Whose cosmopolitanism is it, anyway?: Western museums, looted artifacts, postcolonial identities and restitution in Africa

The Financial Commitment of Repository Countries: A Key Element of Reparation

As a relatively new democracy, South Africa is seeking ways to protect and promote its African heritage. There is increased interest in the repatriation of South African cultural artefacts, mostly taken during the colonial era, currently held in western museums. Internationally, calls for the repatriation of cultural artefacts from western museum collections back to their originating countries in the context of decolonisation and the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement are increasing. As a means of advancing the debate and feeding into draft South African policy, this paper examines the arguments for and against the repatriation of African cultural artefacts from the point of view of an African country. A values-based approach is used to analyse the debate. The ways in which South Africa has made progress towards defining, and protecting, artefacts ‘of national importance’, and some of the repatriation experiences of other sub-Saharan countries are discussed.

The Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., organized symposium, Asia in Museums, as part of celebrations of the museum's seventy-fifth anniversary in 1998. I was asked to talk aboutJapan in museums. When I was given my topic, in American Museums, I immediately responded with question: Which Japan? The theme and my response gave me an opportunity to reflect on collections in this country and their functions. My investigation took me down both familiar and unfamiliar paths of thinking about the reception and presentation of in foreign culture. This paper relays the gist of my presentation, and my continued theoretical musing about Japanese art as notion rather than about the objects themselves that make up this category. The general theme of the symposium was the examination of how Asian cultures are perceived and presented in museums. Our intention was to review broadly how Western museums, through their collections and displays, have told stories about cultures. To the extent that they narrate other societies by means of selected objects drawn from various cultures, museums today share their ancestry with nineteenth-century ethnographic museums. In recent catalogue published for Images of Other Cultures, an exhibition of ethnology held in Osaka showcasing artifacts from the British Museum, various scholars observed how and what artifacts from Japan were displayed in the British Museum during the early decades of the twentieth century.l According to one report, Japan was shown in two different types of space in the museum. On the one hand, Japan was part of the ethnographic gallery devoted to artifacts from Africa and Oceania. Here objects were presented alongside those of the Ainu, an indigenous community in northern Japan of distinctly non-Japanese linguistic and ethnic identity. On the other hand, paintings were represented in the prints and drawing gallery, and other objects, such as porcelain, metal work, lacquer ware, and netsuke,2 were displayed as works of art in the Oriental or T6yo [sic] gallery. The report also notes that a great deal was already known about the periods and styles of painting and substantial number of paintings were exhibited according to these categories in the prints and drawings gallery.3 In the Osaka exhibition catalogue,John Mack of the British Museum addressed in his essay two major issues concerning ethnological collections and ethnographic exhibitions. One issue has to do with the question, What are ethnographic collections and exhibitions about? He examined the role

The Long View: Leadership at a Critical Juncture for “African Art” in America

IN THE LATE 1830S, TRAVELERS FAMILIAR WITH NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICAN museums found little in the display rooms of Cincinnati's Western Museum to differentiate it from many other similar museums. Posted among its glass cases of insects, rocks, bones, coins, and Indian artifacts stood life-size wax figures of Washington, Jackson, Charlotte Corday, and Napoleon Bonaparte; oil paintings darkened by lamp soot hung near the ceiling. Dotted about the displays were curiosities of doubtful provenance: the head of an Egyptian mummy, a sepulchral lamp from Pompeii, and such shams as a mermaid constructed by stitching the head and hands of a monkey to the body of a fish. Ranged along one wall were rows of glass jars holding hideously deformed animals, some suspiciously waxy, suspended in cloudy liquids. In the Museum's attic, however, was the eccentric attraction that had brought the Western Museum popular fame-The Infernal Regions, a mechanized and electrified version of Dante's Hell that entertained a paying audience every night but Sunday with a shrieking assemblage of imps, demons, and animal and human grotesques alternately freezing and burning. The show was enclosed by an iron rail electrified by means of a hand generator, and it delivered smart shocks to visitors attempting to touch the crawling and writhing figures within. Knowledgeable travelers and observers tended to find the Museum's displays, mean as they are, also miserably deficient in order and arrangement, and The Infernal Regions above to be a piece of charlatanism . . ., gross and impious humbug.' In fact, by the 1830s little but its appellation remained to suggest that the Western Museum's original intent had differed widely from the dusty incoherence travelers saw. The Museum's founders had, two decades earlier, created a regional museum to serve as both a compendium and an illumination of

This book examines the role of music in British-South Asian postcolonial literature, asking how music relates to the construction of postcolonial identity. It focuses on novels that explore the postcolonial condition in India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom: Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, Amit Chaudhuri's Afternoon Raag, Suhayl Saadi's Psychoraag, Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia and The Black Album, and Salman Rushdie's The Ground Beneath Her Feet, with reference to other texts, such as E.M. Forster's A Passage to India and Vikram Seth's An Equal Music. The analyzed novels feature different kinds of music, from Indian classical to non-classical traditions, and from Western classical music to pop music and rock 'n' roll. Music is depicted as a cultural artifact and as a purely aestheticized art form at the same time. As a cultural artifact, music derives meaning from its socio-cultural context of production and serves as a frame of reference to explore postcolonial identities on their own terms. As purely aesthetic art, music escapes its contextual meaning. The transgressive qualities of music render it capable of expressing identities irrespective of origin and politics of location. Thereby, music in the novels marks a very productive space to imagine the postcolonial nation and to rewrite imperial history, to express the cultural hybridity of characters in-between nations, to analyze the state of the nation and life in the multicultural diaspora of contemporary Great Britain, and to explore the ramifications of cultural globalization versus cultural imperialism. It will be a useful research and teaching tool for those interested in postcolonial literature, music studies, cultural studies, contemporary literature and South-Asian literature.

In this paper, I explore linkages and dis-linkages between academia, Cultural Resource Management, and Tribal Historic Preservation programs. The vast majority of archaeological field work in North America involves recording and interpreting Indigenous material culture, ceremonial sites, sacred sites, community sites, and burial sites. Over the last century, millions of American Indian, First Nations, and Hawaiian cultural artifacts, and thousands of human remains were collected by Western academies, museums, and governmental institutions. These human remains and cultural artifacts have been used to interpret and define Indigenous histories and peoples, most often without any input from Indigenous peoples or communities. There are a few exceptions to this notably in the Southwest; however, the vast majority of American archaeologists have not traditionally consulted Indigenous communities regarding their ancestral sites. Indigenous people who were included in discussions or archaeological field work were treated as native informants: the power to define and interpret the past was not shared. Tribal Historic Preservation offices and archaeological projects have risen to challenge non-Native control of heritage and interpretations of the past and present. Although archaeology has grown and changed since the implementation of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, core issues negatively affecting the field remain undiscussed. In this article, I discuss problematic issues within Cultural Resource Management field work. I argue that some of these issues require changes to current academic programs in American anthropology.

MUSEUMS AND AMERICAN INDIAN: LEGAL ASPECTS OF REPATRIATION

Since the 1980s, museum professionals have increasingly committed to sharing collections with the descendants of people and communities from whom the collected artifacts originated. As late as the 1970s, Indigenous people were not considered stakeholders in the collection and exhibition of their own cultural artifacts. Recently, however, exemplary cases of collection sharing have occurred in North American and European museums. Museums have become “contact zones” as issues of decolonization have come to the fore. This article discusses the sharing of material culture and “double” position of anthropological museums, rooted in their own (colonial) history but in possession of another’s culture. Ownership issues, access, and ethics are important for local communities but not always easy for museums to negotiate. This article describes thirteen examples of collaborative partnerships between museums, for the most part large, urban, European, postcolonial institutions, and Arctic Indigenous communities. I argue that open communication, collection research, and an increasing level of co-curation are prerequisites for changes in museum practice, and these changes will benefit both the institutions and the communities involved.

The decolonization movement has prompted cultural heritage museums worldwide to critically reexamine the ways they collect, curate and historically narrate cultural artifacts. While notable initiatives have emerged, from repatriation programs to community-driven exhibitions, the term “decolonization” itself remains deeply contested and ambiguous, carrying a buzzing ring to it. This chapter critically interrogates what is truly at stake in the decolonization process: are we witnessing a genuine transformation in practice, a foundational change, or merely shifts in rhetoric and the strategic rebranding of established norms?Through two cases with critical reflections — one interrogating decolonial efforts in Western museums, the other addressing decolonial efforts in African museums themselves — the chapter explores the intersecting issues of repatriation, curatorial authority, community participation, and the enduring influence of colonial epistemologies. It argues that while surface-level reforms have generated positive visibility, deeper challenges persist, often masked by the language of inclusivity and reconciliation.This chapter aims to contribute to a more globally inclusive understanding of decolonization in museums by uniquely examining African cultural heritage in both Western and African contexts together. It contends that without addressing underlying foundational issues— including asymmetries of power, control over narratives, and the political economy of heritage institutions — beyond geographical and institutional barriers, the discourse risks devolving into little more than tokenism and a conceptual placeholder. In doing so, the chapter contributes to the broader project of imagining what a decolonized, globally just museum might look like. Ultimately, it invites reflection on how museums might reimagine their roles: not as custodians of people’s historical and cultural heritage, but as participants in cultural repair, restitution, and future-making.Keywords – decolonization, cultural heritage, rhetoric, inclusiveness, historical narratives, transforming heritage, cognitive dissonance, community-driven

Western museums are under pressure to return cultural artifacts looted during the colonial period, as world-class African institutions emerge to claim rights to lost heritage.

STATEMENT OF CORRECTION This article from Lucy K. Mensah has been republished in ILS 26.3. The original text here included several errors that were not corrected in the first printing due to a miscommunication between the author and publisher. Since accuracy is a prime scholarly objective, especially with regard to primary works, we thought it best to reprint the entire article. We express our apologies to readers for the errors that were included in the first publication of this article. ABSTRACT This article builds on existing scholarship on literary encounters with the museum in its treatment of Robin Coste Lewis’s poem, “Voyage of the Sable Venus” (2015), as exemplifying the contemporary state of museal engagement in literary production. The poem delivers an account of the history of the Black female form in Western art—a presence Lewis argues, has gone overlooked, both intentionally and unintentionally, by Western museums. Sourced from an inestimable number of museum labels interpreting objects rendered in the Black female form, the poem not only brings the ubiquity of this form into view but presents a method of literary production that this article theorizes as “Black feminist museographical poetics.” In its heightened focus on museography, otherwise referred to as museum text, Lewis’s work adopts a poetics shaped by historical knowledge of the museum’s role in generating perceptions of Black femininity premised on erasure, dehumanization, and subjugation. Lewis’s poem reveals biases toward Black femininity encoded in the museography, through which museum visitors interpret cultural artifacts. This article argues that through her unconventional arrangement of museum labels, Lewis appeals to the nature of museal texts as inherently poetic sources of information, marked by accounts of racial and sexual difference.

Museum Cooperation Between Africa and Europe: A New Field for Museum Studies edited by Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, and Raphael Schwere

How are postcolonial identities curated in non-Western art institutions? How do the latter engage with the question of the restitution of colonial looted artefacts during this turning point where Western museums seem increasingly willing to address claims of repatriation? Focusing on the unfolding debates on restitution and heritage around the new Museum of Black Civilisations (MCN) in Senegal, the article investigates how curatorial approaches aimed at challenging Eurocentrism address questions of identity, authenticity and discourses on the Other. It finds that, contrary to decolonial museum exhibitions in the West, the MCN avoids engaging in claims of restitution as this would reproduce Europe’s key role in defining “authentic” and “traditional” African art. At the same time, this paper shows that the underlying logic aimed to subvert exoticising representations and reconfigure Self-Other relations can uphold an internal dichotomy of cultures that risks lapsing into the same essentialism that is criticised. This is furthermore complicated by the tension between an imaginary of pan-African Black Civilisations and the criticism directed towards the management of artefacts in postcolonial states where nation-building is an ongoing process. In teasing out the challenges of formulating a reconfigured postcolonial future without drawing on culturalist discourses and reinforcing a dichotomy between modernity and tradition, this article adds a radically different perspective to the literature on heritage and museums in relation to colonialism and is also of relevance to those looking at curatorial practices, identity politics and international relations.

Abstract: In this essay, I argue that among the problems that the return of African cultural artifacts portends is the issue of ownership, involving who the legitimate owners of artifacts are and what consequence this has concerning the repatriation or restoration or return of African artifacts to African communities. In the cosmopolitanism of artifacts proposed by Kwame A. Appiah, ownership ought not to supersede the possibility of universal or wider aesthetic appreciation. Appiah argues that such artifacts are individuals' contributions to the world's cultural heritage, which are to be aesthetically appreciated and lived with as works of art and not an exclusive entitlement of a particular culture. What this implies is that the West has no moral obligation to return the cultural artifacts wrongfully taken from Africa, since the question of ownership is still unclear. I critically reflect on Appiah's cosmopolitanism of African cultural artifacts in this essay. I do so by reconstructing the idea of ownership using Ifeanyi Menkiti's Afro-communitarian ideal, which recognizes communal ownership, and by introducing the notion of the African phenomenological aesthetic experience. I demonstrate that the idea of communal ownership necessarily answers the question of ownership, and the notion of African phenomenological aesthetic experience establishes descendants' interest in experiencing and living with cultural artifacts. In turn, I argue that both communal ownership and African phenomenological aesthetic experience show that the West has a moral obligation to return those cultural artifacts belonging to Africa.