ABSTRACT
Housed in the former ‘Palace of the Colonies’, the question of how to represent the colonial past is one of the most difficult France's new national museum of immigration (the CNHI) has to negotiate. Drawing on extensive data collected from 2004 to 2007, this article maps the debates around the place of colonialism and its ambiguous relationship to immigration in the new institution. Colonialism was openly addressed in the planning period, yet by October 2007 the museum stood accused of denying this history. This ‘flattening’ of the colonial discourse is attributed to a series of processes that occurred during the design phase: containment, deferral, disciplinary exclusion, and (in a limited sense) censorship. The article concludes with a consideration of the prospects for the future of this major site of colonial memory.
