Curating the colonial: the afterlives of museums, heritage sites and great houses in Jamaica and England.

In tourist discourse, Jamaica features as a natural, tropical paradise rather than as a culturally significant space (Thompson,2006). Its material artefacts are largely absent from England's extensive imperial museum collections (Barringer and Modest, 2018). Where present, Caribbean collections are small and focus on a narrow representation of its heritage, namely natural history in the form of botanical specimens and ethnographic collections from the island's indigenous past. This orientation reflects the scientific pursuits of colonial figures such as Hans Sloane and plantation owners such as Thomas Thistlewood (Modest,2012; Sloane,1707,1725; Fowler,2020). Jamaican objects and cultural practices, whilst evident in Jamaica's National museums, are scarce in equivalent English heritage collections. This omission has profound cultural consequences. More fully represented heritage enables collective cultural memory and enhances cultural and civic identity (Hall, 1999). However, in the two decades since Hall's foundational work, the 'mind's-eye' visualisation of British heritage remains largely immutable and dominated by white colonial perspectives (Ashley and Stone,2023).

This research investigates how heritage collections from the colonial era are perceived and negotiated by those who identify as Jamaican both on the island and among the Jamaican diaspora in England. I will also draw on literature which explores the absence and presentation of Caribbean artefacts from writers including Andrea Levy and Louise Bennett, whose work provides a creative-critical commentary on curatorial practices.