As museums reimagine how anthropology interprets Africa and “Blackness,” they are wrestling with both the residues of historical race science and the realities of anti-Black racism in America today. For anthropologists working in museums this “decolonizing the museum” approach means balancing anthropology as a science against pseudoscientific notions of Africa and “Blackness” that museums and anthropology helped to visually codify in the popular imagination.

Monique Scott (Yale ’04 PhD, Anthropology) will share insights from her career, at the American Museum of Natural History and the Penn Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, to address the pitfalls and potentials of reimagining Africa and rearticulating the value of Black lives for museum audiences and popular and political culture today.