Beyond a narrative of shackles: the negotiation of slavery’s difficult heritage in national and Afro-diasporic Brazilian museums

This article examines how national and Afro-diasporic Brazilian museums negotiate the heritage of slavery through exhibition storytelling. Focusing on three museums in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador, we explore how museum practitioners engage in memory work that challenges hegemonic narratives of slavery, often centred on violence and silencing. Drawing on exhibition analysis and expert interviews, we observe the persistence of a ‘narrative of shackles’ that defines and binds the memory of slavery and foregrounds its trauma through material artefacts of violence and narratives of suffering. In contrast, museum spaces employ strategies to reframe and resist this established narrative, emphasising the museum’s complicity in colonial violence, Afro-diasporic historical and contemporary resilience, and joyful and celebrational narratives. By analysing exhibitions that are not solely dedicated to trauma but embed slavery within broader cultural narratives, the study contributes to debates on the ongoing struggles to negotiate difficult heritage in institutional memory spaces and the possibilities and limitations afforded to museum producers to negotiate colonial legacies in the present.