvement in enslavement and the plantation economy. The question then arises: how can museology in the Anglophone Caribbean evolve to incorporate perspectives that offer more profound analyses of historical and contemporary events, particularly concerning the Afro-Caribbean experience? This evolution is crucial to support the efforts of Caribbean historians aiming to challenge the ongoing silencing of non-European histories within the broader narrative.
4Alongside the call for decolonizing content is also the examination of colonial frameworks in methodology and of curatorship itself. In Barbados, the term anticolonial is often referred to in addition to decolonial, to recognize the 400 years of resistance and freedom fighting against colonial structures that have been forced upon Black Africans enslaved and trafficked to Barbados, as well as the continual contemporary actions to dismantle colonial legacies in the current creolized Republic. Within museology, an anticolonial/decolonial approach has been evident in fostering community inclusiveness, which manifests through various strategies, encompassing considerations for diverse physical and learning capabilities, promoting equitable representation across racial and socio-economic divides, and empowering the public to take the lead in cultural initiatives within museum settings. However, the common thread among these approaches is the acknowledgment of the importance of prioritizing community engagement and input in museological endeavors. This emphasis holds particular significance within the Caribbean context, where museums and associated cultural institutions are actively engaging in reflective practices aimed at dismantling colonial legacies and fostering reparative dialogue.
- 1 Barbados became a sovereign nation within the Commonwealth realm in 1966 and in 2021 became a repub (...)
5This paper aims to discuss the role of museology in the colonial project in Barbados and share a few recent examples of democratic co-curatorship at the Barbados Museum & Historical Society in the context of unpacking colonial legacies to create space for more inclusive museum participation and community knowledge sharing. It’s important to note that unpacking the legacies of the plantocracy and the plantation landscape in Barbados is a continual educational process of unlearning colonial ideologies. While we have grown in our cultural self-determination and (in some aspects) the fights for social justice and reparations, our anticolonial/decolonial journey did not, arguably, end with independence in 1966, nor did it end with republicanism in 2021.1 In acknowledging that ongoing legacy comes the recollection of how entrenched the intertwined ideologies of colonialism, enslavement, white supremacy, and plantation agriculture has been in our politics, society, environment, and psyche, as interrogated through the works of many significant scholars from the region, such as Hilary Beckles (1984) and Melanie Newton (2013).
6An exploration of the broader historical and cultural contexts shaping museology in Barbados is necessary to understand the colonial origins and enduring legacies that underpin the country’s museums. A critical aspect to consider is the island’s natural history, encompassing its geographical and geological attributes, which have significantly influenced the evolution of museological practices that are primarily rooted in natural history collections. Cummins (2013) emphasizes this, stating that “for colonial institutions in the Caribbean, natural history continued to be equated with national history in the first half of the twentieth century” (p. 33). Additionally, Barbados exhibits cultural multivocality, evidenced by the diverse first peoples or Amerindian communities that traversed and settled in Ichirouganaim (Barbados). While this paper cannot delve deeply into pre-historical cultures, scholarly insights by Peter Drewett and Kevin Farmer, amongst others, have investigated a nuanced understanding of migration patterns and settlement dynamics in the region, emphasizing the fluidity inherent in these historical processes.
7The early 1600s marked Barbados’s emergence as a British focal point in European imperialism, ushering in an era of enslavement and trafficking that profoundly impacted Indigenous and African communities over centuries. Beckles (1984) underscores the rich diversity of cultural practices and beliefs among enslaved individuals from various West African communities brought to Barbados by the late 17th century. This diversity contributed to a multifaceted understanding of Barbados’s West African traditions today. Concurrently, periods of resistance and rebellion among enslaved populations were met with oppressive measures, both through armed forces and legislative frameworks such as the Slave Code of 1661 and subsequent revisions. The persistence of white supremacy ideologies following the abolition of the slave trade and emancipation continued to shape social and economic dynamics on the island, exemplified by the Barbadian Assembly’s advocacy for compensation to planters post-emancipation. It was in this context that the first explorations of a museum in the island were being discussed. Newton (2013) emphasizes the necessity of in-depth localized studies to grasp the nuances of emancipation dynamics within specific contexts like Barbados, where internal governance structures played a significant role in shaping responses to emancipatory measures and cultural development.
8The post-emancipation era was marked by ongoing political tensions, with working-class Barbadians advocating for economic equity and social mobility amid systemic inequalities. Grassroots political movements and activism, including the 1937 Labour Rebellion led by figures like Clement Payne, underscored the potency of social action in effecting policy changes. However, persistent patterns of elitism and racial segregation persisted, evident in social clubs’ “white-only” policies and the predominantly white composition of cultural institutions’ founding councils, including the Barbados Museum & Historical Society in 1933. This raises critical questions about whose interests these institutions truly represented and underscores the challenges of post-emancipation societal transformations.
9Barbados’s journey toward self-determination and independence from Britain in the mid-20th century marked a significant shift in national identity. Yet museums and cultural institutions were notably absent from the discourse surrounding independence, reflecting broader disconnects between cultural heritage and evolving national narratives. Kamugisha’s (2019) critique of postcolonial accountability highlights ongoing challenges of neocolonial despair in the Anglophone Caribbean, encompassing issues of economic inequality, social justice, and governance. Decolonizing museology, therefore, necessitates unpacking the intertwined narratives of nationalism and politics within museum frameworks to situate museological practices within specific colonial legacies and their contemporary implications.
10Museums as modern institutions have a history of policy tied to colonialism, taking form in late 18th/ early 19th century Europe as buildings to showcase objects conquered and collected (an analogy perhaps to the nations being simultaneously conquered and collected [Bennett, 1995]), and as institutions to glorify imperialism through the material culture of the oppressed (Small, 2011). This global, colonial control and erasure of human narratives in favour of collecting objects related to natural landscapes in the Caribbean can be interpreted as an active suppression of contested histories of these countries in order to uphold colonial identities tied to the landscape. Hall (1996) situates identity within a historical framework of society, which he describes as the politics of exclusion (p. 4). Identity, then, can be argued as being linked to the content of the historical materials and to how this content is shared and displayed. This suggests that museums in the Anglophone Caribbean, in their display of “natural history as national history” (Cummins, 2013), perpetuated an identity that submerged and erased human stories as Caribbean history, particularly narratives of enslavement, of African heritages prior to enslavement, and of modern Indigenous cultures.
11With the breakdown of the empire in the 20th century, the function of the postcolonial museum shifted to become an institution for constructing new national identities, and, to remain relevant, it strove to integrate the changing cultural make-up whilst serving communities. Whilst slowly transitioning in museum theory and practice, this was articulated through the school of new museology, which was formed in Europe in the 1970s, in part as a way of rationalizing and charting a path for museum theory whilst addressing power structures within museum spaces and advocating for democratized museum processes. The direction towards a more reflexive and people-centered museum included paradigms of living museums and ecomuseums, and it often emphasized the importance of inclusion and developing sustainable community relationships. However, the limitations of applying new museology to the local contexts in the Global South became emergent almost immediately. One significant event that shifted this trajectory was the 1972 Roundtable of Santiago in Chile. This meeting was coordinated by UNESCO and brought museologists together with wider cultural practitioners from Central and South America to discuss the role of museums in contemporary society. As a result, a set of resolutions were drawn and proposed to UNESCO on the idea of an integral museum – one that is active in local society and re-contextualizes the objects it exhibits, the process of which looks different for each locale.
- 2 Translation by the author.
12New museology, however, took on a Eurocentric and universalizing role for museum praxis and continues to be critiqued in Latin America, specifically through the notion put forward by Brazilian museologist Mario Chagas of a social museology. Social museology is described as “committed to reducing social injustices and inequalities; to combat prejudice; to improve the quality of collective life; to strengthen dignity and social cohesion; to use the power of memory, heritage, and the museum in favour of the general population, the indigenous peoples, and the social movements” (Chagas & Gouveia, 2014, p. 17).2 It highlights that the broad conditions of new museology negate the socio-political realities of Latin American countries and pacify the discipline when it should be an active participant in resolving community issues.
13Despite its geographical closeness to Latin America, these histories of museology were not, until recently, easily accessible to museums in the Caribbean region. Rather, Eurocentric models of museology are often imposed onto Caribbean museums through international policy and partnerships. Universities in the Global North with museology or museum studies degree programs design a research project and then invite Caribbean participants. There is a colonial-type, colonial-style approach to “conquering” the ground of Caribbean museology by international practitioners, sometimes through literal digital cartography of museum spaces via mapping or inventorying. This is by no means to say that museological study cannot come from beyond the Caribbean region – in fact a dialogue between Caribbean researcher-practitioners and international researchers is imperative to improving any stagnation in museum practice. But more often than not, these projects embody the concept of academic tourism. Different from fieldwork, academic tourism is usually a singular trip, with little or no integration or sustained relationships to the communities that surround the research. Although there can be benefits in the academic tourism model within museum work, which largely relies on knowledge sharing, it seems that researchers are still consuming and extracting knowledge provided to them from local expertise, without considering possibilities for exchange or contribution throughthe work they produce. This can often cloud opportunities for curatorial models to be generated out of localized practice, and it has historically resulted in a profound absence of Caribbean voices influencing the development of museology.
14However, there has been critical scholarship from within the Caribbean to review the legacies of this imperialistic museology. Donna MacFarlane (2012) employed critical race theory to critique the Jamaican Folk Museum’s attempts to represent Blackness as she observed that “for the Black population surrounding the museum there is little identification with, attachment to, or ownership of the museum” (p. 35). She noted that emphasis on objects as central to the narrative of the museum removed any agency or relevance to independent Black Jamaicans, and that it would have been more useful to try and chart human stories and provide critical readings of historical contexts in which the objects would have been used. Alissandra Cummins’s research is also a significant point of reference and outlines that to reduce the risks of erasure of narratives of the enslaved in Caribbean museums, we would need to develop Caribbean practices that challenge the hegemony of new museology.
15Considering museum practice today, it can be argued that museum work and museum theoretical research are intertwined and should not be separated by a hierarchy of knowledge across the museum field where the scientific ambition of museology generates a higher amount of validity than the practical work conducted in museums. It is in this context that the Barbados Museum & Historical Society (BMHS) can be situated. Established in 1933 by an act of parliament and founded by an all-white Barbadian / British elite, the early collection of the BMHS consisted mostly of natural history objects donated by Reverend Beresford Watson. Like most museums in the world, in the first half of the 20th century the curatorial approach of the BMHS was one that prioritized the facts and information that objects held in relation to Barbadian and British history. Although there had been pockets of community engagement, the priority of collecting specimens of natural history, archeology, and objects of Empire such as military insignia and domestic items from colonial plantation great houses firmly placed the BMHS in a “cabinet of curiosity” model of exhibition-making and erased the stories of the enslaved.
16The revisionist efforts undertaken by the BMHS experienced significant momentum during the 1980s and 1990s, marking a period of deep reflection on the museum’s societal role and a deliberate effort to decolonize its internal structure, exhibitions, and programming. This transformative phase emphasized a shift towards a philosophy of being “for people, about people,” extending outreach into communities, creating traveling exhibitions in collaboration with the National Library Service, curating cultural displays, and designing educational programs that resonated with the voices and aspirations of Barbadian youth while integrating diverse perspectives into its collections. A pivotal moment in this journey was marked by the publication of the 1982 Final Report of the Museum Development Plan Committee, commissioned by the Ministry of Information in 1980. Chaired by Sir Woodville Marshall, this committee was tasked with researching and proposing recommendations to reshape the museum’s strategic direction, ensuring an authentic representation of Barbados’s rich history, culture, and development.
17The report also delved into the relevance of recommendations stemming from a CARICOM Secretariat Workshop on Museums, Monuments, and Historic Sites held in Jamaica in 1978. It underscored the vision of museums as active centers for community engagement and cultural activities, aligning with a broader Caribbean-wide initiative aimed at fostering a community-centric museology. This regional approach, supported by collaborative research initiatives and the establishment of professional bodies, marked a significant turning point for museums across the Caribbean during the 1970s and 1980s, ushering in an era of greater inclusivity, diversity, and community involvement in museum practices.
18It is on this foundation of re-imagining what the BMHS could be that recent exhibitions were able to adapt existing models of curatorship and explore experimental social museology for community-led histories, positioning the BMHS as a producer of progressive, democratic co-curatorship.
19One of these actions was the 2018 project Artistic Interventions, where six contemporary Barbadian artists – Ada M. Patterson, Adrian Richards, Annalee Davis, Katherine Kennedy, Kraig Yearwood, Llanor Alleyne – intervened and re-contextualized the historical narratives of collections. This project raised important questions about how the museum can decolonize interpretive approaches, particularly with regards to the plantation and enslavement. Artists communicated with the BMHS permanent galleries through works they had in their portfolio that they felt could expand on the concepts the BMHS presented. They scheduled individual walk-throughs of all the galleries, speaking about their work and the collections. They then made a decision about which artwork/s they wanted to include, where they wished to include them, and how the installation should look. The curator was in more of a facilitation role, and the artists were taking ownership of how the interactions and discussions would take place.
20For example, Richards describes that:
Being a Black man in postcolonial Barbados is a battle that is played out both internally in one’s subconscious and conscious thought processes and externally where your appearance, i.e. the colour, shade of your skin and the way you dress presents you to the world and positions you in a discordant relationship within the country of your birth; how you see yourself and how you are seen. Discordant in that Barbados where the native population is over 90 % black, colonial attitudes are perpetuated by even blacks themselves to ensure the continuation of tropes and ideas that negatively impact you because of your shade and therefore perceived class and ultimately worth... My work often examines this disconnection. I want to take part in the Museum project to stimulate further discussions along these lines. The museum is filled with historical work that for the most part shows the life of the colonialists, the ruling class, slavery and the sugar industry. There is minimal discussion on recent history, far less contemporary Barbados. It feels like something is missing. My intervention will be in keeping with my area of interest which is the contemporary black Bajan experience through photographs, and performance.
21Figure 1, Richard’s striking intervention into a case in the BMHS Jubilee Gallery visually unsettled the narrative of prosperity of white planters in Barbados. Alongside portrait miniatures and domestic regalia, Richards has inserted a gold frame with an abstracted portrait of a Black man, fixed to the frame via red duct tape. Through a superimposed photographic technique, Richards presents his portrait on the edge of the grotesque, with one eye becoming disproportionate to the rest of the features in the portrait. Here, the layers of the intervention become apparent – Richards’s “King” is an antidote to the ideological poison of imperial plunder and the plantocracy, suggesting both that wealth was held in West Africa prior to the Trans-Atlantic Trafficking of Enslaved Africans (TATEA) and as a stark reminder that the white planter’s wealth was obtained through the heinous system of TATEA.
Figure 1. Adrian Richards, King, installation view in Jubilee Gallery, 2018
Image courtesy of the artist, © William Cummins and the BMHS
22In addition to the visual responses, the artists were video interviewed speaking about their interventions, and a video of their collective responses became the “curatorial essay”. This was all an attempt to decentralize authority in museum practice and have the project become a multi-vocal exchange between the BMHS collections and the six artists.
- 3 In botany, a rhizome is a plant stem that grows horizontally rather than vertically underground, pr (...)
23Artistic Interventions employed a working methodology I was developing throughout my PhD work on a rhizomatic research approach to Caribbean museology, subsequently published (McGuire, 2023), based on Edouard Glissant’s concept of rhizomes.3 Glissant draws on this concept primarily from Deleuze and Guattari, who argue that meaning-making is rhizomatic in that there are multiple points in creating meaning and that to produce ways of knowing is to assemble rather than to interpret. Glissant goes beyond their European lens by locating the idea of rhizomes in the context of resistance to neocolonial realities in the Caribbean. The rationale for using this approach in museology is the recognition that knowledge production is not apolitical and developing a methodology to decentralize authority within the creation and archiving of museum theory presents alternate possibilities for knowledge-sharing in a Caribbean context. With this as the foundation, and in tangent with other experimental participatory models in social museology, I proposed a Rhizomatic Research Methodology based on the following principles:
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Multivocality in museum research and practice through assemblage. This goes beyond collaboration and involves lateral knowledge exchanges between museologist, researcher, curator, publics, and communities.
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Research methodology as a relational ecology rather than a linear framework. This suggests that museological research be transformative, facilitating micro-level case studies over large-scale survey projects, interrogating definitions, and demonstrating sustainable relationship-building.
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Accessible research outputs. This takes the research out of theory and into praxis, including ongoing, participatory projects that are ideally community-led, and the creation of collaborative toolkits shared across open access platforms.
24Glissant’s concepts of relation and rhizomes emphasizes the interconnectedness and multiplicity of cultural identities, histories, and experiences in the Caribbean. This research methodology explores how, in the context of museums, Glissant’s rhizomatic approach can suggest that museums should not be limited to a singular, linear narrative of history and culture but should instead embrace a diverse range of perspectives and experiences. The non-linear necessity of rhizomes emphasizes the importance of inclusivity and interconnectedness in cultural narratives and suggests that there is no single, dominant perspective that can fully capture the complexity and richness of cultural identity. Museums should strive to incorporate diverse perspectives and experiences in co-curation with communities, allowing visitors to explore the interconnectedness of cultural identities and histories. This approach to cultural representation can help to break down traditional hierarchies and power structures within museums and foster a more inclusive and equitable cultural dialogue.
25This approach was again experimented with when the BMHS, Life in Leggings: Caribbean Alliance Against Gender Based Violence, and the Barbados Youth Development Council created a platform to discuss Barbadian activism. Developed by co-curators Saamiya Cumberbatch, Ronelle King, and myself, Insurgents: Redefining Rebellion in Barbados was an interactive exhibition analyzing historical instances of resistance from plantation rebellion to labour and social riots, as well contemporary activism.
26As McGuire, Cumberbatch and King (2020) outline, the core content and design in this exhibition was developed by women-led community stakeholders serving as co-curators, as well as drawing from interviews with activist leaders, prioritizing knowledge exchange as a lateral process. Participation was a key aspect of the content, with visitors encouraged to make placards about a cause they cared about and add to an installation of artifacts in the exhibition space, giving equal value to their contributions alongside museum objects. We collaborated with a young activist named Imani on the creation of the character Activist Amani, who through short, animated clips conveyed these difficult topics for visitors under the age of 13 in language and imagery they could relate to. Accessibility of content was also a co-curated process, in that the exhibition team worked with the National Society for the Blind to ensure all panels and labels were translated accurately in Braille, which shifted some of the terminology we used. Insurgents also existed beyond the exhibition gallery, facilitated mainly through the two creative events embedded in the ethos of the exhibition: the Resist! You Got Me Excellent night of performance as activism and the Frenetic Arts open mic night, focusing on the intangible aspects of knowledge sharing, such as oral traditions. Insurgents arguably also aimed to be sustainable through a website that archives the exhibition materials as a toolkit. One challenge of this exhibition, a challenge that we still encounter, was the response to the museum including the voices of LGBTQI communities, as Barbados is still a very conservative-Christian and hetero-patriarchal society. Many of our public view the museum as a space to preserve those agendas, citing them as “tradition”, and are averse to the institution supporting LGBTQI rights.
Figure 2. Installation collage of the Insurgents exhibition at the BMHS, 2019
© Natalie McGuire
27The Barbados museum also continues to investigate notions of unpacking colonial legacies in the 2023 exhibition LOOKA: Dismantling the Colonial Gaze. This project is an exploration of postcards, photography, and artistic interventions where a collective of Barbadian women artists challenge the historical objectification and commodification of Black bodies, inviting us to critically examine the visual representations perpetuated by the colonial gaze. As scholars such as Krista Thompson have described, historically, from the late 19th century, British promoters of tourism to the West Indies strove to create islands as idealized tropical paradises through the use of photography. Being pictured with and without consent, images of Black Barbadians were mass printed and sold for white consumption and profit in lands far beyond their own without compensation. This trade meant the plantocracy model became repackaged under the budding economy of tourism. Instead of sugar cane, popular imagery – such as those produced through postcards relying on certain preconceptions around the landscape and population, centered on the picturesque – became the materials sown and reaped for profit. In the process of decolonizing museology, it is arguably important for museums in the Anglophone Caribbean to consider that photographs allow for visitors to engage with the lives of those within the images, to provide agency to previously submerged histories and challenge the colonial-ethnographic gaze in displays where photographs are purely being used to furnish or illustrate a moment in time. Ideally, the development of the displays of photographs or postcards are done with families of those featured or with the communities that share their heritage and can manifest readings in a multiplicity of ways. In examining our own collection of postcards, the nature of their production, dissemination, and ultimate acquisition into the collection, several key questions became apparent for us. How can the imagery in this collection be critically engaged with beyond its function as a historical record? How can we begin to untwine the layers of visual hegemony in the active picturing of early 20th century Barbadians? In what ways can agency be facilitated in the images of those featured? And how can this process of curatorial engagement be led by voices beyond the museum as institution?
28LOOKA: Dismantling the Colonial Gaze initiates these inquiries through a powerful collaboration between five Barbadian women artists who work primarily in photography. Through their work, the artists challenge the ways in which Black bodies have been objectified, dehumanized, and reduced to stereotypes through the lens of colonialism. They invite us to reconsider the power dynamics at play in the production and circulation of images and to recognize the agency of the subjects of these images.
29Menezes de Carvalho (2020) highlights that institutional instances, which are often governed by protectionist laws and preservation policies, tend to promote an elitist and official version of heritage or tradition. This process of selection and legitimization can marginalize certain community narratives and perspectives, shaping a limited and often exclusionary understanding of cultural heritage. In relation to the Caribbean, this discussion is highly relevant. The region is rich in diverse cultural traditions and histories, often shaped by complex layers of colonialism, slavery, migration, and resilience. However, the selection and legitimization of these heritages through Europeanized museology have historically been influenced by dominant institutions and perspectives, leading to the marginalization or erasure of certain communities’ cultural practices and histories.
30As noted by the reflections in this paper on recent exhibitions, the BMHS is arguably an organization that openly grapples with its colonial origins and is working towards more inclusive exchanges within its space, with communities at the forefront of this process of unlearning and knowledge sharing.
31Community engagement programs exist in a digital sphere as well, with the Barbados Beyond Boundaries project (2016), a community-led digital map where individuals, organizations and collectives can share their experiences of “Barbadianess” wherever they reside in the world. In addition, digital projects led by communities through the BMHS, such as Beijing to Bridgetown (2021) and Bengal to Barbados (2024) allowed the virtual world of the museum to be a facilitator of multivocal interpretations of heritage beyond its physical site. By engaging with local communities, incorporating multivocal narratives and perspectives and advocating for inclusive curatorship, the BMHS can contribute to a more nuanced and representative understanding of Barbadian cultural identity.
Figure 3. Collage of the LOOKA exhibition, 2023
© Natalie McGuire.
32Although the case studies shared in this paper were all temporary exhibitions, the approaches and relationships established here are informing a major redesign of the museum’s core galleries that has begun after several decades of fundraising. Most significantly, these exhibitions have been articulations of new Caribbean museological methodologies that the BMHS has facilitated the scholarship of, further encouraging Barbadian academic voices to contribute to the international museum field. There is still work to be done, but the democratic co-curatorship discussed here provides a hopeful signpost for the continual shift in the development of the BMHS and its impact on museology.
33However, it is complex to try to draw concrete conclusions about museums relationships with communities (especially in an anticolonial context) from a case-by-case analytical perspective, as each process is a product of a time and institution-sensitive situation. As the discipline of museology continues to be navigated, institutional understanding of community needs and roles of representation in a national identity context will no doubt expand. What is commonly evident from the cases presented in this paper is that Caribbean communities find strength in being part of the exhibition development process – we have the opportunity to think about cultural identity critically and form a sense of guild with a museum space that may have been fragile before. There is no all-encompassing model for better inclusion that can guarantee an idyllic museum-community relationship applicable to every process. Rather, curators, museologists, and community representatives can learn through interpreting individual case studies and through listening rather than analyzing data. It could be that the future of understanding what a kind of anticolonial museology is like lies not in the boundaries of museum practice, but in a shifting ecology of multiple entry and exit points of encounter between museums and communities.