Belgian museology reframes colonial massacres as nostalgia for lost imperial glory

Evidence

The Tervuren Museum is a merging of the historical and contemporary, as all memorializations tend to be. But the Museum fails – really refuses – to memorialize the murder of ten million indigenous Congo basin people in 25 years (more or less half the region’s population); it serves rather as nostalgia for Belgian loss – of the colony, its wealth and prestige, of the power and standing it represented within Europe, explicitly even for fallen colonial agents in the service of the state. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 903

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels how national memory institutions elsewhere construct founding myths by erasing violence - echoes the erasure patterns discussed in the reader’s work on public memory and infrastructure.
• SEED: Possible essay: ‘What museums refuse to say’ - the institutional choice to frame mass death through the colonizer’s grief, using Tervuren as the case study.