Museums of Eurowhiteness or museums of migration? Exploring the geographies of racialization through migration museums
2026-08-13
This article explores the opportunities and challenges of Migration Museums as sites of knowledge-production and representation. Building upon contemporary debates that connect migration studies with research on race and ethnicity, I first provide an overview of which museums exist worldwide that are explicitly framed as ‘museums of migration’, meaning that their mission and permanent expositions concern migration (be it emigration or immigration), and that receive some kind of public funding or support. After tracing the emergence of 15 museums that respond to these criteria, I look at how these institutes understand and narrate migration and migrants, and how such narrations have changed over time. I employ a global blackness framework as a tool to reflect on the entanglements of race, racism, colonialism and migration, and on the existing absences in the representation of migration narratives. One pattern that emerges is that most migration museums worldwide have so far mainly centered the experiences of white European migrants, leaving other migration narratives and experiences untold. Yet a second pattern testifies to a shift in focus over the past decades, with museums acknowledging that many communities have been traditionally invisibilized, and increasingly taking some remedial actions to incorporate the lived experiences of indigenous, racialized and migranticized populations in their permanent exhibitions.