I’m having one of those “peculiarly wide awake at 5am” times, so I thought I’d do my first 101 post on this blog, for visiting the Museum of the African Diaspora this weekend. It’s a nice place, but I didn’t realize that their current exhibition wasn’t quite current yet, and it’s a very small museum (because it’s new), so I ended up a bit disappointed. The exhibit will be called Africa.com (though their title is AFRICA.dot.COM, but I can’t help reading that as “Africa dot dot dot com”), about communication from prehistoric times to now. I hope to go back for it.

They did have some interesting content, and I liked the fact that they have three different aspects of diaspora that they focus on: the origin and spead of humans out of Africa, the modern diaspora during colonial and slave-holding times, and the current diaspora through emigration. They had some informative videos about food, some focusing on dishes (gumbo, beans and rice), and some on a particular food (peanuts, greens, yams). There was also a lot of information about African-influenced music, including some material about symphonic and choral music that I particularly liked.

We also watched a longer video about Toussaint L’Ouverture, a person who was entirely new to me.

Besides it being small, some of the material shows low production quality, which was probably the most disappointing aspect. Lots of weird superimposed animations. Photoshop effect isn’t quite the right word, but whatever the equivalent for video is. And the longer video had a lot of faux drama at the expense of conveying more information. The real story is dramatic enough; I didn’t really appreciate the faux drama.

They also have a nice museum store. I spent a long time looking at What the World Eats while my mom checked out bracelets. And the photomosaic of the African child that is their logo is reproduced large so that you can see it across the street in its entirety, but you can also see all the photos up close, which was really cool. The museum definitely has potential.