- Good morning, everyone, welcome to the opening event
for the symposium repatriation, restitution, and reparation,
African Art in the University Vermont's Fleming Museum.
I'm Vicki Brennan, an Associate Professor of Religion,
and the Director of African Studies here at UVM.
I'm also part of a group of faculty
and Fleming Museum staff
who have organized this three day event.
Last year, during the 2020/2021 academic year,
this group met regularly to discuss issues
of representation, materiality and performance
in relation to the Fleming's collection of objects
from communities on the African continent.
This conversation took place against the political backdrop
of the events of 2020, in which the ongoing violences
of imperialism, settler colonialism
and systemic racism continue to be made manifest
in instances such as the Black Lives Matter protests
that erupted nationally and globally,
in reaction to the brutal killing of George Floyd
by police in Minneapolis,
to the ongoing disparities of illness
and death experienced by black and ethnic communities
in the US and worldwide during the COVID 19 pandemic.
So as we talked about the objects
in the museum's collection,
and tried to envision new modes for the display
in the museum, questions of repatriation,
and restitution moved to the forefront of our conversations.
In part inspired by the publication
of the book The Brutish Museum's
by today's keynote speaker, Dr. Dan Hicks,
our conversations quickly expanded to a consideration
of the lasting legacies of colonialism and imperialism
in the museum as a whole.
Out of these discussions,
the plan for this week symposium emerged.
We're starting today with repatriation.
Repatriation involves the return of objects
that were stolen from communities in Africa
as part of European colonialism.
The presence of these plundered objects
in Euro-American museums contributes to ongoing
imperial relationships and perspectives.
The events we've organized this week
center on what has become the signal event
at stake in discussions of repatriation.
The Benin expedition of 1897,
in which British troops invaded Benin City,
killed an unknown number of civilians
and other residents of the community
and destroyed the palace.
As part of this colonial violence 1000s of artworks,
including sculptures, brass plates and carvings were taken.
Many of these objects may now be found in museum collections
across Europe and the United States,
including the Iyoba Queen Mother sculpture
that's part of the UVM Fleming Museum's collection.
Today's events, which include this morning's
keynote lecture, and the roundtable discussion
on the politics and processes of repatriation,
will focus on why repatriation is necessary,
and how museums should undertake this process.
However, it's important to state that repatriation
is only the beginning of a larger process of restitution.
We want to ask how can the museum and the university
contribute materially to practices
that lead to a process of repair
to address these historical and contemporary injustices.
The events that we have organized tomorrow,
offer one way of thinking through issues of restitution
through an engagement with how black artists reconcile
with the past and look towards the future
through an engagement with activism,
artificial intelligence, performance,
and other technologies and practices of remediation.
On Saturday morning, we'll have a closing conversation
that may end this symposium,
but we hope it will be part of a longer term process
of thinking about what reparation, restitution and repair
would look like at the Fleming Museum
and the University of Vermont,
and will allow us to develop concrete steps
that will enable us to take action
towards accountability and liberation.
Before I introduce this morning's keynote speaker
who is going to begin our conversation
about reparation, I wanna first thank our sponsors.
This symposium has been generously supported
by the University of Vermont Humanities Center
and the Fleming Museum of Art.
Additional funds have been provided
by the Department of Anthropology,
Art and Art History, English and Religion,
as well as the programs in African Studies
and Global Studies.
It is my pleasure to introduce our keynote speaker
this morning, whose book "The Brutish Museum"
set the table for the issues
we're going to address this week.
Dan Hicks is a Professor of Contemporary Archeology
at the University of Oxford.
He's a curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum,
and a Fellow of St Cross College in Oxford.
Dan works on the material and visual culture
of the human past up to and including the modern
colonial, contemporary and digital world,
and on the history of archeology, anthropology,
art and architecture.
While Dan has written many books,
it's his most recent publication,
The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence,
and Cultural Restitution, published in 2020,
and I think just released in paperback,
that draws us all together today.
He's going to deliver a lecture entitled The Brutish Museums
that introduces some of the key arguments
made in this inspirational and forcefully argued text.
So I wanna take this opportunity to welcome him virtually
to the University of Vermont.
And I'm sure we're all looking forward
to hearing his comments today.
Just a quick note, before I turn it over to Dan,
there's going to be time for questions
at the end of the lecture.
But we'll use the chat feature,
so that you can ask questions of the lecturer.
So please type your questions into the chat.
And with that, I'm gonna turn it over
to our keynote lecturer.
Thank you so much for being here, Dan.
- Okay, wonderful, so it's wonderful to be here.
Hello, everyone and nice to see some names
in the audience who I know.
But also lovely to meet lots of people who I don't know,
I'm just gonna share my screen,
so we can see the lecture slides.
And if someone could just no
or give me some indication yeah okay, that's great.
So I know that you can see what we're looking at.
I just wanted to say that was an incredibly
generous introduction, thank you so much.
I think in terms of the ideas
that I'm gonna be talking about,
I would actually make the outset
make a distinction between repatriation
and actually restitution.
So repatriation is a word that is bound up
with the notion of the nation state,
which is part of the legacy of empire
that we're seeking here to resist.
So actually, restitution also allows us to think
about the necessary physical returns of objects,
but also to think about a wider set of debts
that can be repaid in a whole host
of actually really different ways.
So hopefully that's a useful initial thing to say.
So in this lecture, I'm gonna talk to you
for about half an hour, I think I've been asked to speak
for and then we're going to open it up,
which of course, for me the greater joy,
of these conversations with institutions
holding Benin bronzes, with their colleagues
in Art History, Anthropology, Archaeology around the world,
with those with interest in African Studies,
in what some are calling the decolonization of our museums
and our institutions, and what I prefer to see
is the unfinished work of anti-colonialism,
and of course, anti-racism.
The greater joy is to learn how the book lands,
what the conversations are in different parts of the world.
So I'm really looking forward to the Q&A
and I put a link to the book for those of you
that would like to buy it not via Amazon,
there's a link to the publisher,
but also a link to one of the important ideas in the book
that I discuss in a journal issue,
which is available online,
there's a link to that as well about the notion
of the necrographic, so they're in the chat.
So let me just start off really by talking to you,
as is maybe appropriate, but also maybe we need
to do it in a bit of a different way these days
to talk about my positionality in this conversation.
And of course, that starts off with the location
in which we are sat.
So I'm sitting here in Pitt Rivers Museum,
just 30 yards away or so from this space
that we see in front of us.
It's an 1884, institutions built in 1884.
It holds 300,000 objects from around the world.
It's a museum, which is a Department
of the University of Oxford.
It is a location from which I'm speaking,
but obviously, it's also important for me to talk
about my positionality here,
as a cis male or white curator at an elite institution.
My source of the privilege includes aspects of my identity,
but also access to knowledge as well,
the sense that as a curator, I have access
to understanding objects that are so important
for so many communities around the world.
But I think these days, it's not enough
simply to state one's privilege,
because often that can serve simply to reinforce it.
It's not really enough anymore,
as we would have done maybe 30 years ago to be reflexive.
Because often the reflexive turn in anthropology
simply represented the same anthropologist,
the same figure of the anthropologist of the patriarchal
and the neocolonial, and arguably the cultural supremacists,
individual just a little bit more self aware,
a little bit more sensitive.
In fact, our role in talking about positionality
has to start with a sense of undermining that positionality,
undermining that privilege.
So to think about curation as an in part
the role of seeking to dismantle
what the book talks about as the white infrastructure
of these museums.
So in the course of this talk,
I want to convince you of a number of things.
But I guess a part of that is the role that anthropology
and art museums have played and continue to play
in the creation of if we use the language
of Franz Fanon, we would talk about the notion
of the cultural racism.
So the role of these institutions,
not maybe if, again, if we think about 30 years,
how the notion of a museum anthropology
might have talked about how an institution
like the Pitt Rivers, how any anthropology museum
serves to create the myth of the primitive,
the myth of alterity, that uses culture,
to divide certain cultures from others,
because 1884 here in Oxford was not only the year
in which the Pitt Rivers was founded,
and of course the year of the Berlin Congress,
where the European Nations decided
to begin to carve up Africa in between themselves
to begin the so called Scramble for Africa,
one of those euphemisms that serves to distract
from the sheer level of death and violence,
experienced by African societies.
And instead gives us an idea that this was simply
a bunch of Europeans on a Boy Scout day out,
elbowing each other out of the way.
But 1884 was not only the founding
of the Pitt Rivers Museum,
and the year of the Berlin Congress.
It was also the year of the founding
of the Ashmolean Museum here in Oxford.
So another Museum of Archaeology and Art,
but one of the West and not the rest.
This is a period of time in anthropology's history,
where in terms of issues of nature,
in terms of issues of the biological,
we're very familiar with the idea
that human remains, skulls were put on display
in our natural history museums,
to tell the racist lie,
that there are different species of human
there are different types of humanity.
But right next door to those institutions,
I mean, literally here in Oxford,
where the Pitt Rivers Museum was built in 1884,
as a physical extension to the Natural History Museum
that was founded in 1860.
Having taken apart those racist displays
in terms of stories of natural history,
the same stories told with art and cultural objects
in these institutions still remained.
We haven't started to dismantle the use of culture
to create the narrative of cultural whiteness.
So at the heart of anthropology,
and here, I think we could go to Sylvia Wynter for example,
with her accounts of how in the middle of the 19th century,
a certain form of liberal humanism,
that came out of a crisis for whiteness in Europe
that happens after abolition and emancipation.
Obviously, emancipation in the British colonies at 1838.
In the 1840s, 1850s, there is this form of humanism,
form of sort of universalism, that we've often seen,
anthropology as a positive side
the argument that we're all human.
An argument against the racists
in the natural history world, that's a celebration
in a space like this of diverse cultures.
But at the heart of the Pitt Rivers of course,
was also that sense that that universal model
and the notion of not the creation of alterity,
but the creation of something else,
the creation of the cultural whiteness,
the sense in which if you're on the right side
of the glass, in this institution walking around,
as a living and breathing human being,
you are being racialized culturally,
as a part of a more powerful culture
than those that are reduced simply to objects.
And in some cases, of course, to human remains as well.
So the role of a curator, of course in part
is to keep things the same.
But as the book says, there's been a sort of mission creep,
that we've seen in these spaces.
So of course, my job in part is to make sure
that the moths aren't eating away at the textiles,
and to make sure that the iron work
isn't rusting away.
But that mission creep has led some to think,
to misunderstand our role in museums
as seeking to stop the world from changing around us.
And of course, those changes have happened,
a great deal around Oxford Museums around all our museums.
And I want to tell you a little bit
about those in the time available to me,
but let me start with the theory
that is represented in the display of these objects
at the Pitt Rivers 'cause it goes to the heart
of what we're talking about.
So this is a theoretical Museum
in that it's organized by type, it's a typological museum.
Each of the cases shows a different type of object.
And originally, it started in 1850s,
as a personal collection of weapons.
Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers,
after whom the museum is named, was a soldier,
he was famously charged by the army to improve the rifle.
And that led to a theory especially through his experiences
in the conflict in a number of the battles
of the Crimean War,
were the difference between muskets and rifles,
which is a relatively minor difference
in terms of the military technology
that led to the great issues of whether empires
are going to fall or succeed.
That led to a wider theory that he worked out
and wrote about in the 1860s, and 1870s,
which he called "The Evolution of Culture."
So in 1874, the first year
in which he puts his objects on display,
this was in East London and what was then the museum
and Bethnal Green, he then put them on display
in South Kensington in what's now the V&A.
And then they came to Oxford in 1884,
but in 1874 in order to explain the rationale of his museum,
he presented this diagram,
which is a diagram of a series of objects,
all from a single culture from Aboriginal Australia,
all of which he acquired not in the field, but in London.
He's sort of purchasing these at auction houses
and from dealers.
Each of these objects in the middle as a hypothetical stick.
And this is a model of the evolution of the wooden stick,
if you like, all of the other objects
that are identifiable objects in the collections
of the Pitt Rivers, which he had no idea
of the relative date of these things,
but he arranged them according to what he called a series,
a hypothetical series, what if the boomerang
and the shield and the lumps of the club,
but what if they could be said in some way to evolve?
What if there was a constant sense of improving the form,
so that we could build a theory for material culture
that was about constant improvement
and human difference, of course being at the heart
of human difference then are different material histories
rather than different natural histories.
So in some ways, this is a fairly conventional
Victorian improvement narrative,
but there are two things that I think should detain us.
One is that this is founded on a notion of civilization,
and of superiority in relation to culture.
And another is that there's an inherent violence here
we're talking about weapons.
And of course, he then generalized
the improvement of weapons,
to the improvement of other forms of objects
and whole cultures of course as well.
That was really brought home to us in 2015.
With the Rhodes Must Fall Oxford Movement
when they tweeted that the Pitt Rivers Museum
is one of the most violent spaces in Oxford.
Now at that point in 2015,
I've been here about eight years.
If I think back to 2015,
we were feeling pretty good about ourselves
as an institution, we had restituted objects
to First Nations and to Native American groups.
We had returned ancestral human remains
to communities in the Pacific, to Australia to New Zealand.
We had hosted visits from the Haida Gwaii.
We'd held a potlatch on the Anthropology law.
We had commissioned the copies of ancestral objects
to be returned.
Suddenly, an African-led movement
said that the very presence of the museum aspects of it,
every time it opened its doors, it was enacting violence.
So that for me was a moment
in which I had to really rethink what the museum was,
and in many ways was the start of thinking for this book.
So think back to 2015 and what's this African led movements,
which of course is part of the Fallism movements,
that has a long history in Africa, in Algeria in the 1960s,
in other parts of Africa in the 70s and 80s,
the removal of colonial statues is not just an artifact
of the Confederacy in the American South,
it's something that's happened
across the continent of Africa as well.
And this moment at which the Fallism movements,
entered a new phase really was a generational shift.
So in 2015, students who were born
after the end of apartheid, which was ended in 1994,
who are 18 or 19 years old,
still experienced institutional racism,
still experienced everyday racism,
and anti-black violence at UCT,
the heart of that university,
on land supposedly handed over by him,
although his rights of ownership
are another set of questions, was an image of Cecil Rhodes,
the diamond miner, the colonialist,
the architect arguably of what turned
into the system of apartheid.
The mass murderer, the corporate colonizer,
whose South Africa company,
was part of this reemergence
of the corporate model of colonialism
that happened in the late 19th century.
So the removal of Cecil John Rhodes
from the heart of the campus
became not just a symbolism issue, but a recognition
that the symbolism of this image was designed
to do violence over time, to naturalize,
to normalize his worldview, for years to come.
So the use of arts and culture
to make a colonialist vision last was one thing,
then in the fall of 2015, because of the Rhodes Trust,
which is an immensely rich organization
that uses a bequest from him to sponsor students
from around the world.
South African colleagues and Zimbabwean colleagues
found themselves in Oxford
having been part of the Rhodes Must Fall Movement
in South Africa, and found another image of him
on the front of Oriel College,
which of course, to our great shame
continues to be there today.
And that student movement pointed out
the many, many different ways and sites
at which the vision of empire
whether it was the naming of the Codrington Library,
which has since been unnamed.
And also a college named after a Caribbean slaver
who gave some money to the college in the 18th century,
whether that was the physical architecture
of the old Indian Institutes,
whether that of course, was Rhodes House itself,
or whether it was the Pitt Rivers Museum.
These were institutions in which a worldview of colonialism
was continually in the present memorialized
and thereby celebrated and thereby naturalized
and thereby hurt was being caused in the present.
But at the heart of the campaigners'
vision was not the upper gallery of the Pitt Rivers,
where the weapons such as the ones I showed you
were being displayed.
It was the accusation that the display of looted art,
which had been legally purchased
by or actually given to the museum over the years
by numerous different donors.
That was where the violence was,
that was what was causing hurt
to African visitors if they came in,
to many visitors in our diverse community in Oxford
and to those many people who are part of the communities
that we claim that we serve,
who would never even walk into this building,
because they know what it is, they know what it represents.
So as someone who deeply believes in the fact
that we need something like a world culture Museum,
more now than ever in the present
to spaces to celebrate and to learn about,
and to explore different ways of thinking and seeing
and making and creating and imagining.
It was a sudden realization that that aspiration,
that mission for an institution like the Pitt Rivers
was being hamstrung and was being hypocritical,
made hypocritical by the display of looted African art,
when the demands were being returned.
When returns were being demanded.
So the case of the Benin 1897 expedition
is, I guess the most high profile,
the most iconic of those incidents
that happened in this key period of time
between the 1880s and the early 20th century.
This return of the corporate colonialism
that we saw with the Royal Africa Company
in the 17th century that kicked off
the transatlantic slave trade,
that we saw with the East India Company
with all the violence that happened across Asia, and so on.
That, of course, by this point was long defunct,
but further companies like Cecil Rhodes'
South Africa Company, like an equivalent,
actually to that body in East Africa,
and then in West Africa,
in the form of the Royal Niger Company,
this corporate colonialism.
So this isn't settler colonialism,
This is ultraviolent militarist extractivist colonialism,
came together with the model of the protectorate.
So the story of the Benin expedition,
is actually not about the colonies,
it's about these edges of empire,
the notions of the protectorate, the notions of the company.
So the military activity of the company
in the North of Nigeria,
or what soon would be the Northern Nigeria
the northern parts, the upper reaches
of the Niger River and then the military attack,
overseen by the protectorates in their areas
along the Niger coast, within which was the Benin kingdom,
which of course, had been working
with the British over centuries
with the Portuguese before that.
This was a vast, significant urban civilization,
urban society with an unbroken line of kings of Obas
that reaches back earlier than Elizabeth I.
Within which, as part of the religious life of the court,
as part of the royal ritual of the court,
there was this unique artistic tradition
in this attack, which was about a land grab,
to set up the rubber industry, and the palm oil industry.
So this is the banal reality
of this is, this is about rubber tires,
it's about margarine.
It's about lubricants for the factories in Manchester.
They are being, this attack is going on,
and the removal of the Oba, the dispossession
of many, many kings and chiefs,
of whom this was the most iconic, it was the largest scale.
In that process, more than 10,000 objects were looted.
Now, we're all aware,
of course of the more than 1200 plaques,
maybe the most iconic of those objects that were taken.
And so the relief plaques that tell the story
and this unique iconography of the history
of the royal courts, the achievements and interactions
of each of the Obas, and here on the left-hand side
is the famous display of some of those plaques
at the British Museum.
But on the right-hand side here is our case
that reminds us of how many other objects
more than 9000 other objects that were taken at that time
that includes the Benin heads, the Heads of Obas
that we see in the middle,
which have a little hole in the top
into which a individually carved ivory Tusk,
such as we see at the bottom and a detail on the right
with this very unique iconography.
This again tells the history of the achievements
of each Oba and their lives.
There are those that are the figures in bronze
such as the Hornblower, the top left
and the leopard in the top right.
There were the iconic hip ornament masks made of ivory,
such as we see on the left-hand side
that depict the Queen Mother Idia,
and a host of other items of coral work,
wood of ivory and so on.
Here's a rare photograph of one of those altars
because this attack was a hyper modern
attack with many of the technologies
that would find their way to the soil of Europe
in the 20th century, that were being experimented
with on African bodies in the 1890s.
1884, was the founding of the Pitt Rivers Museum,
it was the year in which they carved up Africa in Berlin,
it was also the year of the invention of the Maxim,
which is the machine gun, so important,
alongside rocket launchers, alongside the mountain guns,
alongside electric lighting, alongside barbed wire
that was being used in this attack
against the civilization of city,
who were armed with 17th century muskets,
and were armed with their cannon, and their bows and arrows.
Think back now to the diagram
that the General Augustus Rivers drew in 1874.
And think about what that history of the military technology
found itself doing in the desecration
of these religious sites,
in the destruction of the locals
in so many villages around such a massive area,
so many of the civilians that were killed.
So many the 3 million of the dumdum bullets,
which were filed down and shot into the bush
as they attacked the sheer loss and of course,
as the book says, The Hague Convention,
the first Hague Convention of 1899
arguably was a direct response to this atrocity.
Because it outlawed so many things that were done here,
including the desecration of religious sites,
including the willful killing randomly of civilians,
but also the looting of artworks as well,
because what I hope to convince you of,
as we move towards the end of this talk
is that looting was not a side effect of this attack.
It was a central military strategy.
This is about the taking of sovereignty.
It's about the destruction of traditional religion.
And it's about an enduring attempt
at a cultural dispossession.
So these are photographs from the Pitt Rivers collection,
the one that's most familiar to people
that know about this history the one on the right-hand side,
with the loot laid out in front of these figures,
less well known are the photographs
that show how they burned the place to the ground.
So the restitution movement, like the Fallism Movement
is a long standing African led movement.
The first returns were made to Oba Akenzua II
as early as 1938.
And here he is actually receiving the two coral work crowns
and the coral work robe in a return overseen
actually from London by the British.
With a 100 year anniversary in 1997,
a major campaign war, which was a Nigerian led campaign
with support here in the UK from some MPs
include Bernie Grant, who we see here,
there was what was seen as an unsuccessful campaign
to see the return of the Benin bronzes.
And in the wake of those arguments,
the statements of the universal value museums
that came out in 2002, was really an attempt
to put a sticking plaster onto the sets of questions.
As we approach the 125th anniversary next year,
we're in a very different time.
And the tone now is not so much anger,
as about diplomacy, about remembrance, about restitution
as a way of facing up to these histories that we Europeans
have shut our eyes to,
not only in terms of the military history,
but the role of our museums in creating myths
of white cultural supremacy.
So I don't have time now to tell you about all the words
I made up in the writing of this book.
But I did find so many of the basic vocabularies
available to me, from art history, from anthropology,
from archaeology, from architecture, wherever you look,
I found them lacking.
In order to give you one example,
the notion in the field of material culture studies,
there's no idea more familiar to us than the idea
of the life history of the object.
The social life of things, the cultural biography
of an item that moves from A to B
and it's constantly re-contextualized,
is constantly there's another meaning added to it.
That notion of the social life of things
felt completely inappropriate when the taking of an item
was about destruction and loss.
So there I used as Achille Mbembe's
critique of Foucault,
where he takes the bio-political and remodels it,
in the world we live in now as the necropolitical
where he says that okay Foucault
might have found it useful to talk about the way
in which life has a politics in institutions
like hospitals or prisons.
But in the modern world, we're at the boundaries
of Fortress Europe, so many displaced people from Africa
and the Middle East are losing their lives every year,
as they drown in the Mediterranean,
as we seek to hold the boundaries of Fortress Europe,
we need another category,
we need what he calls the necropolitical.
So inspired by Mbembe, the notion of the necrographic
is an attempt to talk about the biographies of objects
that are actually about loss and death.
So we can talk about some of those other ideas in the Q&A.
But just to finish, what does this mean for us?
What does all of this reckoning we're having
with the history of museums, with the role of museums
in the ongoing propaganda,
not just of notions of the primitive,
but notions of the civilized.
How do we, if we see these as institutions
of cultural whiteness, if we recognize
the work of abolition, the work of emancipation is not over.
Then what do we do?
Now my colleague, Nick Mirzoeff's book
was incredibly important for me in writing my book,
and you can download his texts,
which he calls the appearance of Black Lives Matter online,
you just Google it, and he wrote this in 2017
long before what some people
have called the BLM moments of 2020.
It's very important for us to see these movements
in the long term.
Restitution wasn't just thought up last year,
nor was anti-racism, right?
And in many ways, I mean, we can talk again in the Q&A,
maybe about the sense that the Civil Rights Movement
of the 1960s and 70s was largely a recognition
that racism isn't some human universal,
it's something that has a history.
And that history that came to view in the 60s, 70s
was the history of enslavement.
In the present moment, we're having another reckoning
with the history of racism.
We're reckoning again with the fact that racism
doesn't just come from nowhere,
that racism has a history.
But that history also involves
more recent forms of anti-black violence.
What Nick argues in his book, which is so simple,
but so devastating as an observation,
writing in the context of the racist murders of Eric Garner,
and the racist murder of Michael Brown,
writing about the timeframe from 2014,
up to the Trump inauguration of 2017.
He makes this observation he says,
"It was a shift in the visual regime of our society
that meant that suddenly dashcam footage
and cell phone footage, the technologies
of seeing made visible anti-black violence,
that has been happening for centuries,
and made those images shareable,
and helped to shape a politics of anti-racism in a new way."
What does that mean for us in our context of museums?
Well, I would add to Nick's important argument,
the words of the Minnesota Attorney General,
speaking in April this year, after the verdict
following the racist murder of George Floyd,
who said, "I would not call today's verdict justice,
because justice implies true restoration,
but it is accountability.
And accountability is the first step towards that justice."
What does that mean for museums?
Well, in the book, I argue that this work, as I say,
which I don't, in a European context,
where the de-colonial has a set of different nuances.
I noticed we didn't have a land acknowledgement
at the start of this talk.
We don't have land acknowledgments
when we talk about the Pitt Rivers either
because we're not on stolen lands,
but were full of stolen art and stolen culture.
So simply to list where are all these items?
This work of as I say, what I don't call de-colonial,
but anti-colonial, anti-racist work in the museum.
It starts with the very boring conventional work
of a curator to say, here's a list,
to name to say the names of the museums
that hold the Benin bronzes,
and to begin a conversation in each of them.
And that in the past year because of the renewed Nigerian
led campaigns for returns, has started to happen.
And we as our institutions, we are exactly as we saw
with the Washington principles in the 1990s,
in a very different historical circumstances
of coming to terms with the Nazi loot in our museums.
So in this moment, the owners of responsibility
for knowing what is stolen,
for being transparent about not just what's on display,
but what's in the storerooms lies not with the claimant,
but with the institution.
We want, I want to imagine a world
in which World Culture museums exist,
in which nothing is stolen.
Here in the UK, that conversation is being run.
That argument is being run even to the point
where when Aberdeen announced
that they will be returning their Benin bronze.
The Times editorial and The Times of London,
shifted their editorial line
and said that they are in support.
And that shows I think when the right wing are happy
to go along with this, as well, as arguments
that in the past have come from the left,
we can see that this is a wider cultural moment.
So I'm gonna stop there.
So quarter to, so we have time in the time available
to us actually to have conversations.
But let's just remember last week,
was a landmark week for this struggle.
My colleague in Berlin, who was speaking in Paris,
at exactly a week ago actually, Benedicte Savoy,
said at the Musee de Quay Branly at the ceremony
for the return of the Benin objects,
which were looted in a very similar way
from Abomey in 1892 by the French,
those objects are going back,
the ceremony was being held on the same day
as the ceremony at the University of Cambridge.
And the day after that Aberdeen returned theirs as well.
She said that this is a moment of comparable importance
for museums as the falling of the Berlin Wall
was for the projects of Europe.
And I think that isn't hyperbole.
That's how it feels.
We need to get this right.
We need to evolve our ethical practices in museums,
far more than we had.
We've always been doing that.
This is business as usual.
If our business as usual, is being open to change.
Okay, thank you very much.
Okay, so I think you're on mute.
Are you're on mute?
- I have a question, can you hear me?
- I think I'm still...
Great, thank you so much, Professor Hicks
for your thoughts and it looks like we have (inaudible).
- I'm so sorry, I can't hear you now I've lost you again.
- Is muted, okay.
- Sorry, if you do have questions
please put them in the chat,
but I will call on, is it David Nalin who has a question?
Please go ahead.
- Yes, can you hear me?
- Yes.
- Yes, my question was regarding
that late 19th century photograph of what appeared to me
to be some of the bronze or brass heads
and in the background, carved tusks.
But my question is it looked in the photograph,
as if some of the bronze or brass heads
were being used as the bases to support the tusks.
Is that true or is just an artifact
of the way the photograph was taken?
- Okay, thank you so much.
Yeah, I'm just trying to share my screen
so we can look at that image again.
So you're absolutely right.
Hopefully you can see that.
Yep, so that's the image you're talking about.
- Yeah.
- So that's an 1891 photograph
by one of the very few Europeans,
who was ever granted entry to the royal court.
These items were virtually unknown,
and that's why they were a part of their fame at the time,
but how they became iconic was this artistic tradition,
because it was so sacred, was entirely unknown.
So you're absolutely right,
so heads of the Obas have holes in the top,
which were designed to support their matching task.
And the iconography of the task tells the story
of the achievements of that Oba.
So in the front, you've got a line of bells.
And then you have a series of the bronze figures.
There's a ceremonial axe, that is laid up there as well,
and it's sitting on an altar in the...
So that's in one of the royal complexes.
So you have to imagine this vast sacred site
which in parts was not exactly a mausoleum,
but each of the palaces of each of the Obas
was abandoned after their reign,
but continued to be venerated
became a site for the veneration and to worship
that went with that Oba, with the Queen Mother's house,
and so forth.
So this is a landscape, which of course, I mean the British
described in some ways, as it was all falling apart,
things were covered in dust.
That was the point, it was a city filled with these sacred,
ongoing spaces, where the altars were incredibly important,
as ways to venerate the ongoing presence of the ancestors.
- Thank you.
- Okay, there's actually a few questions in the chat
that I'm going to ask in relationship to each other.
But there are a set of questions
that are asking about what happens to museums,
if they give all the objects back?
Will museums give the objects back
given that so much of their revenue
and their very means of existence
depends on the display of objects?
And what happens when museums only have objects
from local cultures?
Is there a possibility for what the questioner
is describing as a multicultural, worldly museum?
So I think that's a related set of questions
about will they give them back?
And then what happens to the museum
once the objects are given back?
- Sure absolutely thank you.
So yeah, I mean first off, let's remember,
restitution is already a normal part of our job, right?
When it comes to restitution in the context
of Holocaust spoliation.
When it comes to the question of the return
of ancestral human remains, this is just what we do.
I'm old enough to remember,
in the 90s, in the 80s, the same arguments,
the same questions, the same perfectly reasonable
questions were put where people said,
But hang on, there's the slippery slope arguments.
The where will it endism comes into dialogue
with the What aboutism, right?
So you talk about returning the Benin bronzes,
and then people say, well, what about the Parthenon Marbles?
And what about the statues to Easter Island?
And before you know it, you're talking
about having to FedEx the Lewis Chessmen from London
to the Hebrides, right.
These are we know, that restitution takes time
that the ethics of care mean that it is a process
that we accept is on a case by case basis.
But that doesn't--how long can we retain the idea
that we will return items to indigenous communities
but somehow the continent of Africa.
No that's out of the question.
I mean, what are we doing?
Where does that come from?
Part of where it comes from of course
is we're talking about different forms of colonialism.
We're talking if you read
the Settler Colonialist Literature,
and in the book I talk about Patrick Wolf
in his fantastic final book very sadly before he died,
which is called Traces of History,
where he talks about not just how the Settler
Colonial Literature shows us that settler colonization
is only one form of colonialism,
that's extractive militarist colonialism as well,
that takes a very, very different form.
But as he argues different forms of ideologies of race,
went hand in hand with notions of land and notions
of the body, notions of indigeneity versus blackness,
and he talks about that and only when we read
it from a museum perspective,
we realize that some of these complexities
relates to what can and can't be said,
what can and can't be given back,
in our museum contexts.
Why is it that we have not had a conversation
about anti-black violence in anthroology museums,
when crucially, only at the beginning
of what does it look like to address violence
against indigenous people,
and the way in which that and the ongoing debts and so on.
These museums, these are not questions that are irrelevant.
This where were being co-opted, this is part of our history.
And I think we're simply at the point
where I mean, I recently wrote an amicus
for the case of the important case,
which everyone in this room should be keeping up with,
because it's so important the case brought
by Tamara Lanier against Harvard's,
in the case of the daguerreotypes of her ancestors.
These are daguerreotypes that were taken of
to enslave people.
And the question is about what is the property
right that Harvard has in the photographs,
we're seeing conversations at Penn,
around the Morton Collection, the historic collection
of human remains, which include enslaved African Americans.
Yeah, that's a conversation happening at Harvard
at the Peabody with 20,000 individuals
represented in their human remains collections.
But of course, most shockingly, we saw with Penn,
the use, not of historic human remains,
but of the remains of two children who were killed
in the MOVE bombing in the 1980s.
being used in a MOOC, in a MOOC which was run by Princeton
that just shows the violence in a very real way.
The disciplinary violence of anthropology
of the museum is not over.
I mean, no one these are institutional, no one,
this is institutional violence, institutional racism.
And therefore we just have no choice,
because our communities, our audiences,
the public, we claim we serve are demanding increasingly,
like the shift that's happened in the fashion industry.
People who are ethical consumers
want not just to know where
what they're consuming came from,
but what conditions it was produced under.
People asked me the same about world culture.
So this isn't about emptying out the museum.
It's not about sending everything back.
It's about giving back when asked, as we already do,
in so many other contexts.
Why is it we're so loath to countenance this?
I don't know, but we need to ask ourselves that question.
What's going on?
What is it this idea of our fragility
that we're gonna lose something?
Of course will be someone else's game.
Is it financial?
Is it about identity?
Is it about violence?
What going on?
We're just the beginning of those conversations,
though, I think now.
So I hope that answers the question.
- I think so, yeah.
Sorry, there's a few more questions in the chat.
And one of the original questioners
just wanted to clarify her position a bit
because I think she's asking if you could talk
about the ideal situation for repatriation museums.
I think you've addressed that somewhat in terms
of this ethical practice that you're describing.
But maybe we can return to that.
And right, so the ideal situation for repatriation
and then to a question asked by Isabel,
about can you elaborate more on your idea of a world Museum?
What might a world museum reconfigured in this way
then look like?
Would it be about only having items that were donated?
Even if you can't do the necrography?
I'm elaborating on this, right?
- On that point I mean, the Savoy-Sarr report
is the ground zero for this, right?
So if anyone hasn't read the Savoy-Sarr report,
it's online, it's in French,
there's a dodgy English translation.
If you get that.
So I suggest you read the French
but if you can, the fairly flaky English version
will do fine.
So I was at the Musee du Quay Branly when that came out,
and some of the nameless curators
at the Branly, the great shock in the tea rooms,
right the great horror among my colleagues
was that Benedicte and Felwine
introduced the notion of consent.
And my colleagues were saying,
What is this language of sexual violence
doing in our museum?
This is over the top, this isn't #MeToo, this is museum restitution,
what are they talking about?
But of course, consent is at the heart of this
and consent for an item to be on display.
If someone is saying that this is their ancestor.
This is--Biological anthropologists used to say
some continue to say, human remains shouldn't be returned,
because they might have scientific information in them.
That's ship--one hopes--has sailed.
We have to keep it sailing, right?
- Exactly.
- Obviously, the same goes for culture.
So consent is at the heart of it,
we needn't fetishize the physical movement, from A to B,
where learning that restitution takes a whole host of forms.
Some of those forms is simply signing over ownership,
signing over to say, okay, it's now on loan to us.
And the consent, the agency of its owners
will be recognized by the fact if they want it back,
they can have it back.
But for now, it's actually doing quite a good job
in all sorts of very interesting questions
about intellectual property.
That money I mean, we need to, so the Nigerian debate
has been very, un-embarrassed about saying
that Western museums are profiting
from these items being on display,
So of course, there's a financial implication here
as well over copyright, over the fungibility.
I mean, if something is inalienable.
If something is ancestral, then surely it can't be fungible.
I mean, the whole issue is, I mean
in the museum's we're talking about NFTs all the time
at the moment.
Well, in some ways mean the original NFTs,
are ancestral artworks, that of course,
because the same as human beings
can't be bought and sold anymore.
Absolutely, rightly, these distinctions
that we make in the West often, between artworks,
and human beings are not made by all societies
and cultures in the world.
We've learned that from conversations
with indigenous communities.
We haven't started to think about what that means
for sovereignty for traditional religion, for culture,
in African contexts, where the presence of these items,
the availability of these items,
inspires fashion, it inspires tech,
it inspires movie making, it inspires all all aspects
of the economy as well as the tourist economy, of course.
So yeah, in terms of practicalities of return,
it's a case by case basis.
There is the legacy restoration trust
that's been set up now.
The returns are happening.
I mean, Cambridge University has given back.
Aberdeen University has given back
even the Museum educate Bromley has made physical returns
to Madagascar, to Senegal, to Benin.
And there were more on the way to the Ivory Coast.
We're not gonna solve this overnight.
It's just what we're gonna now resolve
is the idea that we're not gonna say under no circumstances
will we ever return stolen goods to African claimants.
That's just racism.
I'm sorry, just to mention,
I would encourage anyone that reads German
to wait for the English translation,
which I think is in the works.
But Benedicte, has written this incredibly important book
called Africa's Kunstraub, Africa's
Struggle for Her Art,
which is really the companion volume to mine,
where she tells the story of how from 1960 onwards,
actually European museums created in conversation
with the politicians and the administrators,
and the civil servants, a whole set of laws,
and a whole set of myths that held back restitution,
because after a year of Africa in 1960,
where 19 African nations got independence,
they knew, of course, these are items of sovereignty,
there are going to be demands for returns.
So the creation of the British Museum Act of 1963
was not a random moment, there were returns in the 30s,
the 40s, the 50s.
In the 60s suddenly, restitution is turned
into something incredibly important
for the former colonial powers.
Now, what does that look like in a North American context?
Well this is not purely about the nation state,
the reckoning with actually the British colonial past
is being led from Berlin, where they've said,
every one of the Berlin bronzes in the federal museums
across Germany, will be returned.
So for American institutions,
your position is rather like the Germans.
Some in this room may say, well, we bought it fair
and square at auction.
This isn't our war, we are conserving it, we're saving it.
What you got to realize, though,
is that the Anthropology Museum, the World Culture Museum,
was co-opted for a short period of time
between the 1880s and 1920s.
And turned into a site of propaganda
to say, essentially, and this is in the book,
what I call the notion of the chronopolitical,
you destroy the city, the sacred landscape,
you take the arts, and within weeks,
it's being displayed in Berlin, in London, in Oxford.
In London, it's displayed in the Assyrian Saloon
of the British Museum,
it's next to the Bronze Age.
So the Middle East objects are next to ancient Egypt,
the message is clear, we've blown you back
into the Bronze Age, you are archaeological,
we've killed your culture, you're dead.
And we were using the discipline of archaeology.
As a form of things, we're still doing that,
with these items, if they are on display,
no matter what their life histories are, how they got there.
Remember, the art market is just another form
of the corporate powers that we're attacking.
This is partly capitalism roaring in tooth and nail
that is happening there.
And so of course, the art market
is hardly a neutral player; the turning of sacred art
into a commodity that can be bought and sold
or displayed is part of that violence.
- Yeah, I wanna actually really thank you
for raising those issues.
That's a lot of what my work in my classes here
have focused on is the way that these objects are not,
like the conception of the object across cultures
is not a universal.
And so to say that you can put a value
on an ancestor and then create a set of equivalences.
I mean, this makes it much more complicated.
It's not to say that, oh, well, we don't have to,
we'll give you the object back to you, have your ancestor,
and then we don't have to do anything further.
But it also isn't just as simple as a payment.
And I think that I really appreciate the sensitivity
to which you've addressed that issue.
The other thing I'll just point out for those
here the Fleming Museum's African,
it was the gallery of African in ancient Egyptian art,
did the kind of chronopolitical work
that you're describing, where most of the objects
on the African side of the gallery were from 20th century
maybe late 19th century.
And then there was an ancient Egypt on the other side.
And so it created, it elided senses of time
that made all of African cultural production
appear as though it was in the past.
That is part of why that gallery is no longer
in existence in the Fleming Museum.
And that's part of what we're trying to work
through with this set of events here.
So just to turn to a couple more questions,
I apologize to the audience members whose questions
I've kind of mushing together for the sake of time,
and to allow our speaker time to answer them fully.
But there's a couple questions about for you as a curator,
how has it felt to watch this process happen?
And to then maybe identify with this history of violence.
I think perhaps maybe asking on a personal level
as well as an institutional level.
And then what can people who aren't curators
or anthropologists or even academics do?
- Sure, okay thank you, I think if I take
the second one first, that is absolutely.
This is being what's happening now,
is that communities, audiences, stakeholders,
especially in the university museum sector so far,
but I think it's overdue in the city museums.
And why is this conversation not happening in Detroit,
for example, of all places, where the Art Museum
does have significant African collection?
It is I know, there is some colleagues here from RISD,
where, of course RISD in Providence, Rhode Island
has been an incredibly important location
for these conversations, but over the other side of town,
to Brown they're not open to that half of them
they're not open to this.
Five Ivy League schools hold items
from the Benin expedition.
So where are we?
Where are these conversations happening?
They're happening in I think, the university space
because it is a space that requires free speech,
that requires academic freedom,
it allows us to think about to have these conversations
and student activism as I said, in my talk,
was incredibly important for me to learn,
actually for someone to read this museum completely
differently from someone with my lived experience of it.
And so maybe I could use that to highlight
then into the first part of the question,
which was about me personally.
Yeah, I mean, the next book I'm working on that will be out,
probably early 2023, is a biography of Augustus Pitt Rivers,
but written, as if tearing down a statue.
I'm interested in the notion of the naming
of the Pitt Rivers after a dead white man
and the risk of me, not so many dead men shoes away
from him, as in my role as a curator.
If this is about institutional violence,
if this is about institutional racism,
then my identity as an Oxford Don, as a curator,
of course, inherits that.
So the framing of what I'm writing at the moment
when something like this, for the world of nature,
the environmentalists rightly tell us
that we have to learn how to be a good ancestor.
We have to leave a world behind us
that isn't full of toxic waste.
It isn't full of what Rob Nixon calls slow violence,
environmental change, rising sea levels
that go up inch by inch,
but it is where you have to watch it
for a long time to see it.
But it is violence, operating it that way.
We have to be a good ancestor.
What does that mean, for those of us
in the world of culture, who operate
in the world of culture, not nature.
Well, it's sort of the other side of the coin.
We have to learn to be a good descendant.
How do I inherit from Pitt Rivers,
everything that's good about the World Culture Museum,
about the discipline of anthropology,
about the discipline of archeology,
this founding father not just an anthropology museums,
but an anthropology as a discipline
at a time at which at Berkeley
there unnaming Kroeber Hall because of what he did to Ishi
the Native American man who was kept as an exhibit.
Kroeber was left off the hook
for quite a long time because the fact
that Ursula LeGuin was his daughter,
made him seem like, well, he must be okay, right.
But the unnaming of Kroeber Hall which of course also houses
the Phoebe Hearst museum.
And so the anthropology Museum of the UC Berkeley,
that's an incredibly important moment, I think.
So it's toxic masculinity as well as toxic colonialism
that we risk here.
And I'm very interested, I haven't got all the answers.
My work as I said, at the start
is I want to find something else,
something other than the notion of the reflexive.
I don't just wanna be self-aware,
I want to find a way, in a meaningful way,
of undermining myself.
So that I'm not just another person repeating the violences
that we inherit.
As an archaeologist, if I dig, if I write on an object
in the museum, I'm physically with my body
retracing things learned
from not that far back from the soldier anthropologists
that founded this museum.
Anthropology and archaeology are the disciplines
that if someone wants to describe them as experiments
we undertake with our bodies.
We take our bodies somewhere else,
we physically immerse ourselves in a hole in the ground,
we dig it, we retrace the processes of making
or digging that happened in the past
and the pit being filled up, we take it apart,
we reenact the past.
There's a corporeal nature to ourselves.
As anthropologists, there's a corporeal nature
to the visiting of a museum.
There's a sense of the body,
museums are full of bodies, not only the dead bodies
that we don't wanna talk about, of ancestral human remains,
but even the ancestral presences that are there.
Even the sculptures in the art museums,
which are there to create have been used
to create a model of cultural whiteness.
So for me, that's where, that's all a bit vague, isn't it?
For me, writing, thinking, talking
about how to evolve the curatorial practice.
There were some quite rightly
there was a fantastic piece 18 months ago
now by Ryan Jobson about whether we just need
to burn anthropology to the ground, right.
And I think that the predicament anthropology
finds itself in is the same predicament
that the anthropology museum finds itself in?
And of course, he's partly right.
Maybe we do in a time--and remember,
Jobson's the power of Jobson's piece
was it was being written while California was on fire.
So the environmental effects which are intimately bound up
with the extractivist histories
that are at the foundation of our museums.
We need to make sure we're not continuing to pollute,
to hurt in the way that we were in part
built in order to do.
- Yeah, students on campus will know
that in the past couple of weeks,
as I've been talking about this event,
I've often resorted to that,
maybe we just need to burn it down
or rip it apart brick by brick,
because I think that perhaps it's worth getting
to that point where you're really starting
to think is the foundation worth saving, ultimately?
But I also really appreciate your thoughts
here about this effacement, it's not even an effacement
because you're not erasing yourself,
you're undermining yourself.
I really liked that too.
Like that seems really productive to think with.
I'm gonna read this question back to curatorship again.
But it says, is the purpose of a museum ultimately
to hold the physical object or the story we have constructed
around that object?
By returning objects, can we retain
and hold broader narratives, not just about those objects,
but about ownership itself?
Can the vacuum that might be physically created
be filled with representations that allow
for a deeper interrogation of our past
in the spaces that those objects have filled?
And I like this question, 'cause it does allow us
to kind of reimagine, like a possible museum
that is focused on restitution and justice,
but I wonder what you think about those questions
and how you might respond or imagine the future museum?
- Sure, absolutely, so yeah, it's a really good question.
I just wrote a piece for The Sunday Telegraph last weekend,
which is a right wing newspaper in the UK
where it's always an interesting process
because the editor they really wanted a pro-restitution
piece, simply to mix it up a bit and realize
their readership are interested,
but they were really pressing me
which is really helpful reminds us of the positives.
So let's go read it the point I made
was the returning is always,
you're always adding something to the museum
you're adding to your civic role,
you're adding to your international role as an institution.
The notion of gaps, yeah, we need to productively
allow some spaces for memory
to impart the role of the museum is as a site of conscience
society, these are battlefields these are full,
literally of the dead,
who were the victims of empire and racism.
And we need to respect that in some ways,
as part if it's not the whole history
of the institution, it's part of it though,
we need to recognize the notion of the museum
as a crime scene, and to be appropriately
think about the ethics of that.
Let's remember that.
So this is a slight difference with some North American
more art museums.
But the larger institutional anthropology museums,
the vast majority of items are not on display,
this is about what's in the storage,
we're not short of objects,
quite the opposite talk to any museum curator
in those sorts of institutions,
and the whole problem is storage.
We've got too much,
so the idea that we're gonna run out of culture.
And of course, many museums,
certainly this museum basically stopped acquiring items
largely until 1939 really, or 1960.
We're not acquiring in the way we used to,
but of course, we could be part of the repayment
part of the restitution is to commission
contemporary arts, from Africa, from the global south
from indigenous communities.
Here in the UK, we have an artist trustee
of the British Museum, who chose to use his Reith Lecture,
BBC lecture in 2014,
to make the argument that Aboriginal artists
cannot be contemporary artists, because what?
Because they're in the past, right?
I mean, it's the same old argument.
So we have to see our museums,
we have to break down the boundaries
between Western art and non-western art.
The west and the rest is enacted far too much
in these institutions.
So contemporary art commissioning is part of it,
without art-washing, without--the risk is.
And of course, some will say don't return objects,
because we need them to tell our history
of violence even better.
Let's remember how wrong the "retain
and explain" ideology is.
Because these objects were always acquired
to tell the story of victory.
Why does the story of the defeat of the Oba
have to be told in 160 museums around the world?
What's that about? What's going on to be a universal Museum?
You've got to have a Benin bronze and a very, really honest,
super honest account of all the blood
and violence and horror. Why?
What's that about?
It began right from the start.
It was about telling the story of the defeat of the Oba.
Even if we do it supposedly, honestly,
we're just re-inscribing that violence, that's the risk.
So yeah, I mean, we've never needed museums,
World Culture Museums more than we do in the present.
We just need to allow them to evolve.
- Yeah, thanks, that's great.
I imagine a lot of students
are gonna be logging out soon because of the class shift.
And I do wanna just say before
there's one more question that has been recorded.
And we do hope to be able to post a video
of the recording and the question and answer portion.
Soon, we need to make sure we have captions done
for the video before we can share it.
But I just wanted to let everybody know that
this will be available and we'll let you know
how it will be made available to the public.
So the last question--it's interesting,
it's a very kind of historical technical question, I think.
But it's asking about the way that, so let me read it.
It says you stated these lootings were not a side effect
of British attacks, but a central military strategy.
Can you elaborate, were they really truly
after the artifacts or were they interested
in the production of power?
And I think just maybe some clarity about the way
you see those two things as interrelated would be useful.
- Sure, absolutely, so losing becomes something
very, very distinctive in this timeframe
we're talking about.
There are, obviously, objects have always moved from A to B,
the trophies of war have always been taken.
But there's something about these attacks upon Africa
and arguably other parts of the world
that happened in what the book calls World War Zero,
which is this pre-run to the great horrors
of the 20th century,
the relation and of course, the looting reemerges
on the soils of Europe, in the 1920s and 30s, as well.
This connection between cultural dispossession
and cultural supremacy has a very tight timeframe.
So looting isn't happening in the colonies,
it's happening on the edges of empire, in the protectorates.
And the protectorate is what historians call
variously spaces of indirect role,
spaces of informal empire,
they're even some to--Cain and Hopkins,
famously called it the history of a gentlemanly capitalism.
These are the edges of empire
where you haven't got a full crown colony setup.
You're in your--I mean, it's a protectorate,
you're being protected, like the mafia protects you, right?
I mean, this is protection of that kind,
and something elides there between protection of that kind,
and protecting the artworks in museums.
The museums are part of the infrastructure
of the protectorate.
So the taking because these are objects of culture
of sovereignty of belief,
and that's what you're trying to take,
then of course, I mean it's like a serial killer
that takes items from their victim.
And I think that analogy is one we always ought
to hold in our hands when people start arguing
against returns, or say, oh, we should make a 3D copy
before we send it back or whatever.
This is imagine if the survivors or the victims of violence
of that kind, after the serial killer dies,
and the family say, well what's gonna happen to these items?
Are you gonna return them
to the families or to the survivors?
Well, yeah, I mean, maybe
but there'll be a long term process,
we need to just take a copy of these things
before we do. You know, that's all just horrific,
and that's what we're dealing with here.
We're dealing with ongoing acts of violence
and recognizing we have to stop the pretense
which was at the heart of why arts and culture
was put to work in this way in the first place.
It's incredibly hard for us to think of a museum
as anything other than something that needs to be supported.
But of course, we go back Fanon,
we go back, actually to Sylvia Wynter with her account
of the emergence of liberal humanism,
as a form of violence in the middle of the 19th century,
universalism, saying everyone's human,
but it's kind of actually just certain male white
European form of humanity.
That really means you can be human,
everyone's human, as long as you're all human,
like we are human.
That puts at the heart of it, the work of culture,
in terms of cultural supremacy.
That's what we're reckoning with,
and this is just the beginning I think of a major reckoning.
It's an ongoing part of the Civil Rights Movement.
It's a historical realization,
when the Belgians have set up a national commission
to look at the Belgian Congo.
When Macron is doing what he's doing in France,
the Swiss are looking at their imperial histories,
obviously in Germany, experts
on post memory because they've had to deal
both with the inheritances from communism
and also from fascism.
This is happening, people are seeing these histories
that we pretended didn't happen.
We're seeing these violences in new ways.
How that plays out in North America
this is crucial, we need all the thinking in this room
to help work out what this means for the US and Canada
because we need to join the dots
between anti-black violence in the present
between the carceral space I mean,
there's so much about all this.
There's an amazing writing on prisons at the moment.
Yeah, Nicole Fleetwood's important book,
her notion of the carceral aesthetics'
that can emerge in prisons.
Let's link the history of the prison
with the history of the museum.
Let's see what's going on in those ways.
So it's an incredibly exciting time to reimagine
and reunderstand how important museums were
to some of these histories
and how they can be part of the solution in the present.
- Yeah, and I just would add to that,
that many of the objects in the Flemming Museum's
collection of African art were actually donated
by a university alumni who had either 11 missionaries
on the continent, or members of the Peace Corps,
which are again, it's not quite maybe this spectacular,
visceral form of violence of the Benin expedition,
but it's certainly contributing
to this ongoing reproduction of violence
that you're describing.
And so what we can do are in necrographies
for these flashpoint objects.
We certainly wanna think about all of the other objects
that have been part of the museum and as a result of that.
- Yes, absolutely, so I mean, just to finish,
make sure we make this point.
This isn't good.
This isn't just about returning the Benin bronzes
and then this is over, right?
This is about understanding those many other conflicts,
we have a project called the Restitution of Knowledge,
it's looking at the many other expeditions
that were undertaken across the continent of Africa.
These are histories that haven't been written,
we can document minute by minute,
the First World War, the Second World War.
We don't know about these incredibly important
massive operations across the continent of Africa.
So we need to understand that.
But we also I think at the heart of the book
is the question how near are you right this moment,
from the looted African objects,
and you're always nearer than you think,
wherever in the world you are.
There's an updated list of the institutions
that hold these items in the paperback edition,
which is also online as an ebook,
and I put the link in the chat earlier.
But adding to those lists with other African histories
adding to and of course, what I'm hoping
is, in the third edition of the book,
we're gonna start, that number is gonna go down,
the overall number of objects
that are held in the new museum in Edo state
will be going up.
So let's hope that we see,
and that we have that conversation that's happening,
hopefully, at your institution,
you'll be able to join what's increasingly
just the most important movement for museums,
that is the most optimistic moment for museums
in my lifetime, I think.
'Cause we can actually, we're able to make this happen
if we want to, if we can change in these ways.
- Yeah, great thank you so much.
We are officially out of time now.
But I'm really grateful to you for your lecture
for your book, especially.
it's made me rethink so many of the things
that I've taught in my classes
about African art in the western museums.
And I wanna thank everyone who attended
for their excellent questions.
And hopefully, if you are here in Vermont,
you'll attend some of our in-person events.
And then tomorrow morning
will be Peju Layiwola's keynote lecture,
where she's going to pick up some of these ideas
but take them in a very different
kind of direction towards restitution.
So thank you so much, Dan.
I really appreciate you joining us.
- (inaudible) Say hi, to Peju for me as well.
- I will, okay.
- Bye.