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As the Founder and Director of the African American Museum, Lonnie Bunch gave our annual lecture on Building the Dream : the creation of the African American museum and the problem of race in American Museums . Based at the Institute of Advanced Studies Ïã¸ÛÁùºÏ²ÊÖÐÌØÍø for the last four months, he has been an inspirational presence raising our conscience of what can and should be the role of a national museum in constituting a history of race and modern subject hood.  As Founder/Director of the African American Museum, he emphasised, that the intention was not to build a museum only to celebrate the history of African Americans nor exclusively a history of Americans slavery but to show how both were constitutive of American identity in the broadest cosmopolitan sense.   As you can see attached, he shows how a museum can expose in an original way the paradox of how a nation founded on the principle of liberty can be embedded in an economy based on slavery and he reveals how the crafting of a new museum can be achieved from a beginning that started with no collections and a sense of a need to remember rather than a wanting to remember by all. We were most fortunate to have a response given by David Lammy MP who also asked when might we expect to achieve something similar in Britain, admitting that we have still far to go in achieving this. 

• , Labour Member of Parliament for Tottenham

Photo: © 2018 Lonnie Bunch, courtesy of Cecile Bremont