Decolonising museum displays in “difficult” British cities: Liverpool’s World Museum and Belfast’s Ulster Museum

Liverpool’s World Museum and Belfast’s Ulster Museum are home to important United Kingdom ethnographic collections beyond the British Museum in London. They are also located in “difficult” cities, understood here as sites with dark histories and legacies, namely Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” and Britain’s largest slaving port, respectively. This article examines the extent to which this affects efforts to adopt a decolonial perspective on collections that are closely connected to British imperial conquest. It argues that while the World Museum’s “Benin and Liverpool” exhibit achieves a synergy between colonial contextualization and co-curation, the Ulster Museum’s “Inclusive Global Histories” exhibit appears to omit the colonial element from its explicit commitment to decolonization.