Egypt’s dispersed heritage: Multi-directional storytelling through comic art

Heba Abd El-Gawad,Alice Stevenson

doi:10.1177/1469605321992929

Abstract

This paper responds to a need to address the colonial history of collections of Egyptian archaeology and to find new ways in which Egyptian audiences can assume greater agency in such a process. The ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage’ project presents a model of engagement whereby foreign museum collections become the inspiration for Egyptians to express their own feelings about the removal of their heritage abroad using idioms and traditional storytelling of cultural relevance to them. A series of online comics confronting contentious heritage issues, including the display of mummified human remains, eugenics, looting and destruction, is discussed. It is argued that this approach is not only more relatable for Egyptian communities, but moreover provides space for the development of grass-roots critique of heritage practices, both in the UK and in Egypt. Museums have a responsibility to take on board these critiques, curating not just objects but relationships forged amongst them in historical and contemporary society.

Highlights

The extraordinary scale of the colonial extraction of Egyptian artefacts to museums worldwide has recently been documented (Stevenson, 2019)
Despite the rising crescendo of opinion pieces, social media threads and academic conferences calling for decolonization of museums, inclusion of communities from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has been relatively scant, with Egypt in particular occupying a blind spot
In this paper we identify the need to address the history of dispersal within both Egypt and the UK, before outlining the approach we developed to act on that need, which draws on Egypt’s rich tradition of storytelling, satire and caricature

Summary

Introduction

The extraordinary scale of the colonial extraction of Egyptian artefacts to museums worldwide has recently been documented (Stevenson, 2019). The result has often been passive and descriptive approaches to archaeology and heritage, lacking opportunities for direct critical engagement from a local perspective This is not to claim that our project operates outside of such frameworks, since it is sponsored by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Council (AHRC), funding that is contingent upon the expectation that particular forms of impact will be delivered. There are greater opportunities to potentially destabilize categories and labels using UK-based resources than in Egypt To this end the EDH project partnered with the Egypt Exploration Society (EES) and five UK museums that hold substantial Egyptian collections from British fieldwork – National Museums Scotland, UCL Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, Manchester Museum, Liverpool World Museum and the Horniman Museum and Gardens.

September 2020 EES

Findings

Concluding thoughts