Decolonizing the Amsterdam Museum A Work-in-Progress to Becoming a More Inclusive City Museum

This report was developed within the Horizon 2020 project ECHOES: European Colonial Heritage Modalities in Entangled Cities as part of its work package 3 on ‘City Museums and Multiple Colonial Pasts.’ This work package conducts in-depth, qualitative, comparative analyses of three city museums, each representing distinct positions within colonial history. The Amsterdam Museum forms one of these three case studies. The aim of this second report on the Amsterdam Museum is twofold: to test the ECHOES modalities for practicing colonial heritage, and in doing so to identify how the Amsterdam Museum is practicing colonial heritage in an effort to decolonize. Thus, this report provides a case study of the Amsterdam Museum in order to discuss recent or current (de)colonial practices in the museum and to understand how these processes for change have taken and are taking place. Effectively, the report aims to illuminate decolonization as it is internally thought and worked through, as well as the externally visible results.