ABSTRACT
New communication technologies seem to have changed and broadened the horizon for museum exhibits and heritage preservation more generally. This chapter introduces the Digital Museum of African and Afro-Brazilian Memory. The museum began in 1998 at the Center for Afro-Asian Studies, Candido Mendes University, in Rio de Janeiro with a collection of newspaper and magazine articles in the Brazilian press about a Black movement, racism and Africa. The symbolic process of inclusion of Afro-Brazilian culture as representative of the nation has increased greatly, albeit in a context where, for decades, the State has been less obviously present and there has been more involvement by other agents, both physically present and virtual. Incorporation of the popular into the national began during Vargas’s nationalist-populist government in 1932–1945, when certain features associated with Africa were incorporated and the expression ‘Afro-Brazilian’ was invented. To patrimonialise Afro-Brazilian heritage also implies, in some form, defining what that culture is and from which elements it is composed.
