Museums, Empire and Northern Irish Identity

Museums, Empire and Northern Irish Identity will disseminate my PhD research on Colonial Objects in Northern Ireland and is based on twenty-five years of working in museums and heritage. This Fellowship proposal is built on a partnership between Queen's University Belfast, National Museums Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland Museums Council, Irish Museums Association and the University of Maynooth's Centre for the Study of Historic Irish Houses and Estates. The Fellowship will benefit communities in Northern Ireland and will involve academic anthropologists and historians; museum professionals and policymakers; community participants and the general public.

My PhD developed scholarship on how, for centuries, people from the north of Ireland collected objects in other parts of the British Empire. Representing indigenous peoples on whom the lives of the colonising Irish impacted, these are now part of a 'hidden history' about which we know little. The PhD began with a twentieth century collection of 'colonial objects' that I had inherited from my grandparents, who were teachers and bureaucrats in Hong Kong (1931-1961). This was a recent example of how, although England's first colonial subjects, the Irish have also actively engaged in promoting the British Empire elsewhere. By investigating our family's archive, and discussing our emotions and memories about this collection and the home in which we grew up that had housed it, I showed how, as well as being strongly evocative for the indigenous communities within the British Empire who were their first owners, 'colonial objects' might also carry meanings for people at 'home'.

This claim, though, is difficult to make. The subject of colonialism is regarded by many as distasteful, and in Northern Ireland, given its relationships with Ireland, the UK and, in the past, the British Empire, raising it can provoke racist discourse and political unrest. As we also know, there is a growing, worldwide decolonisation movement impacting museums, that is calling with ever greater urgency for them to repatriate objects to the communities from which they came. The potential of colonial objects to fuel polarised public discourse and even conflict, both locally and globally, is one reason why, as my PhD demonstrated, there has been little research aimed at understanding the histories of objects from the indigenous peoples of the Arctic and Antarctic, Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania in Northern Ireland's museums.

Through this Fellowship, I will develop awareness of our relationships with these collections, and with the legacies of Empire. My family experience is far from rare; and throughout my PhD, I met people across the island of Ireland, and from a wide range of backgrounds, whose parents and grandparents had supported the British colonial project. Through inclusive Community Workshops, I will engage with other families' imperial pasts, and also with the human ramifications of Empire in our post-colonial age. By encouraging personal reflection on 'World Cultures' objects from museums and from participants' homes, the Workshops will develop my path-breaking methods for coming to terms with potentially conflicting perspectives. By building a collaborative Collecting, Empire and Ireland Research Group with an associated conference and edited book, I will make sure that these discussions are underpinned by the very latest anthropological and historical research and the best available museum practice. In collaboration with museums, I will also provide a Report, summarising what we know about the collections in Northern Irish museums: where are they from, who made and first used them, who collected them, what do they tell us about the past - and perhaps most importantly of all, what are the complex issues about identity and belonging that they raise?