Museum Practices and Migrating Modernity: A Perspective from the South

The research presented in this paper has been developed within the European project MeLa* (“European Museums in an age of migrations”), which focuses on how contemporary migratory movements come to reshape the role of museums and archives as the privileged places of national identity and cultural memory.[1] The fundamental consideration on which the research is built is that today, under the impact of globalization and an increasing awareness of the positive role played by cultural diversity, museums can no longer pretend to represent culture in exclusively national or local terms, because they are facing the challenge of an increasingly diverse, transcultural and multilingual European society.