The African Archive - Beyond Colonization

History of the Course

This course draws inspiration from a co-taught seminar entitled, “The African Archive Beyond Colonization” co-created by Dr. Sarah Derbew (Assistant Professor of Classics, Stanford University) and Dr. Denise L. Lim (Assistant Professor of Black Material and Visual Cultures, The New School’s Parsons School of Design) in the fall 2021 quarter at Stanford University.

Between May 2021 to August 2022, Dr. Lim was a BIPOC curatorial postdoctoral fellow with the Stanford University Archaeology Collections (SUAC), and was commissioned to research, curate, and teach from SUAC’s African collections, which included over 856 cultural objects from over 10 different African countries. Dr. Lim collaborated with Dr. Derbew to create a course that offered students practical cultural heritage training in research, exhibition design and planning, and curatorship. Co-instruction was a key strength of this course that encompassed a wide range of geographic regions, time periods, and cultures. As no single scholar can be an expert in all these subjects, students benefited from a transdisciplinary, collaborative pedagogy.

This course invited students to interact with an archive in which temporal disruptions, expansive geographies, and complicated afterlives all intersected. As students explored the guiding question of the course, “what is an African archive?”, students traced interactions between ancient and contemporary Africa in various cultural archives, including ancient Greco-Roman portrayals of black people, photography of diasporic Nubian communities, and e-waste dumpsites in Ghana and Nigeria. As a culminating project, students curated a virtual exhibition that highlighted 18 objects from the African Collections held at the SUAC. One curatorial team used the online platform ArtSteps to reimagine what a decolonial exhibition of a Osaniyan staff from Nigeria could look like. Another group taught themselves photogrammetry to curate a digital product for an ornate adze, believed to originate amongst the Chokwe communities from Angola. Dr. Derbew taught this course again in 2022 and 2023.

In the spring 2022 quarter, Dr. Lim taught the course, “Museum Cultures: Exhibiting the African Imaginary” where a group of 13 undergraduate and graduate students research, designed, and curated the on-site exhibition, Reimagining African Borders Through Cultural Objects, which featured over 20 objects from Nubian Egypt, Ethiopia, the Sudan and South Sudan. The exhibition opened at the Stanford Archaeology Center on May 27, 2022 with a keynote address from renowned Swedish-Somali archaeologist, Dr. Sada Mire. The exhibition was on view from May 27, 2022 until September 2023. The spring 2025 semester is the inaugural year that this course has been offered to M.A. students in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies (HDCS), Anthropology, and Historical studies program at The New School.


How to Explore this Site

The spring 2025 semester repesents the inaugural offering of this course at The New School’s Parsons School of Design. This website serves as an open-access archive of all student research conducted on select African cultural objects held at the Brooklyn Museum. The “Student Projects” tab will be updated and archived by each year that the course is offered. This course is offered to 12 M.A. students every spring semester at Parsons and will be offered concurrently with Dr. Sarah Derbew’s “African Archive Beyond Colonization” course at Stanford University beginning in the 2025-26 academic year. Each university’s respective course websites are designed to highlight student research and cultural knowledge that recenters the vital importance of African material culture. For further questions about this seminar at The New School’s Parsons School of Design, please feel free to contact Dr. Denise L. Lim (limd@newcshool.edu).