Inheritance: A Speculative Ethnography of Evidence

Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, and the Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania.  Her recent book, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation:  Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair, was awarded the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award from the Caribbean Studies Association in 2021, and the Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society in 2020.  She is also the author Exceptional Violence and Modern Blackness, and the co-editor of the volumes Sovereignty Unhinged, Citizenship on the Edge, Changing Continuities and the Scholar-Activist Anthropology of Constance R. Sutton, and Globalization and Race.  Thomas co-directed the documentary films Bad Friday and Four Days in May, and she is the co-curator of a multi-media installation titled Bearing Witness:  Four Days in West Kingston.  She is the recipient of several awards, including a Guggenheim fellowship, and she is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  Prior to her life in the academy, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women.

Vernon Chatlein assisted with the sonic display case for Onze Koloniale Erfenis, now on display at the Tropenmuseum. His knowledge of the musical instruments on display, and as a contemporary musician and producer was invaluable for this installation. In 2020, during the pandemic, Chatlein embarked on a research project around the mysterious music style from his native Curaçao called 'Muzik di Zumbi'. The six-month research period on the island has given him many insights in the history of Afro-Curaçaoan music, its contributors and pioneers. This research period also allowed him to dive in the Curaçao archives and find Zikinzá, the extensive collection of field recordings of stories, anecdotes, work songs, lullabies, accounts, legends made in the 1950's and 60's by Pater Paul Brenneker and Elis Juliana. Many musical projects have come to life directly or indirectly as a result of this research made possible by the Urban Arts Talent Grant by Fonds voor Cultuurparticipatie in collaboration with Nowhere Amsterdam.

Wayne Modest is Director of Content of the National Museum of World Culture (a museum group comprising the Tropenmuseum, Museum Volkenkunde, Africa Museum) and the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. He is also Professor (by special appointment) of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.

A cultural studies scholar by training, Modest works at the intersection of material culture, memory and heritage studies, with a strong focus on colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean. His most recent publications include the co-edited publications, Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in A Changing Europe (Sidestone Publications, 2019, together with Nick Thomas, et al), and Victorian Jamaica (Duke University press: 2018, together with Tim Barringer). Modest has (co)curated several exhibitions, most recently, What We Forget, with artists Alana Jelinek, Rajkamal Kahlon, Servet Kocyigit and Randa Maroufi, an exhibition that challenged dominant, forgetful representations of Europe that erase the role of Europe’s colonial past in shaping our contemporary world.