The Making of Racial and Ethnic Categories: Official Statistics Reconsidered

One of the most striking features of the end of the twentieth century was the resurgence of the ethnic question in public debates, both in developing and in developed countries. Between conflicts and wars interpreted from an ethnic perspective (the Balkans and central Africa), nationalist struggles (the Basque country, Quebec and Belgium), and demands for recognition and political representation by new ethnic minorities resulting from immigration, every country is currently affected by what is commonly known as cultural pluralism (Hobsbawm 1993; Dieckhoff 2000; Faist 2009; Simon and Piché 2013). This ‘ethnic renewal’, to coin the expression used to qualify the growing interest for ethnic diversity in the 1960s in the US, is not only driven by a sort of obsession for cultural differences as an explanation for all kinds of social and political phenomenon. It derives from different legacies: from the increasing diversity of the population of countries that have undergone large immigration flows to the long lasting cohabitation of national minorities within modern Nation states, from the history of slavery to the post-colonial era. This resurgence or extension of the salience of ethnicity in most of the societies around the world can be found not only in public discourses, policy-making, scientific literature and popular representations, but also in the pivotal realm of statistics. Indeed, at the turn of century, an increasing number of countries are processing routinely data on ethnicity or race of their population. This is precisely what this book is about: ethnic and racial classifications in official statistics, as a reflection of the representations of population and an interpretation of social dynamics through different lenses

Museum practices and the Belgian colonial past : questioning the memories of an ambivalent metropole

This article questions the traces left by colonialism on Belgium's museums. Adopting a comparative approach to specific museographic representations of Belgium's colonial past, we examine the images they convey of this period. Museums directly concerned with Belgian colonisation are analysed (the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, the Musée Africain de Namur, and the Musée Belvue). This discussion is framed within the context of past exhibitions, but also by a consideration of more recent temporary exhibitions which express the need for Belgium to confront its colonial legacy in more complex and creative terms. The task of confronting the past and of assessing the role which colonialism played in glorifying the Belgian nation reveals the uniqueness of the ‘postcolonial’ Belgian context in which this problematic history has been debated within a broader national identity crisis that has put into question the very future of the country itself