Between the holocaust museum in Washington D.C and Ghana’s cape coast exhibition: Contestations over memory and heritage.

Abstract

In Ghana, December 1994 marked the grand opening of the exhibition titled, “Crossroads of People, Crossroads of Trade” at the Cape Coast Castle Museum. While the exhibition represents five hundred years of Ghana‟s history, it stands as an epochal reflection of the economic and socio-political events marking the transatlantic slave trade. This exhibition opens up a whole debate surrounding race, “horrors of the middle passage, the brutality of enslavement and the struggle for freedom” (Eilean Hooper-Greenhill 2000:19). This paper deploys the “Crossroads of People, Crossroads of Trade” exhibition and the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. to show that the „nature‟ of heritage is highly contentious. The paper demonstrates that subjectivity, meaning, the politics of knowledge production, truth and history are all mutually implicated in the discourse of heritage. The paper equally establishes the inevitable importance of power in the struggle to represent the past in both the Cape Coast Castle Museum and the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C.