Introduction : museum communities/ community museums

Abstract

This book explores case studies of community museums, ecomuseums, grassroots heritage organisations and their networks from Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean. It builds upon and complements the growing literature on the broad topic of ‘museums and community’ through its specific focus on museums that have been created from community action, respond to local challenges and are reliant upon local systems of governance. The volume is birthed out of the international conference Itinerant Identities: museum communities/community museums held at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, in November 2018. This was a major academic meeting for the European Commission Horizon 2020 research project European Union and Latin American and Caribbean (EU-LAC) Museums that brought together museum and university partners from the Caribbean, Chile, Costa Rica, Peru, Portugal, Scotland (project co-ordinator), Spain and International Council of Museums (ICOM) (https://www.eulacmuseums.net" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://www.eulacmuseums.net). 1 On this occasion, we partnered with the Museums Association of the Caribbean and launched the innovative exhibition of contemporary art entitled Arrivants: Art and Migration in the Anglophone Caribbean World at The Barbados Museum and Historical Society. These transatlantic events and the compilation of this volume are part of an ongoing process seeking to address imbalances in the discourses of museology and art curation that have to date occluded the Caribbean and Central American regions, and where possible we endeavour to give greater agency and voice to the communities represented. The conference title Itinerant Identities reflects Alissandra Cummins’ point that the Caribbean is in essence a region where (virtually) everyone came from (virtually) everywhere else, whether voluntarily or by force, and the sub-title ‘museum communities/community museums’ seeks to reflect the problematics of terminology in the field while also reinstating the possibility of characterising a ‘community museum’ informed by transatlantic research.