Untranslatable memory. Slavery museums and angolan voices

Inside the work, the controversial issue of memorialisation in museums will intertwine with the concerns of cultural heritage and the “historical silencing” of marginalized pasts. The examination of museum specialists’, anthropologists’, linguists’, and historians’ theories and works will pave the way for the case study of this research: a survey carried out in three universities in Angola, which involved students in a virtual tour of the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool. If representation is the production of meaning through language, and slavery cannot be represented, one may argue that slavery is, by consequence, untranslatable. However, to accept this failing means to surrender, one more time, to the discourses of power woven around history.