Celebratory History, Reckoning, and Backlash
I spent last week in Portugal, mostly in Lisbon with some side trips. I was struck by the extent to which museums and the like celebrate the age of discovery without much acknowledgment of the impact of colonialism. The Maritime Museum in Belem is a vivid but hardly unique illustration. It is through and through a celebration of Vasco da Gama and other Portuguese explorers of the 15th through 17th centuries. Even more strikingly, it is a celebration of colonialism. Among a great many artifacts, displays, and reproductions, I saw exactly one small wall display acknowledging any role of Portuguese seafarers in the slave trade. And that display downplayed this role, first by noting (correctly) that slavery in Africa pre-dated Portuguese export of enslaved Africans to Europe and the Americas and then by highlighting eventual 19th-century efforts by Portugal to combat the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The treatment of slavery at the Maritime Museum and elsewhere in Portugal reminded me of wh