What About Words? Activism and Cultural Change in the Amsterdam Museum

On 12 September 2019, the Amsterdam Museum announced that it would change the title of its (semi-)permanent exhibition Portrait Gallery of the Golden Age to Portrait Gallery of the seventeenth Century. The museum decided to dispose of the term Golden Age because it frames the Dutch history from a celebratory nationalist perspective and obscures the aggressive mercantile and colonial aspects. This chapter aims to analyse the process that led to the Amsterdam Museum abandoning the term. In the Dutch museum world and in the Amsterdam Museum more specifically, a process of change in the hegemonic “regimes of representation” had been going on for quite some years. Yet, the final blow that led to the decision to no longer use the term Golden Age was given by an activist with a migration background. The chapter focuses on the meaning of the strategic intervention of the activist and on how he was able to mobilise the museum to take action in such a way as to publicly contest a deeply ingrained representation of Dutch history and culture.