Isabella: Odunde Festival Reflection

After doing a little research, I discovered the Odunde Festival is the largest African American Street Festival in the country and I can believe it as the vendors and the performance spaces stretched down street after street in South Philly. This huge celebration of the African Diaspora had an infectious, overwhelmingly positive energy that seemed to touch everybody at the festival. Everything from the music to the food to the art was awe-inspiring and I really want to explore how to bring this level of celebration of Black identity to an exhibit dedicated to Africa and the continent's connections to the world.

What was so special about this event (coming from an outsider, proximal to whiteness perspective) was how this joyous space was for the Black community. Through my readings, I have learned so much about how museums have been structured to reinforce imagined racial hierarchies, constantly excluding Black artists and using their exhibits to promote the false claim of white superiority. How can a museum that has been structured to reject and demean Black identity ever become a place of celebration for the African diaspora? How can African immigrants/people of African descent feel welcomed in an institution  that has historically attacked their culture? I am wondering more and more on the ability of the Penn Museum to ever capture the energy and joy of the Odunde Festival, but this does not take away from the beauty of the festival itself. 

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