Curating implication at the public history museum: Holbæk’s Museum’s West Zealand and the West Indies

To assume responsibility for perpetuating legacies of historical violence, argues Michael Rothberg, subjects need to know how they are implicated in these legacies. Public history museums can play a central role in the task of revealing to visitors their modes of implication. Since they serve “the public” however, they encounter visitors with very different modes of implication to reveal. This article examines this challenge and ways to tackle it using the case of Holbæk Museum’s West Zealand and the West Indies . The exhibit provides a good opportunity to examine this challenge given its effort to reveal how an area unimplicated in common narratives about Danish colonialism is deeply entangled with the history of the Danish slave trade and enslavement in the Caribbean.