2025_PhD Research_Ongoing — Suelen Calonga

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PhD RESEARCH - Ongoing since 2025

African-Brazilian Heritage and the Politics of Memory in German Museums: A Counter-Colonial Inquiry into Silence, Presence, and Epistemic Justice (1870-1940)

Academic
Research
Ongoing

My ongoing PhD research in Art History as Cultural History at TU Berlin, under the supervision of Dr. Prof. Bénédicte Savoy investigates two African-Brazilian collections held at the Ethnological Museum Berlin: the only collections of their kind in the institution and some of the earliest African-Brazilian collections displaced to Europe. One of ritual music recorded with the Edison's Phonograph in the early wax cylinders medium around 1910s; and the other of ritual instruments seized during a police raid in a house of worship in Southern Brazil still during enslavenment times, before 1880. I examine how the histories of these collections were shaped by colonial violence, scientific racism, and institutional neglect, and how this reveal larger patterns of erasure and selective care in German ethnology. Through critical provenance research, I seek to uncover the hidden trajectories of these materials and to propose ways of engaging with them that are ethical, accountable, and open to forms of repair.

Research page at TU Berlin

Research Blog

Photos Wilhelm Pietzker 1880 Collection: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum
Photos Praguer-Coelho Collection: Suelen Calonga

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