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

Exploring the time scales of H-atom elimination from photoexcited indole

Recent spectroscopic measurements have shown that following excitation of indole molecules above the (1)pi pi*-(1)pi sigma* conical intersection, photoinduced N-H bond cleavage results in a range of H-atom kinetic energy release. H-atoms with large amounts of kinetic energy were attributed to direct dissociation whereas those with low kinetic energy were attributed to indirect pathways such as statistical unimolecular decay. With use of a combination of femtosecond pump-probe spectroscopy and velocity map ion-imaging techniques, both energy and time-resolved photoinduced H-atom elimination at 200 nm has been measured. The results show that H-atoms with both high and low kinetic energies are generated on an ultrafast time scale, <200 fs, suggesting that on the time frame of our measurements (<200 ps) there appears to be a direct route to H-atom formation yielding H-atoms with low kinetic energies