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 OPEN

UNIVERSITY

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.