Decolonisation & NEW MUSEUM PARADIGM 2021 SEMINAR SERIES
by
POSTCOLONIAL HERITAGE RESEARCH GROUP Outline
The Postcolonial Heritage Research Group (PHRG) and The University of Sussex School of Media, Arts and Humanities are excited to present a new seminar series titled The New Museum Paradigm, which seeks to provide a common platform to promote complex and provocative research concerned with the social role of museums. Our seminar welcomes approaches that engage critically with key themes and issues relating to the study of museums and their place in society in the hope of drawing interdisciplinary links between different contexts of museum traditions in how they engage with the themes anti-slavery, race, education, science, restitution, and empire (and other intersecting issues). We are interested in bringing together perspectives from Europe, North America, South America and Africa to explore new subjects, methods, philosophies, approaches, temporalities, geographies and practices under the guise of the New Museum Paradigm in the hope of producing a more high- resolution picture of the current museumscape.
The New Museum Paradigm seminar series will follow on from our successful 2019 inaugural symposium Empire and the New Museum Paradigm, which was also hosted by The University of Sussex (funded by CHASE). A summary of the symposium can be found here.
NMP 2021 Seminar Series
14th October 2021 15th October 2021
12:00- 13:30
Museums and Anti-Slavery (Adiva
Lawrence / Dr Lennon Mhishi) 11:30-12:30
Museums and Resitution 1 (Dr Samuel Aylett)
Lunch Break
14:30-
16:00 Museums and Race (Matthew Jones) 12:45-14:15
Museums and Resitution 2 (Dr Samuel Aylett)
Break Lunch
16:15- 17:45
Museums and Education (Laharee
Mitra) 15:15-16:45
Museums and Science (Mike Rayner)
*All times are GMT
**Zoom links will be provided after registration via Eventbrite.
Break
17:00-18:30 Summary Panel Drinks/Reception
Session 1: Museums and Anti-Slavery, Chaired by Adiva Lawrence / Dr Lennon Mhishi
In March 2020, the International Slavery Museum of Liverpool appointed a Curator of Contemporary Forms of Slavery, with the mission to work on developing the Museum’s collection, and to prepare material for a large permanent exhibition on the subject. The post description reads ‘Working closely with NGO’s, government, law enforcement, academics and communities the post holder will be responsible for researching, and developing content for the display galleries, exhibitions and public programming on contemporary forms of slavery including (but not limited to) forced labour, domestic servitude, sexual slavery and human trafficking.’ It indicates an understanding of the Museum’s mission to operate as an active agent of political change. However, we are also aware that the museum space is not separate from the forms of power and hierarchical modes of relation in wider society. Even today, it is generally admitted that museums’ responses to calls for radical change and decolonization have not yet succeeded in transforming the way publics engage with the histories and legacies of slavery and colonialism such as racism, or the growing issues related to extractive economies. It is therefore also of interest to this session to highlight some of the limitations museums may face when tackling the issue of contemporary forms of slavery which may be in part due to their own entanglement with colonial and oppressive structures. How, then, do we curate the present relations of power and exploitation? What methodologies may be put in place to challenge the histories and structures of oppression and dispossession that birth the kinds of exploitation we are contending with today? We welcome contributions that explore these questions from a variety of approaches and are particularly interested in scholarly perspectives that engage in a critical reappraisal of the conceptual tools most commonly deployed to address them. Of particular interest to this session will be to think though the paradigmatic field of ‘modern slavery’. We are equally interested in devising curatorial methods that do not reproduce the colonial visual regimes and their pitfalls in dealing the lives of oppressed subjects in exhibitions. Additionally, if museums are places of anti-slavery activism, what concrete uses of their materials and resources can be displayed by museums as gestures towards liberation?Digestible Memories in South Africa’s Recent Past: Processing the Slave Lodge Museum and the Memorial to the Enslaved
Dr. Nicola Cloete, Senior Lecturer in the Department of History of Art & Heritage Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand.
Given the recent oppressive histories of apartheid and colonialism, the legacies of slavery in South Africa are often overlooked in thinking about aspects of post-apartheid democracy’s discursive formulation of race, nation and reconciliation. This paper analyses how two examples in Cape Town – the permanent exhibition Representing Slavery at the Slave Lodge Museum and the Memorial to the Enslaved in Church Square - represent the historic event of slavery in South Africa. The paper argues that the museum exhibition and the memorial site are instances of memorialization and simultaneously function as political processes that offer insight into discourses of race and reconciliation in South Africa during the early stages of democracy.
Enculturation or slavery: The conundrums of contemporary slavery in the Ghanaian context
Mark Seyram Amenyo-Xa, (Doctoral Candidate) Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, University of Ghana, & Curator, Ghana Museums and Monuments Board
The experiences of slavery or enslavement are as nuanced as the realities and cultural matrixes of people and places all over the world. At its invocation, the phenomenon of slavery connotes convergence and divergence all at once. Despite the generally agreed similarities of restriction, exploitation and sometimes express coercion that characterise slavery, the frequent grey areas associated with its manifestation in different parts of the globe have given rise to contentions in its definition and forms. The contentions become even more pronounce when the issue of contemporary or modern slavery is brought to the fore. This article is founded on the conundrums that emanated from fieldwork in the northern and Volta Regions of Ghana, and an exhibition on contemporary forms of slavery in the Palaver Hall of the Cape coast Castle in 2018/19. The exhibition sought to draw connections between historical and contemporary forms of slavery and to attempt to rouse conversations on modern forms of enslavement in the consciousness of its viewers. The exhibition unearthed interesting perspectives from its varying viewers. Most notable was the seeming struggle of some Ghanaians to identify with the manifestations of modern slavery as demonstrated in the exhibition. This paper argues that the difficulty in drawing connections between their lived experiences and the manifestations of modern slavery has a basis in the age-old cultural forms of apprenticeship and livelihood that pervades Ghanaian rural and peri-urban socio-cultural fabric. The conceptual impasse is predicated on the miasma between enculturation and exploitation and how arduous distinguishing between the two can be challenging in the Ghanaian context.
In this panel there will also be two presentations by two curators from the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool:
Emily Smith is Curator of Contemporary forms of Slavery at the International Slavery Museum.
Prior to this position, Emily spent several years on the frontline supporting survivors of trafficking and slavery through the National Referral Mechanism. Alongside this she completed a master’s degree in Human Trafficking, Migration and Organised Crime.
Jean-François Manicom is the lead curator of the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool/UK. He holds a master’s degree in Arts and Cultural Management from the IESA (Institute of Superior Arts), Paris. He worked as curator of the permanent collection of the Memorial ACTe in Guadeloupe/French West Indies, which is the first memorial site dedicated to the history of slavery and to the expression of contemporary Caribbean Art in the region. In 2015, he directed and curated the first Caribbean Festival of the Image that showcased the works of 41 contemporary artists from the Caribbean. With an expertise on photography, photographic archives and contemporary visual art, Jean-François has curated multiple exhibitions since 1998 that focused on the visual archives of slavery and its legacies in contemporary post-plantation societies, in France, in the Caribbean and in the UK. He is an internationally prized photographer, whose work questions the universal enigmas of our
nowadays, in a world where multiple and fragmented pasts challenge our power to imagine new possible futures.
Session 2: Museums and Race, chaired by Matthew Jones
This panel will explore museums as white institutions which are deeply imbricated with histories of white supremacy, racism, and violence towards people of colour. It will look at this from different perspectives such as the temporary staff, permanent staff, researcher, artists in the museum, and being a visitor to the museum. It aims to discuss the emotional and intellectual experiences of this, how these experiences have changed over time, the root of these issues and what the future might hold with reference to current developments in practice and discourse around museums towards developing decolonial museological practice. As entry point into understanding the multifaceted ways race and heritage are connected this panel will take the events of the summer of 2020 regarding the Black Lives Matter as a starting point to explore the emotional, intellectual and social experiences of people of colour when they interact with heritage and museums either as working with or visiting these spaces. This approach aims to situate these events within longer term movements of anti-racism activism and decolonisation movements in order to understand them, and their relationship to heritage, more fully.
"'Talking back'" via art: Community participatory art collaborations as counterspaces for BIPOC college-aged youth in Minnesota
Angie Mejia, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor and Civic Engagement Scholar at the Center for Learning Innovation at the University of Minnesota Rochester.
Yuko Taniguchi, M.F.A., is the author of a volume of poetry, Foreign Wife Elegy (2004), and a novel, The Ocean in the Closet (2007), published by Coffee House Press.
This presentation focuses on Counterspaces, a community participatory art collaboration between the University of Minnesota Rochester (UMR,) a health science campus with 40%
student population identifying as racially minoritized and located 80 miles from the site of George Floyd's murder by police, and the Rochester Art Center (RAC,) our city's contemporary art museum. The idea of Counterspaces emerged from our experiences as Women of Color scholars and educators providing emotional support (via art-based activities) to our Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) and Black and other People of Color (BIPOC) students in response to our proximity to different forms of racialized violence against People of Color in our state of Minnesota. This presentation will highlight our ethnographic and other qualitative findings from the students whose artwork has been curated by the RAC. The exhibit carries the title of Counterspaces, a term conceptualized by Critical Race Theorists to define those "safe social spaces... which offer support and enhance feelings of belonging" (Ong et al., 2018, p. 207) in marginalized individuals existing in spaces that are not made with them in mind. The artwork highlighted in this current year-long exhibit was and continues to be created by BIPOC students attending guided art workshops. We discuss how art-based workshops and public art dissemination venues act as potential counterspaces, allowing racially marginalized groups to find ways to collectively examine their experiences navigating spaces, places, and relationships that are at times harmful to their emotional health. In all, we look at the potentials and limits of participatory community-campus-museum projects to empower racially minoritized college-aged youth as they navigate contexts influenced by racial inequities at the
structural level in tandem with more unique affective economies of racial resentment and White fragility at the regional one.
‘Whose Heritage?’: Shakespeare, slavery and the National Portrait Gallery, London
Liberty Paterson, AHRC funded Collaborative Doctoral Partnership student at Birkbeck, University of London and the National Portrait Gallery (NPG).
The National Portrait Gallery (NPG) was conceived as the home of British heroes. Founded in 1856 with a likely portrait of William Shakespeare, the gallery’s formation was inspired by a mode of hero-worship promoted by Thomas Carlyle that privileged the achievements of individuals in accounts of history. The gallery remains entangled with this approach, as an art institution uniquely dedicated to individualism where the lives and identities of the sitters are prioritised. The faces that populate the nation’s collection of people present a monocultural version of British history before the twentieth century, in which white heroics are visually omnipresent. This paper explores how racial hierarchies have been constructed and naturalised through the formation of national museum collections like the NPG. By focusing on the provenance of the NPG’s founding artwork, the long debated Chandos portrait thought to depict Shakespeare circa 1600-1610, the institutional history of the gallery can be compared with the lesser-known heritage of this portrait that has come to serve as a national icon. The portrait’s links to the Chandos family and the wealth they derived from enslaving African men, women and children on their Jamaican plantation, will show that this painting as a material possession can offer a different account of British history beyond white achievement. In this parallel analysis of ownership, the Chandos portrait is tied to Britain’s history of violent racial subjugation through transatlantic slavery that often remains unacknowledged or disconnected from the dominant national story in museum spaces. The life of this painting can also connect us to the lives of the enslaved in ways that will hopefully allow a reclamation of this portrait’s perceived place in British heritage.
Collecting the ‘world’ on paper: A history of racialized collection strategies at the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin
Freya Schwachenwald, M.A., PhD Candidate, Technical University Berlin.
Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett, Germany’s largest collection of graphic art, houses more than 600,000 works. Opened in 1831, the museum’s foundational collection consisted of drawings and watercolors acquired by Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, in 1652 from John Maurice of Nassau, governor of the Dutch colony in Brazil. This paper argues that the museum’s foundational entanglement with early and modern imperialism and colonialism have conditioned its collections from its first decades until today. Considering the public and academic lack of reflection on the institution’s foundational violence, I trace three fragments which are haunted by racialized, sexualized, aesthetic and epistemological regimes. I approach the foundational violence through the lens of the museum’s engagement with works from European artists traveling outside of Europe. First, I investigate the museum’s early discourses on and acquisition of so-called ‘Topographical Art’ in direct or indirect reference to Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). Humboldt advocated for the systematic
collection of such artworks at the court of King Frederick William IV, who donated his collection to the Kupferstichkabinett in the early years of the museum. I argue that Humboldt’s universalizing cosmopolitanism builds on a differential regime of racialization, knowledge production and aesthetic legitimacy. Second, the closer investigation of one producer of ‘Topographical Art,’ Eduard Hildebrandt (1817-68), reveals the tensions between marginality and centrality of colonial contexts in the institution’s history. Analyzing Hildebrandt’s artworks from his “Travel Around the World” (1862-64) allows to reflect on the representative strategies and conventions of the images and their relationship to the creation of racialized and gendered aesthetics and knowledge. Third, an analysis of contemporary exhibitions traces the perpetuation of formations of subjectivity, national identity and masculinity in discourses on aesthetic and epistemological truth and the continuous naturalization of these differential regimes through institutional practice and research.
Session 3: Museums and Education, chaired by Laharee Mitra
One of the primary justifications for the foundation and survival of museums has been the
‘educational’ role of museums. Museums have served as important resources to aid the school curriculum, seeing their institutions teeming with school children during term time. Learning programmes and facilities are advertised predominantly to engage more directly with general visitors. Recently, learning and engagement professionals have been placing greater emphasis on object-based learning, sensory, and emotional experiences in museums. These efforts challenge traditional modes of learning practices and re-evaluate the distinctions between the
‘expert’ and ‘student’. Behind the scenes, both museum professionals and academics have been labouring to unpack the colonial legacies of museums. How can this important research be communicated, without falling back on traditional didactic models of education? Can museum learning be used as a tool for ‘decolonising the museum’? What changes do institutions need to make? This session seeks to explore the cross-roads between decolonial museum practice and museum learning and engagement.
The educational aspect of the Museum of Water – Morocco
Ikrame SELKANI, PhD in Heritage from the University of Cordoba - Spain.Museums contribute to the dissemination of forms of knowledge and culture (Jacobi and Coppey, 1995). Seen from an educational perspective, the exhibition is a field/ resource that the teacher uses to enable his or her students to acquire knowledge corresponding to a school program’s objectives. The same exhibition can in this case be used for different purposes and with different methods (Jacobi and Coppey, 1995). It is teachers who have had this concern for their students and colleagues in the cultural service, when those in charge of museums have sought to broaden the target of their action, the service of the gaze or of delight, some are tempted to say, thus putting forward what seems to them to be the essence of their action: to learn, of course, but also to learn how to look (Jacobi and Coppey, 1995). Here, we will see the case of the Mohammed VI Museum for the Civilization of Water - AMAN located in Marrakech - Morocco, which was created in 2017 by the Ministry of Islamic Affairs as a tribute to Moroccan genius in water management, water governance, and as esteem to the contemporary work in hydraulic policy. The museum of water has two educational rooms dedicated to school groups:
these include practice exercises for learning workshops, and group activities. The pedagogical workshops of the museum are aimed at helping children from 5 to 12 years old discover a set of themes around water, sustainability, and sustainable development concepts; as well as the preservation of natural resources. The question to ask is: how could the museum of water of Marrakech be an educational tool to children and people of young ages?
‘I read Beloved in a house museum haunted by domestic violence’: Ghosts and the decolonial said and unsaid when teaching in museum spaces
Samantha Cutrara, PhD
Eschewing a traditional academic format, this paper tells a story of me, as a former historical interpreter at a living history museum, and the adjoined memories that I have that weave in and out of my connections and considerations in this house, both at that moment of interpretation for visitors and in my recollection of it. By engaging in a kind of auto- ethnographic decolonial feminist methodology presented and modelled by Rhee (2020), I explore the said and unsaid in a particular museum space and reflect on how the “unsaid” – the literal and figurative ghosts (Gordon 2008) haunting my “said” interpretation – tell a story of colonialism, racism, and feminism that are integral – and yet still unsaid – in our understanding of the past and our interpretation of it. I have written that we need to focus on the triad of connection, complexity, and care in our teaching and learning of history (Cutrara 2020). I argue that educators need to be aware of, and respond to, the emotional complexity of people’s (specifically youth’s) lives in history education, rather than treating learners with pastoral care protecting them from “difficult” knowledge (for more of this argument see Dion 2009). However, these “difficult histories” are often the histories that confront present-day colonialism, racism, and sexism and thus are difficult for the educators to bring up, but not the learners who want these societal dynamics acknowledged and historicized (Cutrara 2020). With museums, living history museums in particular, how can we bring a more nuanced, complex, care full “ghosts” – residues of difficulties and connections – into our museum spaces?
However, more than that, in this paper, I want to pose, as well as model, the questions of: How can we actively bring the notions of haunting and complexity, connection and care to museum spaces? And how does this work interact with our desires for more decolonized, anti-racist, and feminist heritage spaces?
Not Everything is for us
Anna Duch Giménez is a part-time postgraduate student in Museum Cultures at Birkbeck College (University of London) and a Courtauld MA Curating graduate.
Western museums are working to correct harmful practices and legacies through different curatorial activities, educational programs, and processes of restitution. From the perspective of Western audiences, restitution involves moving the barriers of access to an object, sometimes triggering strong feelings of loss for those who have seen them for decades.
Audiences are not prepared to deal with such feelings, and as such sometimes see restitution as an attack on their own access to art and heritage. With such backlash, there is a risk that museums will seek to ‘protect’ their original audiences and not fulfil their role in decolonising heritage. How do we prevent this? My paper will explore the potential for museums to become spaces of self-reflection and learning about cultural boundaries. Can we teach notions such as access, and open and closed cultures, to facilitate a better understanding of the different boundaries surrounding diverse forms of heritage? I will outline different modalities of access to heritage, such as the Traditional Knowledge Labels used by different Indigenous nations around the world in their reclamation of access to their digital heritage. I will address issues such as intellectual property and copyright, digital access to images, credit and attribution, and how these can be expressions of different cultural practices. I will then consider the use of these notions of access in a museum setting as an exercise to challenge feelings of entitlement to other people’s heritage. Such an exercise would consist of encouraging participants to imagine how they would present an object from home and what kind of access and context they would want it to have. This has the potential to change audiences’ mindsets about restitution and repatriation and in turn smoothen the process.
Session 4: Museums and Resitution (1), chaired by Dr Samuel Aylett
Since the release of the 2018 Sarr-Savoy report on the Restitution of African Culture Heritage:
Toward a new Relational Ethics, the debate around the restitution of African material culture has reached fever-pitch. Provenance research projects that are posited to underwrite restitution efforts have become the focus of museums and universities across the globe. In Germany, for example, Prof. Monika Grütters (The state minister for Culture and Media) announced a new strategy for the recording and digital publication of collections from colonial contexts, with the hope of developing improved cultural relations with former colonised peoples. And whilst such projects help to develop relationships with those communities demanding restitution, many would argue there has been little in the way of actual restitution, and that such efforts overemphasise long-term ‘loans’, often reinforced by disingenuous universalist arguments. More recently, the French senate voted unanimously to return 27 looted objects within one year, though, as the culture minister Roselyne Bachelot stated, this in no way ‘challenges the principle of inalienability’. Inalienable from whom? Of course, the debate around restitution goes back much further than 2018, but as Dan Hicks, author of The Brutish Museums has rather shrewdly pointed out, rhetoric is hardening, and debate has been obfuscated by the language of press officers, rather than academics and activists, ‘driving the misunderstanding of restitution as a choice between retaining everything or the spectre of empty galleries. With this in mind, we invite papers that speak to the history and present of restitution critically.
‘Strings Attached’: ‘Repatriation’ as ‘(Re)insertion’
Dr Jeremiah Garsha is a teaching associate in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London.
Viewing restitution as a spectrum, this paper explores differing forms of repatriation from a global perspective. Museum collections are often returned ‘with strings attached’. This
materialises as intentional obfuscation, ‘long term loans’, and repatriation requests that place the onus and cost on source communities. Yet, the term ‘strings attached’ has been repurposed under Indigenous systems of knowledge. When Haida Gwaii Museum director Jisgang Nika Collison testified during the 2018 debates on Canadian Indigenous Human Remains and Cultural Property Repatriation Act, she stated: ‘our Ancestors put a string on our treasures’
which ‘binds two worlds so that we would come together…to heal and redefine our relationships’. Indeed, as this paper shows, changing the vernacular and conceptual framings around material collections pulls on these strings to create new museum paradigms. This paper seeks to move beyond binaries of ‘retain’ and ‘return’ and instead explores the wider range of restitution tools available to museums. It does so by following Indigenous-led scholarship. I use case studies from Britain, North America and Australasia in order to contrast developments in and between settler societies and former imperial metropoles. I interrogate continued colonial terminology within museum collections in order document decolonising perspectives; where ‘artefacts’ become ‘belongings’ and ‘human remains’ are rehumanised from specimens to ‘Ancestors’. Drawing upon examples such as the Xaayda kil language, this paper sees ‘restitution’ along the lines of the ‘tll yahda’ (‘to make things right’). It embraces the plurality objects occupy, shown through the Māori te reo term ‘taonga’ (‘treasured possession’), which connects an ontological sentience to materiality, where ‘artefacts’ and
‘ancestral remains’ are brought together as one. Throughout I argue that collection has altered materials and thus a true return can never be obtained. The transformative nature of taking and then returning items has added a layered history to material cultures. Thus, this paper demonstrates that postcolonial repatriation should been seen as ‘(re)inserting’ the new into the vacant spaces of the past under evolving restitutional relationships.
The Kwakwaka’wakw Cultural Centres: a successful case of restitution
Roberta Fiorina, Master’s Degree in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology, University of Study of Torino, Italy.
In 1885 the colonial Canadian government issued the Potlatch Ban which prohibited the practice of any kind of Indigenous cultural expression, including ceremonies. Despite the ban, in 1921 Dan Cranmer, a Kwakwaka’wakw chief from Alert Bay, British Columbia, organized “The Last Great Potlatch”. Although it was not actually the last one, the event became a symbol and marked the beginning of those that the elders still call the Dark Years. While the people of Alert Bay were potlatching, the colonial authorities interrupted the illegal ceremony and arrested 45 people who were later offered the opportunity to be released in exchange for their family’s regalia. Many of them accepted, the government acquired their treasures and sold them to various North American and European museums. The first official request for the restitution of the Potlatch Collection was filed in 1958 and in the sixties, someone proposed to build a Big House to host the collection. It was immediately decided to avoid the use of the term museum since the institution is perceived as a colonial one. They chose to use the name Cultural Centre instead. Due to divergent ideas on where to place the centre, it was decided to split the collection between two locations: one in Alert Bay, the U’mista, and one in Cape Mudge, the Nuyumbalees. Today they are important points of reference for the local indigenous communities. Although the return process is not completed yet and many critical factors remain, like the fact that many museums consider the repatriation of the collection as a permanent loan rather than an actual restitution, what happened in the Kwakwaka’wakw
Cultural Centres could be considered as a successful case and could set a valid example for the ongoing processes and future initiatives.
Session 5: Museums and Restitution 2, chaired by Dr Samuel Aylett Swiss Benin Initiative: Findings
Dr. Enibokun Uzebu, University of Benin.
Dr. Alice Hertzog, Rietberg Museum.
This paper will present the current findings of the Swiss Benin Initiative. The project brings together eight cantonal and municipal museums in Switzerland that are seeking to investigate the provenance of their collections from the Kingdom of Benin in Nigeria. We will present the specificities of this Swiss initiative, notably the strategy of Swiss-wide networked provenance research and the mode of collaborative provenance research currently being undertaken with partners in Nigeria. Nearly one hundred objects from the Kingdom of Benin are distributed over the eight collections and whilst the provenance of some is known, the origin and biography of many remains unclear. For those objects associated with the British “punitive expedition” of 1897, the question of restitution is on the table. The topics raised by the Swiss Benin Initiative form part of broader debates on the restitution of the Benin Bronzes held in European collections, for example in Germany, the UK or France. However, there are also some specificities of the Swiss context, that of a colonial power without colonies, that will be presented here. These include the role of the Swiss art trade and private collectors in the circulation of non-European artefacts, the established field of Swiss provenance research as a result of looted Nazi artwork and current the absence of restitution claims from Nigeria. In this context, the Swiss-Benin Initiative’s attempts to establish open and transparent cooperation with Nigeria form an important step in response to wider calls to decolonize ethnographic collection, and local reckonings with Switzerland’s colonial history.
Disposession and the restitution of materials from the global North to the Pacifc
Sydney Stewart Rose, doctoral researcher at the Pitt Rivers Museum and is reading for a DPhil in Archaeology at the University of Oxford.Restitution is often prevented by the practicalities of strenuous and complicated returns processes. In a more theoretical sense, the obfuscation of the longstanding histories of restitution has also served to support a framing of returns as a novel idea (Stewart Rose, 2021). However, this paper argues that anthropological material culture theory itself has obstructed meaningful action towards restitution for almost a century. This proposed paper builds off my doctoral research to argue that the dominance of anthropological theories of gift-exchange has in fact prevented engagement with the restitution of material culture from museums. Dan Hicks (2020) has already noted how the emphasis on ideas such as object biography and entanglement can impede discussions of museological restitution. I have extended his ideas to posit that the core theories of anthropological material culture studies have also contributed to the dispossession of the global South. This paper first outlines how the dominance of gift-exchange theory has served to prevent discussion of the power
dynamics inherent in the collecting practises of museums in the global North. This includes an examination of the history of these ideas as well as a discussion of their mobilization and role in obscuring wider discussions of colonial violence and restitution. Next, I argue that re- purposing these theories can provide an opportunity to consider restitution more fully by reassessing how debt, reciprocity, and inalienability can be used to understand restitution.
This paper therefore speaks not only to the history of how restitution has been conceptualized, but also to the future of how anthropological material culture studies can understand restitution.
Returning and Retaining – Reclaim and Repatriation of Ethnographic Photographs as Processes of Dispute, Contest and Reconciliation
Alona Dubova, Master’s Degree in Art and Visual History, Humboldt-Universität Berlin.
In March 2019, Tamara Lanier sued Harvard University and associated Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology for the issuance of the licensing rights and the daguerreotypes showing her ancestors Renty and Delia. Both enslaved and abducted to South Carolina have been forced by racial theorist Louis Agassiz to be photographed naked. After years of approaching of the university administration and self-conducted genealogical research, Lanier decided upon taking legal action. In contrast to this case and embedded in the discourse on demands for restitution and a sensitive approach to photographs containing sensitive contents and deriving from problematic production contexts, as in the case of Renty’s and Delia’s photographs, proactive returning processes of photographic material from archives, collections and museums pose opportunities to open these spaces in collaborative approaches to include former excluded perspectives, expertise and critique in curatorial and museum practices. Forms of return of archival photographs, as Lanier is demanding today, have existed approximately since the 1990s particularly in “settler colonial nation states” as the US, Canada, New Zealand, or Australia, and are often indicated as “visual repatriations”. Collaborations as the Kainai-Oxford Photographic Histories Project from 2001, led by Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown from the Pitt Rivers Museum with members of the Kainai Nation, demonstrates an example of sharing of photographic reproductions with the descendants of the depicted. Nevertheless, up until today the Pitt Rivers Museum has retained the archival originals, historical prints, and copyright contradicting the intention of repatriating these objects. Although both university collections and museums understand themselves as “ethical stewards” of sensitive photographs and their responsibility as spaces of research and accessibility, contradictorily those images circulate unrestricted in the institutional databases and are still used as illustrative imagery to mediate history of colonialism and slavery in conferences or publications.
Session 6: Museums and Science, chaired by Mike Rayner
In 1969, Joseph Needham wrote, ‘it should be clearly understood that Europe did not give rise to ‘European’ or ‘Western’ science, but to universally valid world science.’ Recent postcolonial interpretations of science have challenged this both on the grounds of the universal validity of Western science and its Eurocentric origin. Postcolonial histories of science have explored how indigenous knowledge contributed to the establishment of modern science, while
Foucauldian epistemology explores the role of power within knowledge production. In the current ‘post-truth’ age, public communicators of science face the dual challenge of contextualising science within a nuanced historical perspective and counteracting the subjective relativism caused by the politicisation of scientific theories. This session seeks to situate science museums in a network of scientific institutions and explore their role as public communicators of knowledge, including concerns around legitimacy of authority; the development of public trust; their navigation of the current socio-political climate; and their efforts to decolonise their own practice.
“The miserable giraffe affair”: Percy Powell-Cotton and Rothschild’s Giraffe
Rachel Jennings, Curator of Natural History and project lead on ‘Colonial Critters: Reimagining historical natural history dioramas with modern audiences’, Powell-Cotton Museum.The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw a boom in the ‘discovery’ of ‘new’ species, as the expansion of European imperial control increased access to the African continent for hunters and explorers. Percy Powell-Cotton (1866 – 1940) was one such hunter. Powell-Cotton made 23 shooting trips across Africa between 1895 and 1939. He used his wealth and networks of contacts - both in the metropole and the colonies - to gain permission to shoot species that were protected by game preservation laws, and thus off-limits to most Europeans. Styling himself as a scientific collector – as opposed to a trophy hunter – from the early 1900s, Powell- Cotton shot animals for his own private museum and the UK’s national collections. Specimens were donated to the Natural History Museum (NHM) in the expectation that any ‘new’ species would be named in his honour, both enhancing his reputation as a collector and ensuring his scientific legacy. However, in the case of Rothschild’s Giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis rothschildi, now sometimes synonymised under the Nubian Giraffe, G. c. camelopardalis), Powell-Cotton’s legacy was usurped. What would become the holotype specimen was collected by Powell-Cotton in Kenya in 1902, and then sold to Lord Walter Rothschild in the knowledge that he intended to donate it to the NHM. When Powell-Cotton discovered that the newly described subspecies had been named after Rothschild and not himself, he was furious. Letters in the Powell-Cotton Museum archive reveal a fascinating (and sometimes farcical) story that demonstrates how the science of taxonomy and the museum collections on which it is based are inextricably entwined with the machinery of empire. It also highlights that science is not a ‘neutral’ body of facts, but a process subject to the biases and whims of its practitioners.
Representations of space science infrastructures
Dr. Eleanor Armstrong (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Delaware.
Representations of space science infrastructures - such as telescopes, launch sites, or analogue environments - have been dominated in UK science museums by narratives of nationalism and danger, ‘heroic’ cis-white-men researchers of the Global North, and of research successes. In my research anti-colonial research lenses, including queer feminisms and postcolonial approaches, open a critical avenue to understand how these narratives and imaginaries erase Indigenous peoples and their Lands that are used extractively for this research. In this proposal,
I will explore the examples of the representations of telescopes at Maunakea, Hawai’i at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, and meteorites on display at The Royal Observatory Greenwich, the Science Museum, and the Natural History Museum. This paper will emphasise that while the representations of historical interactions around astronomical research and observatories deserve critical postcolonial attention and need to be embedding within broader global narratives of empire, enslavement, and ‘exploration’ to be understood in public communications of science; many astronomical research sites continue to be used (or are expanding into new locations). Neglecting ongoing tensions around Land rights, resource uses, and the Indigenous resistances to astronomical and space science research in science museums continues to historicise these debates and assert a universalising narrative of Western/dominant science.
Colligentia Corpora: The Inventions of Man, Biocentric Science, and the Colonial Logics of Captivity in the Ethnographic Museum
Delande Justinvil, Doctoral Student, Department of Anthropology at American University.
The Enlightenment is often hailed for its revolutionary advancement of widespread application of scientific reasoning, igniting a series of epistemological shifts that impacted everything from college curricula to self-determination. This same era influenced landmark shifts in culture and social life, giving way to salons and cafes - hotbeds of lively discussions and heated debates on current affairs - architectural innovation, world fairs, and more. A primary locus where burgeoning aspects of science and culture met was the ethnographic museum. This paper mobilizes the work of philosopher Sylvia Wynter and her interlocutors as interventions into the conception of the ethnographic museum. I argue that the ethnographic museum was not just an exhibitionary institution, but one of many "vast and violent colonial and slavery projects, increasingly heightening the meaning of phenotype and physiology" (McKittrick 2006). I syncretize the origins of the ethnographic museum with the dawn of “bioeconomic Man”
(Weheliye 2014), the invention of man predicated on "bodily schemas" developed through biocentric and colonial logic that systematized “differential/hierarchical degrees of rationality”
and distinguished “different populations, their religions, cultures, forms of life" (McKittrick 2006). Bringing the two together reveals the ways in which the museum is not just a byproduct of enlightenment thought and practice, but more specifically an apparatus committed to the reinscription of Bioeconomic Man as the true figure of the Human through the invention and captivity of its "human, not-quite-human, and nonhuman" others (Weheliye 2014). This paper then situates the museum within a trans-institutional context, connecting the development of the museum to parallel projects of collecting bodies, e.g., the prison, the clinic, the asylum, the zoo, and the archive. I conclude with a meditation on recent discoveries concerning human remains in university museums as an aftermath of biocolonialism and speculate on what a practice engaged in a decolonial counter-science might look like.
Summary Session
In 1989, more than 30 years ago, Peter Vergo declared The New Museology. Less concerned with the ‘how to’ of museum management and curatorship, The New Museology was concerned with the purpose of museums. Foundational texts that emerged alongside this new museological approach sought to ‘deconstruct the historical and structural narratives [of the museum], practices and strategies of display, and the concerns and imperatives of governing
ideologies.’ These ideas, as they began to inform curatorial practice alongside the presence of more radical voices emerging both from within the educational and heritage sectors and from without, gave rise to more equitable methods of interpretation that focused on, but that were not limited to, who was being represented, how and what for. More recently, the very existence of museums, and the western colonial philosophies on which they’re built, have been challenged as part of a broader decolonial movement. 2020 has been a year in which both old and new global challenges have called into question the role of the museum in shaping our past, present and future, and their very necessity. Black Lives Matter, for example, has focused minds on the way in which racial injustice and racism continues to operate globally, and how the legacy of colonialism persists in our arts and cultural institutions. There are, however, those museums that have fundamentally challenged what a museum is and what it is for. The District 6 Museum in Cape Town South Africa, now threatened with closure, was born out of a need to capture the memories and stories of District Sixers who had been forcibly removed from their land under the Apartheid regime. And, whilst a physical location exists, much of the museum ‘work’ takes place outside the museum and focuses on the goal of successful land claims and land restitution. Designed with the recognition that museums occupy space already politically and socially charged, museums can and must be a force for good in the world. 30 years on from the New Museology to what extent has there emerged a New Museum Paradigm? Many of the key museological questions remain the same, but focus has shifted from the institution as the central location of analysis, to relational dynamics between museums and human flourishing.
Pulling restitution strings through contemporary art, From policies of
extraction and accumulation to policies of care in the work of Nicolás Grum
Victoria Vargas Downing, PhD candidate, Leeds University.Departing on the question of restitution, this paper is an invitation to pull the speculative threads of the intertwined relationship between heritage and contemporary art. Drawing on the heritage dynamics and problematics, I will analyse the actions of two projects of Chilean artist Nicolas Grum, which exemplify the contradictions, tensions, and frictions regarding museum policies, art creation, and restitution. The first project involves objects from Tierra del Fuego in the British Museum (2019) and the second, The copper man, in the Natural History Museum (New York). While restitution advocates against the accumulative and extractive logics embedded in the museum, Grum’s work deals with the question from a relational perspective, aiming for symbolic returns and more-than-human care. I argue that the artworks visualise conflicts on heritage pieces and criticise the accumulative and extractive practices of the museums. Here, Grum’s projects address the conflictive history of the objects positioning the artworks as a reparative act, where the materiality creates and recreates a symbolic world attempting to heal the colonial violence exercised in the objects, the land and their people. In this sense, through the symbolic reparation, his works move beyond the problem of restitution to an issue and policy of place and care.
Ramesses II at the British Museum: An Alternative Restitution
Liza Weber, PhD researcher at the Centre for German Jewish Studies, University of Sussex.
Under the umbrella of the grassroots project ‘100 Histories of 100 Worlds in 1 Object’, Liza’s paper imagines an alternative provenance and restitution for the sculpture of Ramesses II at the British Museum. In so doing, it means to revisit, from the perspective of the Global South, the 2010 podcast series ‘A History of the World in 100 Objects’. Indeed, a lot has changed in the museum world since its first BBC broadcast. The life stories of objects are no longer upholding the history of the world as it has been told by the Global North. Rather, they are pulling the rug from under it. And they are doing so in innovative ways. Which begs the question: what does an alternative provenance and restitution of Ramesses II look like? How might we ‘give back’ in lieu of the return of an art object? Opening with a survey of provenance as performed and motivated by the artist—from the work of Hans Haacke to Maria Eichhorn—
Liza’s paper demonstrates how creative practices not only shed light onto the dry and often dark field of provenance research, but also onto what, how and why provenance ought to be exhibited: “as an ethical, legal, historical, art-historical, and artistic issue”. Taking the latter aspect as a point of departure, Liza’s paper concludes with her own artistic intervention: a screening of a filmed movement piece, which not only tells the story of the sculpture’s trajectory through time and space, but also imagines a symbolic return of Ramesses II to its origins of ancient Egypt. Indeed, through the therapeutic disciplines of movement and dance, Liza’s contribution means to add to the wider discussion, initiated by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, on how to heal colonial wounds.
“Nations crowded into a rail car” – Native American experiences of British museums
Jack Davy, PhD (UCL), Exhibitions Curator for Morley College in London.
In 2019 Mohegan playwright Madelaine Sayet performed a one woman play at the Globe in which she described the experience of visiting the Native American galleries at the British Museum as “nations crowded into a rail car . . . I have nothing to offer the spirits crowding the building, mashed up against friends, enemies, and strangers who don’t understand them. I am scared to close my eyes and listen to the howling and pain around me.” I presented on Sayet’s experience and those of others to whom I spoke on the Indigenous experience in the museum at the 2019 PHRG symposium, and I offer here an update now about a book to be published on the subject later this year with Cambridge University Press. In the book I have compiled these experiences into a chapter which synthesises the main concerns of Native American visitors, feeding into subsequent chapters which look at why museums have failed so badly to provide adequate representation and a guide to enable more ethical and productive collaboration. In this age of government-led anti-woke campaigns it is critical that we remain focused on the voices of those for whom these problems are most pressing – for whom the harm is greatest and their mitigation most urgent. Museums have reluctantly become front lines in cynical political culture wars, and we must defend our institutions by emphasising our future as collaborative, inclusive spaces, rather than continuing to perpetuate the damage of the past through inaction or carelessness. This paper offers direct evidence of the crisis at hand, and a roadmap to achieve these progressive ambitions, which museums up and down the country must now urgently address.
Panel Chairs and PHRG Steering Committee
DR SAMUEL AYLETT, THE OPENUNIVERSITY
Sam is currently a visiting fellow at The Open University in the Department of Arts and Humanities, and an Academic Skills Tutor at Arden University, Berlin. Sam received his PhD in History from the Open University in 2020 with a thesis entitled 'The Museum of London 1976-2007:
Reimagining Metropolitan Narratives in Postcolonial London'. He also has a BA (Hons) in History and MA in Modern World History from Brunel University London. His research is concerned with the place and value of empire in British culture in the twentieth and twenty-first century. His monograph ‘Legacies of an Imperial City:
The Museum of London 1976-2007’ is expected to be published by Routledge in 2023.
MATTHEW JONES, UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX
Matthew is a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex in the Art History Department. His thesis focuses on the ways museums develop exhibitions and displays on the history and legacy of the British Slave Trade. As a result, Matthew is interested in how museums develop curatorial practice over time, issues of collaborative curating, the displaying of the memory and trauma of slavery, and curatorial approaches to the Black Lives Matter movement. Previously, Matthew completed a MA in Art History and Museum Curating at the University of Sussex and a BA in history and politics at the University of Warwick.
ADIVA LAWRENCE, UNIVERSITY OF HULL
Adiva is a PhD candidate in Heritage Research at the Wilberforce Institute for the
Study of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull, funded by the AHRC Heritage Consortium. Adiva’s background is in Art History and Social Anthropology, and she holds a Bachelor of Arts from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, and a master’s from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
Adiva is interested in postcolonial histories and theory in relation to cultural productions and institutions. She is currently working on the representation of transatlantic slavery in museums and contemporary art from a transnational perspective. Adiva has written and published about art in Brazil and women artists of African descent. Adiva is also a 2019 Junior Research Fellow at the Research Center for Material Culture in Leiden, and a Terra Foundation 2019-2020 fellow.
LAHAREE MITRA, UNIVERSITY OF BRIGHTON
Laharee Mitra is currently pursuing a PhD in museum learning and public engagement with decolonial practice at the University of Brighton, UK. She has previously worked at Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai assisting with collections research, education and exhibition programming.
She holds an MA in Museum Anthropology from Goldsmith, University of London, and an MA in Art History and Museum Curating, University of Sussex, UK and a BA in Psychology, Sociology and Literature, Christ University, Bangalore. Her research interests include public engagement with heritage, emotional experiences in museums and decolonisation theory.
MIKE RAYNER, UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX Mike is pursuing a PhD in History at the University of Sussex, focusing on international networks of geneticists between Britain and India in the early 20th Century. Mike is also the Network Facilitator for a collaborative research network run by the Centre for World Environmental History (CWEH) on the Botanical and Meteorological History of the Indian Ocean World. In this capacity, Mike has facilitated several publications and events related to colonial botany in India.
As a research associate for CWEH, he is working with McGill University’s Appraising Risk Partnership and the Institute of Development Studies’s TAPESTRY project, for which he has been involved in collecting and analysing historical sources of climate data.
DR LENNON MHISHI, UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL
Lennon Mhishi a postdoctoral researcher with a background in migration and diaspora studies. His interdisciplinary work spans interests in the African diaspora, mobility and displacement, music, place, space and belonging, Black health, technologies of Blackness and sound, and recently, creative heritage and community- based approaches to forms of exploitation, forced labour and human rights in different African countries. Lennon has a particular interest in music, sound and other arts- based, creative approaches to knowledge making and engagement. Lennon is committed to pursuing a research agenda and activism that centre African, Global South and Majority World epistemologies and contribute to the debates on knowledge production, at the intersection of histories of coloniality and other forms of domination, negotiating the present, and imagining alternate futures and worlds.
