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"The Sarr-Savoy Report & Restituting Colonial Artifacts" by Clara Cassan

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"The Sarr-Savoy Report & Restituting Colonial Artifacts" by Clara Cassan

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31 January 2019 from Center for art law

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By Clara Cassan.
In 1885, The General Act that emerged from the Berlin conference read as follows: "The Signatory Powers exercising sovereign rights or authority in African territories will continue to watch over the preservation of the native populations and to supervise the improvement of the conditions of their moral and material well-being" (Article 11). The text was signed by the United States and thirteen European nations, including France, with the intention of "protecting" African countries and enabling free trade and transit through the continent. Its language gives us a clear illustration of colonization, one's appropriation of a place without its owner's consent, which, more simply, can also be defined as theft. The conference gave way to the division Africa endured until the 1970s. France acquired Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, most of the northern Sub Saharan countries, and Madagascar.

Amongst European material appropriations were artworks and sacred objects of various African communities. French colonizers imported these acquisitions to France and slowly integrated them into their national collections. Some objects entered the Louvre Museum, while others reflecting "the history of manners and customs" of colonized countries were placed in the newly created musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, near the Eiffel Tower. As these importations scattered across France, the government organized "colonial exhibitions," attracting tourism and contributing to the country's growing economy. Paris consequently experienced the birth and expansion of specialized institutions, starting with the Colonial Museum in 1931. Today's Musée du Quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, in Paris, is a concentration of 70,000 Sub Saharan African treasures, which represent about two-thirds of the African objects still held in France. Most of the institution's artworks originate from Tchad, Madagascar, Mali, and Benin.

In November 2017, French President Emmanuel Macron undertook his first political visit to several African countries since the beginning of his mandate. His tour began in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, where he gave a speech at the University of Ouagadougou that planted the seeds for what is now one of France's most sensitive cultural topics. On November 23rd of that year, Macron expressed his desire for the temporary or permanent restitution of African cultural heritage throughout the next five years. Back then, this sounded like mere political politeness; but only a few months after his address to Sub-Saharan Africa, Macron commissioned a report, today known as the Sarr-Savoy Report, from academics and researchers Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr to implement the return of thousands of artworks. It was published on November 21, 2018, and two days later, Macron announced that Benin's 2016 restitution requests would be promptly answered with the return of 26 artworks that have been in France since the colonial period. Director of the Fondation Zinsou for Contemporary Art in Cotonou, Marie-Cécile Zinsou, hopes for a rebalancing of African art's presence across the world so that, she says, Benin is not the only place in the world that does not hold Beninese objects.

The Report

The Sarr-Savoy Report On the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage, Toward a New Relational Ethics is a 252-page bilateral agreement between France and certain African countries. The document is divided into three main parts: (1) To Restitute, (2) Restitutions and Collections, and (3) Accompanying Returns.

The second part, "Restitutions and Collections", draws a three-step process towards effective restitutions. The first phase was launched on the report's publication date and asks French public museums to create thorough inventories of all the Sub Saharan artworks they possess, in the hopes of reaching as much transparency as possible. These lists will then be sent to the relevant African countries. A lack of response from one of these countries will be read as an unwillingness to collaborate. By Spring 2019, these inventories should be completed and publicly accessible online. Thirdly, starting November 2022, France will be returning all claimed artworks.

Effects on the Law of Inalienability

The Report sparked defensive criticism from Western countries. One fear was that the Report's implementation might entail modifying the French Code of Heritage and, more specifically, limit the principle that has protected its public domain for nearly five hundred years. The inalienability rule in question was originally written to protect the French crown's property. It was temporarily overruled under the French Revolution and resurged in the 19th century. The law still fully applies today, preventing individuals and other countries from taking possession of public goods and monuments. The former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Marc Ayrault, relied on this old principle to avoid Benin's first requests in 2006. Part 3 of The Sarr-Savoy Report finds different ways to skirt this sacrosanct law. It recalls this text was solely meant to protect national property and notes that the African objects in question never belonged to France and, thus, were never a part of its national heritage. The authors also suggest using the "law of exception" that was brandished in 2010 to return 16 Maori heads to New Zealand, after a vote by the French legislature.

Foreign Governments' Response

European governments expressed another, more practical fear. If African goods were returned, what was to become of their collections? Would the Musée du Quai Branly be reduced to empty shelves? France's former Minister of Culture, Jean-Jacques Aillagon, shared this concern in an op-ed for Le Figaro, calling the Report "a manifesto, built on the assumptions and involvement of the authors, leaving hardly any place for contradiction." Of course, the Report never suggests such a drastic solution. The point is to reach a healthier balance between both continent's possessions and to move forward in their political and cultural relations.

Sarr and Savoy's call for transparency from public institutions will also help identify which objects were stolen, bought, or acquired during colonization. These stages will avoid unnecessarily emptying the Musée du Quai Branly, for example. Unfortunately, even if an entity is found to hold illegitimate artworks, it will not be legally forced to return it. International conventions such as UNESCO's 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transport of Ownership of Cultural Property only apply to circulations post-1970. Acts performed during colonization are long prescribed. Despite potential legal modifications, the international community will have to rely on the country's ethics and good faith. Though the report has no legal force at the moment, it has laid out practical solutions that can hardly be ignored. In an interview with the Swiss media, lawyer and Director of The Art-Law Centre in Geneva, Marc-André Renold, said President Macron's strong diplomatic commitment towards certain African countries would likely pressure him into modifying French law in light of Sarr and Savoy's suggestions.

The Art World's Response

Part of the art world sees European museums as the proper environment for "universal exhibits." They argue that Africa's objects will be best preserved and admired in institutions with greater means. Yet, a country's ability to welcome its own heritage should be measured by the country itself. The African continent has over 500 museums that are still waiting to be heard. Keeping the litigious artworks locked in Europe would only maintain the infantilization Africa has been a victim of.

Museum directors also responded to the Report and raise the issue that French museums are primarily government-owned. By contrast, US museums are privately owned and answer to boards and trustees. However, the Report still reinforces how museums and their directors must be transparent about the nature and origins of the collections.

Nonetheless, Alexandre Giquello, a primitive art expert at French auction house Binoche et Giquello, finds the report reflects a misconception of the art market. He explains that auction houses and art dealers want to avoid the circulation of looted, stolen, or suspicious works at all costs. According to him, ninety percent of African goods were acquired through regular and barter sales, donations, or exchanges during the colonization era. In his address to Burkina Faso, Macron had talked about the possibility of "temporary restitutions" of Africa's heritage, as if to promise skeptical European actors, like Mr. Giquello, that France will not be infinitely deprived of these works. The expression sounds absurd, but the applicability of proper restitutions in this case is also debatable. The notion of restitution implies returning an object to its legitimate owner. However, as Nigerian-American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola recently explained to The New York Times, the artworks will not necessarily be returning to where they came from simply because their provenance is not always identifiable. Territorial reconfigurations gave way to untracked commerce, which will only complicate future restitution ambitions. Instead of entirely brushing off the idea of "temporary restitutions," the Report finds a middle ground by embracing it as a transitory solution until legal dispositions are enacted to enable definitive returns to Africa.

Against this backlash, Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy spoke up to say that their ideas have been oversimplified and that the media are inciting fears. With the yellow-jacket movements still taking place in France, accusations aimed at the President include his unreliability and detachment from life's daily realities. However, on the subject of art restitutions, Macron has been surprisingly efficient and is the first Western President to put his foot in the door of a public and risky issue. Actual advancements will now depend upon African countries' willingness to cooperate and take possession of their - or their neighboring countries' - heritage. Whatever the outcome, Macron's actions are unveiling political relations from anachronistic masks.

Catherine Frammery, "Faudra-t-il un jour vider les musées suisses?", Le Temps, December 6, 2018. Available here.

Jason Farago, "Artwork Taken From Africa, Returning to a Home Transformed", The New York Times, Art & Design Section (January 3, 2019). Full article available here.[

Further readings:

Kate Brown, "'The Idea Is Not to Empty Museums': Authors of France's Blockbuster Restitution Report Say Their Work Has Been Misrepresented", Artnet News (January 24, 2019). Available here.

Selected press articles here.

About the Author: Clara Cassan is French-American. She holds a graduate degree in European Intellectual PropertyLaw and Art History from Paris I, Sorbonne University. She began an LL.M degree at Fordham University in Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law in January 2019, after working as an intern with Cahill, Cossu, Noh & Robinson, LLP.

Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and is not meant to provide legal advice. Readers should not construe or rely on any comment or statement in this article as legal advice. For legal advice, readers should seek an attorney.

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The Sarr-Savoy Report & Restituting Colonial Artifacts

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By Clara Cassan. After his address to Sub-Saharan Africa, French President Emmanuel Macron commissioned a report, today known as the Sarr-Savoy Report.

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Sotheby's Institute of Art

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Ariella Aïsha Azoulay: "It is not possible to decolonize the museum without decolonizing the world"

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Ariella Aïsha Azoulay: "It is not possible to decolonize the museum without decolonizing the world"

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12 March 2020 by Sabrina Alli from Guernica

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It was only as an adult, when she read her father's birth certificate, that the political theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay learned the name of her paternal grandmother-and the fact she was of Algerian descent. After that, Azoulay reclaimed the name her father had refused: Aïsha. "My father clearly did not want this name to circulate and be associated with our family, to taint the semi-white appearance he worked hard to acquire [in Israel]," Azoulay writes in her new book, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, She accuses her father of having "betrayed the ancestors," condemning the logic of a man who had learned to conflate erasure with progress. This very logic convinced my own father that I didn't need to know my grandfather's name either, nor his reasons for migrating from India to Detroit in the early twentieth century. It was as if eliminating these significant details would eliminate his-my-difference.

Potential History is a project spanning centuries and nations, from the mass expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain in 1492 to Palestine today. It is a critique of and intervention in imperial knowledge production and the technologies that make it possible-museums, national archives, the discipline of history, the discourse of human rights, and the camera, which "made visible and acceptable imperial world destruction and legitimated the world's construction on empire's terms." Azoulay, who, in addition to being an author, is a filmmaker and professor of modern culture and media at Brown University, expands upon a theory from her seminal book, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography, by positioning the roots of photography in extraction and erasure. With Potential History, Azoulay aims "to make non-imperial sense out of existing knowledge that imperialism has manipulated and relegated to different domains." This includes reimagining everything from timelines to political sovereignty to interpretations of individual photographs.

Of course, this work is not for the imagination alone. Azoulay, who disavows her Israeli citizenship, calls for open borders and the fundamental right to migration. She argues that people whose worlds have been destroyed by centuries of imperialism have the right to live near the objects that have been plundered from their culture and now sit in the "neutralizing" space of Western-style museums. In fact, she suggests, those objects might constitute the very "documentation" the countries hosting those museums demand of migrants.

I talked with Azoulay over Google Chat while she was in Berlin and I was in Brooklyn. She prefaced our discussion by saying that she tries to think and communicate in non-imperial terms. I understood this as an invitation to allow language to take unexpected turns. What followed was a dense, rich, daunting, and hopeful discussion about the (im)possibilities of decolonization, the potential of gallery spaces, and the invisible work of research. Central to Azoulay's process-whether creating the contents of a book, a gallery exhibition, or a film-is refusing the role of the scholar who, as the expert, assigns meaning and "discovers" new knowledge. In practice, this involves tracing, cropping, cutting, juxtaposing, annotating, and erasing the texts from history's totalizing narratives. Yet her process is even richer than that: Potential History is not only about the past, but about the enormous possibilities of the present.

-Sabrina Alli

1. "This fantasy of photographs as discrete objects that can be owned by one person or institution is part of the imperial regime that makes us believe that the photograph captures a bygone moment to which we are the latecomers."

Sabrina Alli: I'd like to start with photography. You write, "photographs should not be thought of as raw archaic material, primary sources, or positive facts whose intrinsic meaning is to be spelled out through research." So what do you think photographs are?

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay: Photography was invented as an imperial practice and it was thus a productive practice-geared toward the production of images, and, in a broader sense, commodities. This valorized photography's products, meaning photographs, and enabled the undisputed use of others' free labor-those being photographed-as raw material.

In a non-imperial understanding of photography, the photograph is only one possible outcome of a complex encounter. The encounter involves not only the one who holds the camera and those in front of it, but also other participants, including imaginary spectators. These spectators are not necessarily the same from the point of view of the photographed person as they are from that of the photographer. While the person who holds the camera is most likely committed to a milieu of experts-an editor, for example, in the different venues where the photograph is likely to be published, and an audience-the person who is photographed has perceptions and aspirations of her own. We should not let the photograph, a contingent product, overshadow the complex nature of the encounter out of which it was taken, nor to blur the inequalities, the patterns of exploitation, and the incommensurable expectations, aspirations, and modalities of participation inherent in a photographic event.

When we understand photographs not only as the focal point or end product of photography as a practice, we face both its imperial and non-imperial potential. It also makes it easier to see how we can be manipulated to naturalize photography's imperial nature; that is, easily inhabiting the scripted roles offered to us as scholars, curators, photographers, and spectators. This fantasy of photographs as discrete objects that can be owned by one person or institution is part of the imperial regime that makes us believe that the photograph captures a bygone moment to which we are the latecomers. This teaches us imperial notions of time and separates shared encounters into the property of an individual.

Photography was built on already existing imperial practices, structures, and regimes that it continues to reproduce. Relating to photography as if it has a separate history originating with the invention of the device in the nineteenth century means ignoring the way photography accelerated and enhanced the process of primitive accumulation of wealth (especially visual wealth), labor, and resources from people in Africa, India, and the Middle East. Without this primitive accumulation of photographic wealth, the majority of Western-type museums and archives could not exist. Scholars are trained to see archives and museums as benign sites of research where they can find their objects, forgetting that they themselves take part in the conflation of violence and scholarship. In the book, I reject the centrality of the camera in the story of photography's invention and foreground instead "the infrastructure of extractions": that is, what enabled the camera's access to people as free raw material for the production of photographs, which then became "primary sources" for other experts to consult and interpret. My book questions the naturalization of this category of "sources" ("primary" or "secondary") and reconstructs the production, accumulation, and naturalization of the photographic "raw material" under imperial power. What is free raw material, to whom is it free, and what do we forget?

2. "Under the imperial conditions that shaped our world, being the victim is not only the outcome of violence, it is also 'a right' that can be given and taken."

Alli: I was struck by a part of the book where you arrive at this analysis about photographs that show the event well known as the Holocaust. What I took away from your analysis is that we, the viewers, don't assign meaning to photographs, they're given to us. There are photos that we all recognize as depicting the Holocaust-which have become iconic, and make it seem exceptional compared to other atrocities.

Azoulay: The identification of the term "Holocaust" with the extermination of the Jews overshadows the multiple groups targeted by the Nazi extermination plans. This enables the exceptionalization of the extermination of the Jews alongside the exceptionalization of the Nazi extermination plans, thus normalizing centuries of genocide of different peoples.

Those photographs of piles of corpses taken in liberated camps are associated with the extermination of Jewish people, but actually we have no way of knowing whose bodies these are, since different groups were incarcerated and exterminated. They could be African soldiers from the colonies who were taken as prisoners of wars and sent to the camps, they could be Communists, Jews, or Roma people. This helps create a regime of differential sensitivity to violence, predicated on who is targeted, by whom, and under which circumstances.

Under this regime, being born an "Israeli Jew"-a violent category toward non-Jews and non-white Jews alike-means recognizing the exceptionality of the violence toward Ashkenazi Jews as the primary definition of violence. It also relates the violence perpetrated by those identified as "Israeli Jews" as a simple policy, one that is tolerable or perhaps not even "violent" at all. In my book, I describe my rejection of the adjective "Israeli" as part of my identity, acknowledging that the name of "Israel" legitimates a campaign of violence that omits the destruction of Palestine. Writing this book is part of righting this wrong. I refuse to be enlisted in ontological violence. I insist on actualizing other lineages that the state renders unimaginable, such as me being an Arab Jew and a Palestinian Jew of African origins.

This takes us to this image. My project of inscribing the rape of German women in the photographic imaginary of World War II originated in a similar refusal. Among the thousands of photographs taken during what is known as the end of World War II, there is not a single photograph associated with the rape of between one and two million German women. Rather than going to the archive and searching for the photographs of these acts, I reviewed the existing corpus of photographs. Based on the assumption that many of them were taken at the same sites where rape occurred-one to two million rapes, largely in one city, so consider the dense geographic occurrence of rape-I asked myself which of them required an extra epistemological manipulation in order to dissociate it from the mass rape of women. The question was how to reject the status of mass rape as incidental to the major events of the war and the foundations of democratic political theory, and show its important role in the imposition of "the new world order."

Prior to my study of the rape of German women, I studied the rape of Palestinian women by Jewish soldiers and its role in the establishment of a racial patriarchy in Israel. Other scholars studied the rape of women during the partition of India and Pakistan, and that of enslaved Africans and African Americans. When these rapes are considered together, it is hard not to see that without the violence of rape, democracy could not gain its status as the only viable political regime. That is, the mass rape of women is both central to western democracy and has been occluded by it.

With these series of "untaken photographs of rape" I impose on the archive a different kind of photograph-what I call the "untaken photograph." I took sentences about the rape of German women in 1945 from books and transformed them into captions. I printed these captions below blank squares in different sizes, figured as placeholders in the archive, challenging the way the imperial archive operates through absences and silences. If we are seduced by this trap of "the archive's silence" we can find ourselves seeking the documents it has the power to conceal from us. Producing these placeholders is a way to switch from the position of passive clients of what is in the archive to the active position of rejecting its authority to define what exists and what does not. It is worth emphasizing that these placeholders do not mark unknown events; they deliberately mark events we know happened, but which the archive orchestrates as non-events because of the lack of documents, as if documents are needed to prove a large scale campaign of violence.

The mass rape of German women by Allied Forces in occupied Berlin after 1945 was conducted with the justification that Germans had to "pay the price." When some German women started to talk about this rape, they were silenced under the pretext that they could not, as citizens of Germany's overthrown Nazi regime, inhabit the position of the victim. Under the imperial condition that shaped our world, being the victim is not only the outcome of violence, it is also "a right" that can be given and taken. Being born a Jewish woman, I felt compelled to use my position as a Jew against the way this history was scripted to justify that violence. As a scholar of photography, I sought to inscribe this rape in the same imaginary of violence from which it was removed, and to place it alongside other types of violence, refusing the script given to us about victims and perpetrators.

Alli: I am trying to understand the relationship we have to photography and its limitations. Do we have the right to see everything? What is role of photography in helping to create a culture of memory?

Azoulay: We certainly do not have the right to see everything, but this cannot be defined by the state or by experts. The practice of non-imperial potential history, as I describe in my book, engages with how different communities can restore the limits they impose on this imperial right, without aspiring to come up with some universal ethics of the gaze. There is a very recent example concerning the publication last year of the coffee table book Sex, Race, Colonies, edited by French historian Pascal Blanchard. This man acted like a neutral historian who had "discovered" a collection of postcards from the French colonies and whose professional duty was to bring them to the awareness of the public. These are postcards that show different degrees of sexual violence, and that circulated among the French across their empire. The images are certainly not his discovery, and such a collection cannot be published as is under the mantra of "education."

It is academic audacity, born of imperial ways of knowing, that enables a historian to act as if it doesn't matter that victims and their descendants know what was done to them; it doesn't count as "known" unless it is articulated in academic language by a credible expert. Historians who "discover" imperial violence from the archive often seek to share it with their peers, who enjoy similar privileges of access to documents of violence for the purposes of academic "discovery" rather than for the purpose of halting the violence inscribed in them.

For a white male French historian, postcards that were taken in the nineteenth century are historical objects. For racialized women in the former French empire, this is not a bygone past, as members of the French collective Cases Rebelles wrote in a brilliant manifesto, The Exhausted Bodies of the Colonial Spectacle (Les corps épuisés du spectacle colonial), against the publication of the book. When imperial violence is not brought to an end through the transformation of the infrastructure that enables it, such violence will be a continuous reality.So rather than seeking some universal rules drafted by experts, local communities should have the right to set rules about who has the right to see and to show, what is known and unknown about imperial violence, and how it could be repaired.

The idea of the book, of working in this 500-year temporal framework from 1492 onward, is to foreground the amount of imperial violence that was and is required to destroy different cultures and enable the imperial fantasy of universality to exist. The allegedly universal ethical code about looking at pain and death doesn't make sense when we broaden the scope out to 1492. It is not about whether future corpses should be shown or not; what do you do with all the corpses that have already been shown, let alone produced? Reminding ourselves that billions of people have been killed by imperial actors in the last 500 years is also a reminder that there is nothing progressive about the idea of not showing bodies.

3. "This object, like millions of others, was part of the fabric of life, not part of the monoculture we now call 'museum.'"

Alli: The imperial idea of temporality claims that there are discrete units of time. There is the past, which is over, and there are the present and the future. In your work, you break with the borders that imperialism requires, both spatially and in temporality, but also within institutions like archives and museums. Looking at this photograph, can you say more about your understanding of the relationship between plundered objects in a museum and the neutralizing function that museums serve within society?

Azoulay: I took this image last year at the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. This museum was founded by King Léopold II to display objects stolen from the Congo, access to which other imperial actors had "granted" him with imperial hubris and power. King Léopold II, responsible for the genocide of millions of Congolese, built this museum with the resources, free labor, and treasures that he plundered from Congo. Seven years ago the museum announced that it was starting a process of decolonization and closed its doors until reopening last year. I'm afraid, though, that the museum's understanding of decolonization is very limited.

In the 1950s, when Congo was still under Belgian occupation, this object stood at the top of a chief's house. I saw it first in a small booklet of images taken by a Belgian art historian. What does it mean to be a Belgian art historian who publishes research in state publications when the objects you study are stolen and the people to whom they belong are under occupation? It means that you have free access to everything expropriated from these people and the imperial right to see everything. This right is recognized by one's imperial peers, but refuted by the people to whom the objects belong.

Even though they had been colonized, people sought ways not to let experts see everything. Their resistance was often repressed by armed forces, but ignored by non-armed experts of empire, meaning scholars. The image of this object taken in the 1950s encapsulates this. The Belgian art historian who took the photograph wrote in the caption that the left arm was deliberately broken by the local people who didn't want to be forced to disclose its meaning or hand over the power of the object. Even though the art historian understood the message, he nonetheless took a photograph of the object, which was then transferred to the museum and is still being shown there, with no account of the violence that facilitated its transfer. Now displayed in the museum, there is no caption attesting to this resistance, and the object, actually crafted in the mid-twentieth century, is displayed as an old tribal piece, a ruin of a sort.

The local people were prepared to damage their own beloved object to protect their culture from the invading gaze of the colonialists. What we do not know is if the elimination of this piece increased or decreased the amount of violence exercised against them to force further disclosure of their secrets in the name of scholarship and "universal" values of art, knowledge, and historic preservation. This object, like millions of others, was part of the fabric of life, not part of the monoculture we now call "museum." When we speak about the plunder of objects, the violence is not only that of extraction, it is also the violence of naturalization: that is, of what was extracted by the museum so that museum-goers can look at the objects as detached from the physical, spiritual, and cultural environment of which they were part and from the decades of violence that severed them from that environment.

4. " It is not possible to decolonize the museum without decolonizing the world."

Alli: So, is it even possible to decolonize a museum, or decolonize an archive? Your work sits within a movement calling for decolonization, along with the work that Decolonize This Place is doing.

Azoulay: It is not possible to decolonize the museum without decolonizing the world. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't engage with this important work, but we have to do so with the full awareness that decolonization cannot be limited to discrete objects, museums, or archives, and cannot be substantial as long as the people from whom all this wealth was expropriated are not allowed to lead the process. It is not about hiring an individual curator from Congo or Nigeria, but about opening the imperial borders and letting people re-build their worlds in proximity to their objects.

When I look at this map of migration, I see patterns of counter-expeditions, a belated movement of people to join the objects that were forcibly migrated away from them decades or centuries earlier. We should think about those people who are deemed "undocumented" alongside this massive forced migration of objects that started in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, objects that are still held in imperial archives, museums, and libraries.

Rather than thinking of decolonizing the museum as a discrete institution, as if the museum exists in a world apart, I study the correlation between the migration of people and objects, out of which I configured this non-imperial right-the right to live near your objects.With this right, it is not hard to imagine what it would mean to live in a world free of imperial borders, a world in which people whose culture had been destroyed are recognized as those whose rights are inscribed in the objects preserved in Western-type museums.

Rather than calling these people "undocumented," I offer a shift that enables us to see their "documentation"-that is, their rights-in their objects. The statue with the broken arm holds within it the rights of the Congolese to use the resources of the Belgian state to repair their world. Rather than viewing these people as object-less or place-less, we should recognize their worldliness in their objects, now violently held in museums, and call on these objects to advocate for their rights.

5. " The fact that these objects plundered from Africa were not made available to African Americans is the ultimate proof that decolonization of museums cannot be pursued outside a wider process of decolonization."

Azoulay: We can continue this conversation by considering another image, actually a superimposition of two photographs, one of which was taken by Timothy O'Sullivan. Captions often indicate that this is a photograph of five generations of slaves at J.J. Smith plantation, a statement that is not neutral. At the moment the photograph was taken, these people were no longer slaves nor was this place still J.J. Smith's plantation (if it ever was, as the plantation is a complex of stolen land, stolen property, and stolen labor). At that moment, at the ending of the Civil War, J.J. Smith had already run away, and the enslaved people had freed themselves as part of what W.E.B. Du Bois called the "general strike of the enslaved."

I produced two such juxtapositions that I call "dismissed reunion," which consist of two types of images. One depicts freed African Americans, and the other shows objects looted from Africa and held in museums, as if they have nothing to do with these property-less formerly enslaved people.

The fact that those millions of objects from Africa were not reunited with people who were kidnapped from Africa is the ultimate sign of America's unwillingness to abolish slavery and to enable African Americans, whose culture was plundered, to reclaim it as part of recovering from the trauma. These objects continue to be the cultural assets of white culture, studied and handled mainly by white experts who protect the imperial license of museums to own them instead of being owned by the descendants of their makers. The fact that these objects plundered from Africa were not made available to African Americans is the ultimate proof that decolonization of museums cannot be pursued outside a wider process of decolonization. Through the activity of Decolonize This Place, which is targeting museums such asNew York City's Natural History Museum, sites of gentrification, museum trustees, corporate power, and rising subway fares, we can see the beginnings of what a full decolonization could look like.

6. "Extraction is never only of objects, it is always also of knowledge."

Alli: The picture of the hands. What is this image?

Azoulay: I produced a series of cropped images like this one, foregrounding the extraction of objects. I'm interested in the gestures involved in the practice of expropriation and the transfer of these objects to museums. My assumption is that as scholars, artists, photographers, and curators, we have inherited these gestures, and we have to recognize them in our bodies in order to unlearn them.Rather than engaging with such photographs as documents that, as a scholar, I'm expected to study and interpret, I approach photographs with pens, scissors, and tape in order to break the spell of the photographic document.

The original caption describes a collector specializing in African art. For me, he is not a collector, nor an ethnographer, but an actor in an orchestrated campaign of plunder. Rather than studying him in comparison to other collectors and affirming the collector as a neutral category, I'm looking at the materiality of the act of extraction. This what guides me when I decide how to crop the image. The one who extracts holds the object in his hand-in a way common to curators or other experts who manifest, through this gesture, the embodiment of their knowledge. But there is another hand nearby, a non-white one. This is the hand of the person from whom information is being extracted and used to empower the experts and enrich the institutions for which he works. Extraction is never only about objects, it is also extraction of knowledge. Without the informants, those would-be-experts could not be experts, since the objects would be kept opaque to them. It is worth mentioning that during the initial process of extraction, these informants were exploited-their labor was assumed to be free to take. Once the information was extracted, many of them were compelled to be porters for the white scholar-experts, expected to carry tons of these objects to the ports to be shipped away. In this cropped image, you can see one example of how experts became authoritative figures from whom generations of students learned about other people's cultures.

We started our conversation with my struggle to unlearn the right of the nation-state to become the adjective that defines me: "an Israeli."This struggle cannot be detached from the one against the imperial premises of scholarship, the refusal to let institutions define what I see or expect to see, what I can say and what I'm not allowed to say.Both citizenship and scholarship come with a set of privileges that should be unlearned. Going on strike against the archive is one way to do so.

7. "Archivists are also violent actors who traffic in bodies, brand them, transfer them from one place to another, put them under chain and lock."

Azoulay: To fight the ideology of the distant gaze, I'm experimenting a lot with images. Here, for example, is a series of drawings that I traced as a way to bypass the regime of copyrights. It is another cropped image. I focus on this man who sits near a big book in which he writes information regarding the trafficking in African bodies. We don't know exactly what he writes, but he is part of the culture of lethal documents that proffer verdicts of enslavement to people who have been kidnapped. I am interested in the presence of documents at the moment when physical violence is exercised and how the documents are used to tame the horror. Tracing these images, cropping them, detaching them from the institutional authority under which their meaning is defined, is part of an attempt to undermine the assumption that the archive is a deposit of primary-and hence sacred-documents. These documents of violence are themselves violent: They partake in the transformation of people into slaves. I am trying to create a different imaginary of the persona of the archivist. Our conception of the archivist is of a tedious ant at the service of scholarship, but archivists are also violent actors who traffic in bodies, brand them, transfer them from one place to another, put them under chain and lock.

Alli: You drew that?

Azoulay: Yes. But not as an artist would draw an image. I sometimes draw them, other times I crop or tape them. One of these drawings is central to the book. It is the "Unshowable Photograph" of my Palestinian companion. I first encountered his photograph at the International Red Cross Archive, I think in 2009. The archive didn't allow me to show the image in an exhibition I was curating. I was asked to sign a document consenting to show this and other images from the CIRC Archive with their original captions only. The meaning of my term "Unshowable Photograph," then, is not that the image cannot be seen but rather that it cannot be shown by me. The archive acts as the proprietor of the images of which it is only the guardian, and purports to decide how those images will be shown, by whom, and to whom. You can go to the archive and see this image-the point is that you won't see it as I would show it to you. This is what I refuse when I draw the image: the right of the archive to preserve the terms under which violence will be shown and studied. The caption, in this case, obscuring the destruction of Palestine and normalizing the creation of Israel, is crucial. It replaces one order with another, to make people believe that Palestine is gone and Israel took its place.

8. "I never just read a book; I annotate it, I write against its arguments, I juxtapose it with images and objects, I erase what is written in it."

Azoulay: This is an image of one of twelve tables on which I spread the project Errata [an exhibition at Fundació Antoni Tàpies that Azoulay co-curated with Carles Guerra]. It consists of interventions in approximately sixty books. I never just read a book; I annotate it, I write against its arguments, I juxtapose it with images and objects, I erase what is written in it. This kind of work is usually invisible, part of the process called research, out of which a coherent paper can be published in an academic journal. In Errata, I push this behind-the-scenes work to the foreground. Using tape to erase or emphasize elements is not about aesthetics, but about what should not be kept as is. For example, in this book titled "Promised Land" I could barely leave one sentence intact. In others, I cannot let the separation between objects and people persist.

Alli: It's interesting to talk about the potential of spaces. How do you approach the space of a gallery? What are you trying to do differently with gallery space?

Azoulay: The gallery for me is an opportunity to engage with different items-images, objects, or texts -to have the physical items interact with people in a shared space, rather than withholding the items from the public and granting limited access to the "outcome" through the format of a publication. When I unfold such archives in a gallery space, I try to spend as much time as possible in the gallery to generate this type of conversation with people.

I am not an artist, and I am not trying to produce things that will have value in or from the art world. It is simply that I do not think only with texts; objects and images are part of my world, and I learn with and through them no less than through textual sources. Imperialism reproduces itself through a series of curatorial practices, and developing different approaches is part of my commitment to unlearning imperialism.

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Ariella Aïsha Azoulay: "It is not possible to decolonize the museum without decolonizing the world."

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The political theorist argues that those whose worlds have been destroyed by five centuries of imperialism have the right to live near the objects that have been plundered from their culture.

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"What does it mean to decolonize a museum?" by Elisa Shoenberger

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"What does it mean to decolonize a museum?" by Elisa Shoenberger

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2 November 2023 from MuseumNext

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In recent years, a notable movement towards decolonizing museums has emerged across the US, Europe, and Australia. However, the very meaning of decolonizing is being debated.

The Washington Post defines it as "a process that institutions undergo to expand the perspectives they portray beyond those of the dominant cultural group, particularly white colonizers."

The Abbe Museum in Maine takes a more assertive approach by incorporating it into its Strategic plan and defining it as "at a minimum, sharing authority for the documentation and interpretation of Native culture."

Promoting Diversity in Decolonized Museums

Museums are taking on this critical work to make their museums reflect the diversity and the voices of the people within their collections and around them.

Many museums have legacies rooted in colonialism; their collections were from wealthy donors who benefited from empires. For example, Sir Hans Sloane, a doctor and collector, funded his enormous collection that would be the foundation of the British Museum with earnings from his wife's slave plantations in Jamaica. Moreover, his collection profited from the reach of the British Empire, where collectors and travellers all over the world "acquired" items for him.

Many collectors saw their efforts as a way to preserve the past, believing the indigenous communities would fade into obscurity. And then there are the controversies of how items were acquired into collections, such as the Parthenon Marbles at the British Museum, London, and the Zodiac of Dendera in the Louvre, Paris.

Part of the issue is how museums treat indigenous and other minorities in their collections . In his MuseumNext talk, Jérémie Michael McGowan , director of Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum in Tromsø, Norway, explained that indigenous works tended to be in ethnographic museums, not art museums.

This distinction helps to perpetuate the idea that these cultures are no longer living and continuing their traditions. These community engagements work to fight against that sentiment and try to show the resiliency of cultures and traditions.

For example, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has invited several Native American artists to present their work in their Native American galleries, including Bunky Echo-Hawk and Chris Pappan .

Pappan, a Chicago-based artist of Osage, Kaw, Cheyenne River Sioux and mixed European descent, created a series of paintings, drawings and overlays in the Field's Native North American Hall to contextualize and reconsider the objects in the Hall, which has not changed since 1950.

In a press release , the Field will now be renovating the hall and work with "an advisory committee of scholars and museum professionals from across the country and from diverse tribes and nations" to reopen the Hall in 2021.

Strategic Initiatives Towards Museum Decolonization

Some museums are developing strategic plans to redevelop their conception of their collection and auditing the institutions as a whole. The Australian Museum in Sydney, led by Kim McKay, re-evaluated its own relationship to its objects and changed their view of the Museum as the owner of objects to "custodians of those collections, with an obligation to the peoples who created the objects and stories, and to their descendants." They are in the midst of a 10-year Indigenous Roadmap Project.

Part of the roadmap has brought in leaders to review the collections. Notably, the Australian Museum brought in Chief Jerry Taki, a Ni-Vanuatu leader, to review the Vanuatu collections and helped the museum understand the diversity of arrowheads, something that the museum never knew before. This is merely one example of how these efforts benefits museum and indigenous people alike.

Other museums are working with local indigenous communities to determine respectful treatment of human remains and objects. In 2017, the San Diego Museum of Man instituted a policy to ask permission from indigenous communities about the treatment of 5,000 to 8,000 human remains in their collection.

The Canadian Museum of History established the Human Remains Policy in 1991 "to respond to requests from communities for repatriation." Since then the policy has evolved to include both human remains and objects and have resulted in the return of human remains to First Nations in Canada as well as artifacts, such as wampum and medicine bundles to their respective communities.

Dismantling White Supremacy in Decolonized Museums

However, these efforts are only a part of the large project of decolonization. Artist and curator Shaheen Kasmani explains in her MuseumNext presentation "How Can We Decolonize Museums" that decolonization efforts may fail and sometimes help replicate colonial behaviours and attitudes.

She aptly notes that decolonization is not the same as diversity. She instead posits that decolonization is "the upfront challenge of white supremacy, de-centres the Eurocentric view, values narrative of that has been made Other.

It dismantles systems of thoughts [that places] the straight white man as standard." It's not just about inviting indigenous and other marginalized people into the museum to help the institution improve its exhibitions; it's an overhauling the entire system.

Otherwise, museums are merely replicating systems of colonialism, exploiting people of color for their emotional and intellectual labor within their institutions without a corollary in respect and power.

For her and many other culture workers, this overhaul starts with the decision-makers. Who are the people who make the decisions about the exhibitions? What is shown in the exhibitions? How is the story told? Do the decision-makers have a decolonial mindset? Are they aware of their own biases?

Brooklyn Museum received a lot of criticism last year for hiring a white curator for an exhibit on African Art. Sara Wajid, head of engagement at Museum of London, in her MuseumNext talk pointed out the lack of people of colour as heads of permanent exhibitions.

The prohibitive cost of museums also is a significant factor in limiting museums to particular audiences. Kasmani noted that exhibitions and museums can be quite expensive and not affordable to many segments of society.

The cost to bring an entire family as well can limit people's abilities to experience these cultural institutions. Steve Nelson, a professor of African and African American Art at UCLA, explains in a Washington Post article that "Museums are perceived as being for people of privilege. It starts early." This perception could help stymie the pipeline of people in color in museum jobs.

In addition to decision-making and cost, the text and language of the exhibition are another important factor in the decolonization process. The wall text in exhibitions are perceived as neutral, authoritative narratives of the objects displayed.

But Kasmani explains, "Those panels on the walls of your museum are a political act." The words used are important for everyone's understanding of material presented; the words chosen will impact how people understand the exhibit.

She explains that when words like "racist" and "exoticized" are removed and words like "concentration camp" changed into "internment camp" it serves to invalidate people's experiences and histories.

Choice of language

Moreover, the choice of the language for text is also a political act. What language is used in the text will also create barriers or tear them down depending on how it is used. Some institutions around the world are beginning to provide text in other languages than the dominant one.

For instance, the Philadelphia Museum of Art had Spanish language text in their 2016 exhibition about Mexican muralists as a way to better connect with Spanish-speaking museum goers. In another example, McGowan noted that Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum used the Sámi language in texts on a special museum exhibition/performance that took place in 2017.

In addition to how objects end up at their museums, the project of decolonization should also consider what is collected and what stories can be told from those objects. Like wall text, collections are political.

In her talk, Wajid describes how her attempts for an exhibition about the Opium War at the National Maritime Museum was limited because the museum did not collect items relevant to that topic, such as objects from the Chinese point of view. Instead, she noted, they had lots of items from the East India Company.

The museum's ability to make exhibitions that fought against the dominant narrative was hampered by what the museum had previously collected under this prevailing mindset.

New ideas for decolonization

However, there are institutions that have presented intriguing alternatives to prevailing models and presented new ideas for decolonization. In McGowan 's MuseumNext talk, he explains how in 2017, the Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum transformed into Sámi Dáiddamusea within two months from start to finish.

This "museum performance" as he terms it, resulted in an "total and instant makeover that included amongst other things, the display of another collection of art entirely and the use of Sámi language for both exhibition texts and general signage" and much more. They worked with Sámi community to establish trust and common ground in this undertaking.

But he hastens to explain that this museum was a "fictional manifestation of the as yet unrealized art museum that has long been the desire of the Sámi artistic community museum sector and society at large." The new museum/exhibition was not a permanent change.

Ultimately, he concludes that the experience showed that "perhaps one of the healthiest things many museums can do in response to the very demands of the present is to intentionally embrace an alternative condition in which they do not exist or have been replaced by another institution entirely..." (more on repatriation of Sami Sámi collections here).

Since the exhibition, the Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum has continued in this project to review the institution as a whole by reviewing their mission statement, staffing and recruitment policies, analyzing the makeup of their board, and much more.

Abbe Museum's strategic plan of decolonization aptly distinguishes between what the visitors will see and what will take place behind the scenes. For visitors, Abbe Museum explains, "The principles of decolonization inform how the Abbe builds, understands, and exhibits its collections. They affect who shapes and tells the stories in its galleries and programs.

Decolonization is part of the training of all staff, including those who greet and educate visitors, and even determines what is sold in the gallery stores." Behind the scenes, the museum will revamp its values, "including consultative and collaborative decision-making processes that include Native people at every level of decision-making.

This strategic plan calls for development of new models of archaeological and other research, and the Museum's commitment to green practices reflects the Native values of protecting the resources of the earth."

All in all, the decolonizing project will have starts and stops as each museum, cultural worker and audiences have difficult conversations and reflections about the meaning of museums and who the institutions are intended to serve.

New models of decolonization will continue to arise and give inspiration to other institutions struggling to figure out how to change their own institutions. But open and true dialogue will remain an integral point with all members of communities.

Wajid explains that "real talk" will happen; hard conversations will be had about power and authority. And that's important. Former director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Olga Viso says it best in an Op-Ed for the New York Times in 2018, "If museums want to continue to have a place, they must stop seeing activists as antagonists.

They must position themselves as learning communities, not impenetrable centers of self-validating authority."

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What does it mean to decolonize a museum?

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In the past few years, museums across the US, Europe, and Australia are trying to tackle the challenge of decolonizing their institutions.

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Podcast: "Museums as Crime Scenes" Ariella A. Azoulay, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Jonas Tinius

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Podcast: "Museums as Crime Scenes" Ariella A. Azoulay, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Jonas Tinius

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Museums As Crime Scenes - Ariella A Azoulay, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Jonas Tinius (20-06-05)

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A Conversation with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, and Jonas Tinius. What is the relation between the large universal and encyclopaedic museums of Europe, and the continent's diverse imperial projects? How did the modern development of academic knowledge in the name of a colonial mission civilisatrice obscure processes of theft, loot, and violence?

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"Do Not Colonize Decolonization" by Pushpa Iyer

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"Do Not Colonize Decolonization" by Pushpa Iyer

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Summer 2020 from Peace & Justice Studies Association

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Decolonizing is a hot topic today. It is trendy for many to use the term when expressing frustration and desiring change with all things abhorrent in our neo-liberal capitalist world. When decolonizing becomes a buzzword, it implies we no longer need to undergo a rigorous transformation of mind and spirit to embody the term.

Decolonization, the term, is about deconstructing or dismantling colonial ideologies and challenging the superiority of western thought and approaches. Decolonization of knowledge is about questioning who has the power over knowledge production, dissemination and management and eventually decentering those sources of power by bringing in others who were marginalized by colonization. It short, it is about re-centering First nation peoples whose erasure was the number one project of colonization. And, finally, decolonization of the mind is what Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o referred to as the empowering of the languages and the cultures of those subjugated by colonial powers.

I study decolonization, and I also teach classes and conduct training on decolonizing knowledge, my focus is on institutions of higher learning. I am passionate about decolonizing everything around me - education, institutions, communities. In my work, I am struck by how quickly the decolonization challenge reduces to some simple solution. In classrooms, minutes into introducing the topic of decolonization, I hear people say, "Let us decolonize the classroom, the syllabus, the curriculum, the pedagogy." So appealing is the term that we believe that every one of us, trained in western educational-colonized-institutions, somehow possess this ability to decolonize the world around us; but, this is a mistake. How could we end up so wrong?

The following presents 7 ways the process of decolonizing academia fails:
1. Conflate Diversity with Decolonized
We confuse promoting diversity with decolonizing. Efforts to add non-western scholars to a syllabus or hire more diverse faculty is just one small step in the long process of decolonizing academia. Such efforts, in the short term, promote diversity, but they do not always result in decolonization in the long run. Policy changes in hiring, recruitment, curriculum development, decentering individuals and sources of knowledge, and questioning overall educational values and goals must all happen for there to be decolonization. By overusing and incorrectly using the term, Tuck and Yang say that we turn decolonization into a metaphor. The resulting problem, as they say, is we try to fit decolonization goals within the frameworks for equity. Decolonization, however, they argue, is much more than diversity or equity. As a metaphor, it precludes conversations about who should lead and how power must be transformed in these educational institutions for there to be true decolonization. My suggestion would be to use appropriate words to describe the efforts you make and not label every step of initiating change in your institutions as decolonization.
2. Disconnect from Location
We continue to draw benefits from the westernized educational institutions, most of which are built on the land of indigenous populations, this implies hypocrisy. We do not answer fundamental questions: How much Indigenous knowledge is involved in the business of knowledge we engage in these institutions? Can we hire faculty from Indigenous communities and have them lead knowledge production? Can we actually work towards delivering rights to indigenous communities in our region by standing up against our own institutions? Activism, the kind that challenges powerful structures and institutions, should be an integral part of teaching and learning; if academia really is a vanguard for decolonizing knowledge, then it must address the local context and history.
3. Western Education Implies a Furthering of the Colonization Project
Westernized universities train students to secure jobs that further or are an integral part of neo-colonization (imperialistic and economic) project. Success in westernized universities is defined and measured by the job placements secured by students as clients. Decolonization will not be complete until we can challenge the very job market available to the students. We need to question the organizations that work with a savior complex and hire our students to participate in furthering inequality. We academics we must look critically at how we prepare and what we are preparing our students for in their careers.
4. Superficiality
As part of our training in westernized universities, we travel, learn, and encourage cultural expressions. We believe, in good faith, that we are promoting non-western cultures and bringing them to the mainstream. But, culture is more than symbols and traditions. It is about understanding and prioritizing the different ways that people think and make meaning of the world. Are we prepared for Indigenous traditions and knowledge of relating to the earth to take the lead and give these communities credit for leading discussions on the environment? Culture is not merely something you know and understand but something you accept and participate in through your actions.
5. Language for Teaching and Learning
We encourage others to speak their native language and reject colonial languages, but we benefit from the privilege we derive from operating in power structures that use the languages of the colonizers. In academia, we demand proficiency in reading, writing, and comprehension in colonized languages, and we continue to evaluate and judge those who possess less than "perfect" (read standards adopted by the dominant groups) skills in these languages. When we learn non-colonial languages, we must ask ourselves if we are trying to communicate with communities to learn from them or to teach them in their language? In all of these examples, there is a risk that we may be re-centering power in ourselves, and we may end up as colonizers. Decolonization would require us to work on establishing a new order in which particular languages and cultures are not considered the best or the ideal. We might find that we are no longer at the center. How comfortable are we with this idea?
6. Language for Dissent and Protest
In discussing decolonization, we continue to spout our outrage in English or other European languages used by our colonizers. My own piece is an example. We, who are colonized, and in positions to re-colonize others, continue to discuss amongst us, same-language speakers, ways to decolonize. Are we not in this process, keeping those who do not speak these languages out of the decolonization conversation? Why is there so much literature on decolonization in the language of the colonizers? How do we ensure that the decolonization conversation and strategies bring in others like the Indigenous communities, who think and speak a different "language"?
7. Appeal to Woke Authority
Another common feature when studying and teaching decolonization in academia is an almost default practice to reference work by non-western scholars. While this is an essential step in the decolonization process, it can default into a pursuit of academic excellence by seeking glory for how well-read we are. When citing scholars such as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong' o or Franz Fanon, we must simultaneously reflect on our own role in sustaining the colonization process, something these scholars talk about extensively. Once aware, our first step must be to work on changing our colonized minds and all that we have internalized through being colonized ourselves. Thus begins the decolonization process and, hopefully, prevents us from using decolonization as a metaphor (including overusing the term).

Academia was used by the colonizers to further the colonization project, and our westernized universities (which include the higher education institutions in formerly colonized countries) are the ones most difficult to change when initiating decolonization. We may be anti-colonial or post-colonial in our approach, but we have a lot of groundwork to do before we can claim to be decolonizing our spaces and our work.

Decolonization can never be a simple process, and many decolonization scholars, like Fanon, have said, "Decolonization is a project of complete disorder, and it never takes place unnoticed." Do we have the courage to create the disorder and the strength to question our own ego and power as we get deeper into this work? If not, and if we continue to use decolonization as a metaphor, we may colonize the decolonization process.

Bio

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Do Not Colonize Decolonization - Peace and Justice Studies Association

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Decolonizing is a hot topic today. It is trendy for many to use the term when expressing frustration and desiring change with all things abhorrent in our neo-liberal capitalist world. When decolonizing becomes a buzzword, it implies we no longer need to undergo a rigorous transformation of mind and spirit to embody the term.

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"It's Time to Decolonize the Decolonization Movement" by Dr. Ijeoma Opara

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"It's Time to Decolonize the Decolonization Movement" by Dr. Ijeoma Opara

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29 July 2021 from Speaking of Medicine and Health

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"For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change...I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices."
― Audre Lorde

These days, one can barely throw a stone in a global health space without hitting something to do with decolonizing global health. The decolonization of global health is the latest topic du jour and everyone is an expert. From blog posts to journal articles and webinars to conferences, the calls to decolonize echo throughout the cybersphere of institutions in the Euro-American region, twirling in and out of social justice conversations and dancing on the edges of diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) discourse.

"Global health must be decolonized!" is the growing call to action.

But, how? And do folks understand what the term 'decolonization' actually involves?

Is decolonization even possible especially if the same tools and systems of colonialization are employed in attempts to decolonize? Have global health actors reached down into that deep place of knowledge to touch that terror and loathing of difference?

Whose face does it wear?

Some of us in the global health space who were flying the banner of decolonization long before it became lit to do so, have looked upon the growing decolonization movement with mixed feelings and a lot of discomfort.

On the one hand, we see the need for greater awareness about the lasting damages of colonialism, and the power asymmetries that are pervasive in global health. On the other hand, our unease can be categorized in to three concerns:
How is coloniality showing up in the decolonization movement?
Decolonization is often perceived as a means to uncover the histories of the colonized, those whom Frantz Fanon refers to as the "Wretched of the earth", and bring their stories to the awareness of the mainstream. However, it is often confused with any social justice endeavor including diversity, equity, and inclusion and often devoid of a critical analysis of power, history, and sociopolitics. This lack of critical introspective analysis of power, hegemony, and the historical and continuing dynamics of internalized and systemic oppression in contemporary health and higher education structures, results in the reproduction of colonial logics of commodifying human beings, labor, space, and knowledge.

What this looks like is the maintenance of a power hierarchy in global health that is still predominantly white, cis-gendered, heterosexual, male, and European/American. It looks like institutional-community or (neo)colonial-(neo)colonized processes, practices, and policies of funding, partnerships, and program/project development that replicate colonial dynamics of extraction and exploitation. It looks like curricula that re-marginalize, de-prioritize, and minimize the lived experiences, expertise, and epistemologies of indigenous communities. It looks like narratives that obscure the interdependent causative relationship of the development and wealth of Europe and North America and the under-development and poverty of their past and present colonies. It looks like discourse that ignores the role of (neo)colonizer economic and national security decisions and policies that suppress indigenous independence. It looks like co-opting and bending the decolonization discourse to adhere to Eurocentric constraints such as viewing situations in binary terms and, therefore, in "tension" versus in multifaceted, intersectional, and in harmony. Constraints such as framing approaches as pragmatic vs philosophical as opposed to each informing and depending on the other. It looks like language that reinforces the hegemony of Europe and North America over the rest of the word such as "Global North" and "Global South" or defining nations by economic status set to Euro-American indices of prosperity and development. It looks like the absence of a commitment to justice and engagement with community-led justice and liberation movements.
Who is the decolonization movement for?
We have observed a lack of reference and deference to Majority World scholars, thinkers, practitioners, and activists in the rush of Euro-American do-gooders to institutionalize decolonization centers, departments, positions, apply for grants, and create programs, projects, and curricula. This ironic rush to colonize the decolonization movement is done without reflecting on (neo)colonizer intellectual connectivity to indigenous and majority world critical inquiry, often as a result of ongoing epistemological exploitation.

Giants such as Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, George Sefa Dei, Chizoba Imoka, Ngugi Wa Thiong'O, Amilcar Cabral, Es'kia Mphahlele, and many others are omitted from discourse as institutions mobilize to incorporate "decolonization" studies into their neo-liberal academic framework. Institutional norms, epistemologies, ontologies, praxes, policies, and processes built on Euro-American neo-liberal values of the hierarchical dualism of the individual over social, human over environment, and industrialized or "developed" over non-industrialized are expected to embrace what Tshepo Madlingozi and Frantz Fanon describe as a violent and disruptive process, and what Joel Modiri defines as "...an insatiable reparatory demand, an insurrectionary utterance...It entails nothing less than an endless fracturing of the world colonialism created."

The attempt to incorporate the disruptive violent process of undoing colonization within colonial frameworks and matrices is itself an act of colonization as it ignores the inherent intent of decolonization and presents as an unwillingness or an inability to change. It is also emblematic of the ego-centrism and lack of self-introspection that often peppers well-intended decolonization actors and their actions. Often, they do not do the work of reaching down into that deep place of knowledge inside oneself to touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there, and see whose face it wears, so that the personal as the political can begin to illuminate their choices. Often, they do not submit themselves to the endless personal and political fracturing that is decolonization. The urgency dictated by white guilt leaves little space and time for actual reflection, deconstructing, deconditioning, relationship-building, and structural dismantling. Thus, grassroots indigenous and Majority World leaders are left in the dust, their ideas co-opted in the rush to "solutions", while colonial power paradigms and dynamics are left intact, patterns of oppression and structural injustices remaining unfettered and reinforced.
What about intersectionality?
Anchored to the first two concerns, the lack of a critical power analysis rooted in indigenous and Majority World critical inquiry renders the decolonial movement impotent to actualize real fundamental change. This is because a critical analysis of colonialism is fundamentally intersectional and must locate its construction, and thus, deconstruction, at the intersection of white supremacy, global anti-Blackness, patriarchy, capitalism, ableism, classism, homo/transphobia, fatphobia, and xenophobia. It is George Sefa Dei and Chizoba Imoka who state that 'To colonize ... one has to equate the purpose of life to material acquisitions, affirm their personhood only through their ability to dominate/bully others, shrink their mental capacity so as not to respect/understand human diversity and rationalize a wide range of unfettered violence.' A decolonization movement that is not intersectional and does not contend with these mutually reinforcing interdependent systems of oppression and violence in the structural, interpersonal, and internalized dynamics of global health is doomed to fail. The lack of courage to name these intersectional systems of oppression, the paradigms of structural violence that undergird our global health institutions, and call out their perpetuators and benefactors allow these systems to persist un-checked, in so-called decolonization spaces.

The bottom line is that the decolonization movement itself needs to be decolonized. We cannot decolonize global health using the same logics, dynamics, and paradigms that birthed it in the first place. We cannot dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. Unfortunately, many decolonization scholars and advocates, especially in academia are shackled into inaction, as the only tools at their disposal are the same tools of colonialism, the same system into which we have all been baptized. Which is why many anti-colonial thinkers have expressed that decolonization is impossible, but, in the words of Foluke Ifejola, "...we must make her possible if we wish to survive this wretched night that this wretched earth has been plunged into by humanity."

This will require an imagination revolution. A liberatory mindset reset. A paradigm cataclysm.

We must de-construct and re-construct global health spaces using transformative tools created by indigenous, grassroots, and majority world communities. The voices of the poorest, darkest-skinned, most disabled, women (cis and trans), and femmes must be centered at decision-making tables in policy, education, health, economy, & Justice. Tables built by them for them.

Nothing about them without them.

We make decolonization possible by:

Getting comfortable with multiformity and fluidity: Decolonization has multiple definitions and that's okay. The complexity of the concept, process, and movement allows it to accommodate multiple definitions even as its meaning shifts depending on the sociopolitical positionality of the actor, the positionality of their audience, the actor's geographical and epistemological location, their colonial history, their role inside or outside academia/activism/politics, and their access to power. It is a colonial construct that everything has to be rigidly defined and have only one definition. The fluidity of decoloniality allows for a multi-faceted approach to decolonization so that various aspects of the colonial mountain could be attacked simultaneously and synchronously, increasing the likelihood of it being successfully leveled.

Ground decolonization in the work of Majority World leaders: The voices of indigenous and (neo) colonized decolonial and anti-colonial liberation movement scholars, thinkers, strategists, and activists must be centered in all decolonial efforts. Their perspectives, lived experiences, expertise, and knowledge systems come first and must inform all other work. They must inform language, stance, frameworks, and strategies. Funding and infrastructural support must be provided to these indigenous and (neo)colonized communities to power their strategies and solutions towards liberation, autonomy, and independence. They must inform what success looks like and what those metrics are. Intentionality should be performed towards ensuring that Majority World decolonial, anti-colonial, and liberation leaders who are women, LGBTQIA+, and disabled occupy the forefront of the movement.

Center Intersectionality and interdependence: Health does not exist in a vacuum and the health of communities all over the world are informed by social and structural determinants including neo-liberal economic world trade policies that produce and reproduce national poverty, reinforce dependency and neo-colonialism, and lead to poor health outcomes domestically and internationally. These dynamics of exploitation and extraction, which created the conditions for Europe and North America to develop and prosper on the back of Africa, were established during the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism and maintained today within the systems of capitalism, patriarchy, ableism, homo/transphobia, xenophobia, racism, white supremacy, and anti-Blackness. The decolonization movement needs to integrate with movements working to dismantle these intersecting systems of oppressions which undergird coloniality in global health and beyond. Which is why calls to return stolen lands to indigenous communities and pay reparations to the colonized, disenfranchised, racialized, and oppressed must be integral to global health decolonization movements. Similarly, human health is interdependent on the health of animals, plants, the environment, and the plant, which informs the economy and sociopolitical landscape of any society. An intersectional lens is critical to decolonization.

Emphasize a critical analysis of power: Power is fundamental to colonialism, neo-colonialism, and coloniality. Critical introspection as to how individuals as part of institutions, as well as the institutions themselves, produce, re-produce, maintain, and benefit from intersectional systems of oppression within a colonial framework is necessary for decolonization to be realized. What this means is that Euro-American people and the systems they represent and uphold need to divest from power-hoarding and lean out of power and privilege to allow indigenous and Majority World people thrive. While the formerly colonized and neo-colonized lead, the former colonizers and neo-colonizers need to actively dismantle the structures of oppression they created, inherited, maintain, and from which they benefit. This not a light proposition as it will require (neo)colonizers to divest from the very definition of themselves, as their identities were constructed on the basis of dominance acquired through bloody violence, rape, genocide, enslavement all to concentrate power and resources. To divest from an identity that sits at the intersection of coloniality and whiteness will require a fundamental existential shift in consciousness, imagination, decision-making, and politics that sets the (neo)colonizer free from the bondage of their addiction to power and the lies constructed to preserve the un-earned position of power in the social hierarchical house of cards. The challenge would be in the novel act of crafting an identity independent of dominance and oppression.

Return to the Source and Prioritize it: This section is especially and lovingly written to my people, the "unassimilable Majority" - the indigenous, formerly colonized, and (neo)colonized. Ultimately, decolonization should be defined by, led by, and the benefits reaped by who Es'Kia Mphahlele refers to as the "unassimilable Majority". To overcome colonization and achieve decolonization and liberation, we, the Majority people, would need to reject the external as well as the internalized white Euro-American gaze and standards and "return to the source". This means that we must make the journey into our individual and collective self to recover, reclaim, and restore our indigenous cultures, epistemologies, languages, technologies, art, histories, religions, and science. Our stories. Our identities. Our essence. We must name ourselves and own our narratives. We can position ourselves to speak truth to power through taking pride in the complex beauty of our languages. We can create our own definitions and correct the terminologies that reinforce global hegemony and dominance such as "Global North vs Global South" which are alternative terms for "First world vs Third World" or "Developed vs Undeveloped", "The West vs Non-West", "Sub-Sahara vs Super-Sahara?" and other inaccurate, homogenizing terms that were not created by us nor do they represent our reality, ethos, values, and priorities. We can embrace our heterogeneity as strength and re-discover how our indigenous knowledge, resource, and belief systems can inform the structures of our sociopolitical organization. We can remind ourselves that (neo)colonized regions developed and continue to develop the colonizing regions and recognize that their wealth and development is a result of continuing practices and policies designed to exploit and extract from our resource-rich settings. It is also important to note the neocolonial puppet-mastery that use so-called indigenous political leaders and manipulate internal sociocultural and economic dynamics to obscure their continuous plunder of our lands and resources. This acknowledgment is important in framing our own home-grown strategic solutions to achieving true independence and liberation from all forms of oppression. Firstly, liberation begins in our own imagination, in our own individual and collective selves before it can be translated externally. Our possibilities are only limited by our imagination. This is why decolonizing our minds and emancipating our imagination is key to our liberation. We need to be thoroughly purged from centuries of psychosocial conditioning and internalized colonization grounded in European and American myths and lies of who we are, where we come from, our abilities, value, contributions to the world, and how our current state of affairs came to be. These lies were designed for us to internalize their delusion of superiority, even while they depended, and continue to depend, on our wealth, resources, intellect, skills, and labor to survive. We need to engage in individual and collective healing practices to address the cumulative trauma of coloniality, racism, patriarchy, ableism, capitalism, homo-transphobia and all intersecting systems of oppression that have been transmitted intergenerationally and experienced on the levels of the intrapersonal, interpersonal, institutional, systemic, and structural. Without healing from our own trauma, we are doomed to reproduce it among ourselves and reinforce the same systems of dominance in our problem-solving processes, which are then rendered impotent. Collective healing and restorative justice practices will provide us the courage to reject zero-sum, deficit-based, individualistic thinking taught to us by colonizers. Embracing collective action built on dynamic trusting relationships, weaving the physical and metaphysical, uncovering our stories of the past, present, future and in between, and integrating an ecocentric liberated ethos, empower us to reject old paradigms of being and create new ones. We will find that we do not fear or pathologize what others refer to as "complex", but fondly accept and adapt to so-called complexities, while patiently massaging intersectional creative strategies that are rooted in our indigenous toolkits, ancestral wisdom, and youthful innovation. We will find that we can joyfully explore the beauty, abundance, and intricate multifariousness of our own humanities without parroting colonial stereotypes and unidimensional reductive analyses of our lived experiences and realities.

We will find ourselves liberated.

Global health will not survive its true decolonization. It is not supposed to. Instead, a better, transformed ecocentric world health system should emerge from the ashes of the deconstruction and dismantling of the global health industrial machine. We imagine a compassionate, intersectional, comprehensive, universal healthcare and public health system designed and led by the indigenous and unassimilable Majority people, and representing equity, justice, and liberation benefiting all and sundry.

The author acknowledges with gratitude that the land she lives and works on is the original homelands of the Anishinaabe: the Ojibwe, Odawa, and Botawatomi. She acknowledges the painful history of genocide and ongoing colonialism on this land of Detroit or Waawiyatanong and commits to honoring and respecting the diverse indigenous peoples, while learning how to be a better steward of the land.

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It's Time to Decolonize the Decolonization Movement

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We imagine a compassionate, intersectional, comprehensive, universal healthcare and public health system designed and led by the indigenous and unassimilable Majority people, and representing equity, justice, and liberation benefiting all and sundry.

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"Lindemann Family Returns 33 Looted Artifacts to Cambodia"

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"Lindemann Family Returns 33 Looted Artifacts to Cambodia"

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12 September 2023 by Tom Mashberg from The New York Times

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Lindemann Family Returns 33 Looted Artifacts to Cambodia

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The family of George Lindemann, a collector and philanthropist, returned the statues after conceding that they had been looted, Cambodian officials said.

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"Cambodia is turning the tide on looted statues, but some things cannot be returned"

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"Cambodia is turning the tide on looted statues, but some things cannot be returned"

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12 Feb 2021 from The Guardian by Ashley Thompson and Stephen Murphy

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At the end of January, the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts announced the most significant return ever of stolen antiquities to south-east Asia: more than 100 ancient Khmer objects with an estimated value of $50m assembled over the course of six decades by Douglas Latchford.

At his death in August 2020, Latchford was facing federal charges in the US for the alleged key role he played since the 1960s in the looting and trafficking of Khmer antiquities from Cambodia and Thailand. The investigations had begun to lay bare the direct links between the building of south-east Asian art collections in the west - including at some of America's most revered cultural institutions - and the brutal destruction of the Khmer cultural heritage on the ground. His daughter inherited the collection and consented to their spectacular return. Latchford, a British citizen by birth, operated out of Bangkok and London. Though the full extent of the Latchford family Khmer antiquities holdings is still unclear, it is understood that it was split between these two locations.

The return has been framed by some as a "gift" to Cambodians. But rather than celebrating a daughter extricating herself from her judicial dragnets, we should be commending those who have worked tirelessly to uncover and prevent the egregious looting of antiquities and the trafficking networks involved: Cambodian authorities, US authorities, academics and NGOs, including Chasing Aphrodite, Trafficking Culture and Heritage Watch.

With increasingly well-established provenancing methodologies, legal frameworks and ethical codes of practice, it has become harder to envisage the industrial scale of international trafficking once seen out of Cambodia happening elsewhere. Thailand, encouraged by Cambodia's successes over recent years, has stepped up its efforts to repatriate its looted art. Two 11th-century temple lintels are expected to arrive back in the country in March from the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco. Further repatriation requests are in motion. The rampant looting that has taken place in Syria, Iraq and other parts of the Middle East by Islamic State has also resulted in much closer scrutiny and surveillance of antiquities smuggling worldwide by governmental agencies in the west. A spotlight is now shining on the illicit dimensions of the antiquities trade.

The Cambodian announcement should be seen as a major victory for those who have advocated for stricter regulation of the international art market. Two pivotal moments in this fight were the belated decision in 2008 by the US Association of Art Museum Directors and the American Association of Museums to adhere to the Unesco 1970 convention on the prohibition of trafficking of cultural property, and the high-profile legal battle over Khmer "Blood Antiquities" brought against Sotheby's in 2012 by the Southern District of New York in consultation with the Cambodian government.

The successful resolution of the Sotheby's case led to the 2014 return of a monumental 10th-century sculpture which had been brutally broken off its pedestal at Koh Ker temple in north-eastern Cambodia, where it had remained in situ for more than a millennium. The US court papers accused the "collector", identified as Latchford, of purchasing the statue in the 1970s knowing it had just been looted from Koh Ker; consigning its sale to a London auction house; and conspiring with a Thai art dealer and the London business to fraudulently obtain an export licence. Thus began the decades-long travel of the statue, from Koh Ker to Bangkok to London to Belgium to New York, where Sotheby's stood accused of knowingly providing inaccurate provenance information to potential buyers. The publicity surrounding the Sotheby's case prompted a slew of further returns from major US museums: New York's Metropolitan, the Norton Simon in Pasadena, the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Denver Art Museum all returned stolen Khmer sculpture in their collections.

In the years leading to his death, Latchford had approached a number of major museums with the intention of selling the collection. The export of ancient objects had long been illegal in Cambodia, and the international art world had finally caught up: the new legal and ethical environment in which he found himself made it all but impossible for him - and subsequently his daughter - to do so. It is within this context that we should understand the so-called gift.

It is time to put to rest the characterisation of Latchford as a " leading scholar of Khmer antiquities". What are described as " foundational reference works" are seemingly self-published catalogues designed to launder his reputation and his objects. That some scholars associated with him says more about the draw of money and access than it does about Latchford's so-called scholarship. The Cambodian government has been savvy and gracious in this enduring affair. That it offered to honour "the donor"
in labelling the objects as coming from the "Latchford collection" in Phnom Penh's national museum says a lot about strategy, rather than an embrace of the man.

Now is the time however to turn our attention away from Latchford and to the legacy that six decades of pillaging has left around the world. Objects sold or gifted through Latchford's networks remain with international dealers, auction houses, private collectors, galleries and museums. Meanwhile in Cambodia a new phase has just begun.

It is impossible to undo the damage done to Cambodia by decades of looting, which both exploited and contributed to the fragility of Cambodian society during and after the wars of the late-20th century. Each stolen statue, each defaced temple, ripped at the heart of a social order organised around veneration of ancestors embodied in the ancient sculpted stones. Even on their return, the statues cannot go back to a social setting that is virtually gone.

Likewise, it is impossible to undo the damage done to the knowledge of ancient Cambodia embodied by the art in situ. For the looting also stripped the materials of their historical settings. While objects will finally be returned to a museum, there is only so much they can now tell us about the ancient history of which they were once integral parts.

Cambodia possesses committed and skilled archaeologists, conservators and educators. With the return of these ancient Khmer objects, they will do all they can, no doubt, to accomplish the impossible.

Ashley Thompson is the Hiram W Woodward chair in south-east Asian art, Soas University of London

Stephen Murphyis thePratapaditya Pal senior lecturer in curating and museology of Asian art, Soas University of London

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Cambodia is turning the tide on looted statues, but some things cannot be returned | Ashley Thompson and Stephen Murphy

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While we celebrate the repatriation of $50m of ancient Khmer objects, the damage to Cambodian society is permanent, say Asian art specialists Ashley Thompson and Stephen Murphy

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"The Ruins Should Be Inhabited as Part of a Process of Repair" 

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"The Ruins Should Be Inhabited as Part of a Process of Repair" 

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11 December 2023 by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay from Hyperallergic

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The Ruins Should Be Inhabited as Part of a Process of Repair

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The decolonization of Palestine is not only a Palestinian project, but also a Jewish one.

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"Cambodia tracking down thousands of priceless looted antiquities"

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"Cambodia tracking down thousands of priceless looted antiquities"

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17 December 2023 from 60 Minutes

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Cambodia tracking down thousands of priceless looted antiquities | 60 Minutes

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Decolonization 101: Meaning, Facts and Examples 

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Decolonization 101: Meaning, Facts and Examples 

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from Human Rights Careers

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"Decolonization" is a term you may have heard in progressive spaces, especially during conversations about restorative justice, Indigenous rights, anti-racism, and so on. What does it mean? In this article, we'll explore the two main definitions of decolonization, five important facts to know about it, and three examples of decolonization in action.
Decolonization can refer to a country achieving independence (like India did from the British Empire), but it can also refer to "decolonizing" spaces and institutions from the cultural and social impacts of colonization. The term is often used by Indigenous activists.
What is decolonization?

Decolonization is used in two ways: in reference to a country's independence process or as a social, cultural, and psychological process.

Decolonization as a country's independence process

For the original definition of decolonization, we first need to know what colonialism is. Colonialism is when one power takes over a people or area and enforces its culture and values. Ancient Egypt and Ancient Rome practiced colonialism, but Europe modernized the process into a centuries-long project. In the late 15th century, Europe found a sea route around southern Africa and to America. Countries like England, France, Spain, Portugal, and the Dutch Republic began "discovering" and colonizing places in South and North America, Africa, India, and Australia. Colonialism and the slave trade were closely tied as was the spread of diseases like smallpox. In North America, the mortality rate in some Native communities was almost 100%.

Between 1492-1914, European countries conquered more than 80% of the world's land mass. By the early 20th century, many empires had lost their hold on colonies, and gradually, more and more countries achieved independence. The term "decolonization" was coined in the 1930s.

Decolonization as a social, cultural, and psychological process

Colonialism has social, cultural, and psychological effects. After centuries of colonization, colonized societies are world's away from what they once were; countries can't simply "go back." The colonizer's dominant values, practices, laws, culture, and more often remain in place. Indigenous people are still marginalized and discriminated against. The legacy of the slave trade, which brought colonized people to places around the world, also cannot be forgotten. In this context, decolonizing is about, as a piece from The Peace Chronicle defines it, "deconstructing or dismantling colonial ideologies and challenging the superiority of western thought and approaches." Unlike decolonization as a process of formal independence, it digs into thought patterns, biases, policies, values, and more.

What five facts should everyone know?

Because decolonization has two meanings, there's a lot to know about it. Here are five of the most important facts:

#1. WWII was a huge catalyst for decolonization

Many empires lost colonies through the 18th and 19th centuries, but Europe still had significant holdings. According to the Map As History, European dominance in Africa was especially strong in 1939. After WWII, however, European countries were less wealthy and less capable of controlling distant colonies. The war had shattered the illusion that European powers like Great Britain and France were indestructible, while Japan, which had colonized Korea, lost its power there after being defeated in 1945.

After 1945, a wave of decolonization spread across the world as countries like India, Pakistan, and Malaysia gained their independence. African colonies also gained independence from Great Britain, Italy, France, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal.

#2. Decolonization is often violent

Colonial powers rarely leave without a fight, so violence is inevitable. Rebellions are violently squashed, leaders are tortured and imprisoned, and even peaceful rebellion is punished. The Algerian War (1954-1962) was fought for Algerian independence from France, which had occupied the country in 1830. The movement began years earlier in 1914, but after France broke its promise to give the country more self-rule after WWII, things got violent. The National Liberation Front began a guerrilla war in 1945. France responded with the torture and rape of civilians. In 2018, France admitted it had systematically tortured people in the war that claimed as many as 1.5 million Algerian lives.

Even decolonization that's allegedly "bloodless" really isn't. India's independence in 1947 from Great Britain is held up as an example of the power of nonviolent protest, but there were years of violent struggles leading up to Gandhi's campaign. Revolutionaries planned assassinations and bombings. In 1919, British troops killed at least 379 unarmed pro-independence protesters (which included children) in Amritsar. One way or another, violence is always part of decolonization.

#3. Colonialism isn't over

Some people talk about colonialism as a thing of the past, but experts say that dismisses the reality of colonialism's ongoing impact. A piece on The Conversation discusses how Canadian leaders talk about Canada as if it was a non-colonial power. Rather than take responsibility, these leaders shift blame (often to England) and keep centering settlers and their interests. Canada also continues to violate the rights of First Nations people through actions like harassing, removing, and prosecuting members of the Wet'suwet'en Nation who protested gas pipeline construction. This is despite the fact that the pipelines were being built on unceded ancestral territory. Building things like pipelines on the land of First Nations people - in violation of their sovereignty - is just colonialism all over again.

#4. Colonialism affects climate change

Past (and current) colonial attitudes are even affecting climate change. In the 1700s, British colonizers in Australia banned controlled burning, which Indigenous groups had been practicing for centuries. Studies prove what Indigenous people have known for years; controlled burning is essential for good fire management and biodiversity. Many experts also draw a connection between colonial attitudes and how countries like the U.S. and Canada handle waste. If you're Black, Indigenous, or Hispanic, the odds of your county being used as a dumping ground are much higher than if you were white. Colonialism may look different than in the past, but colonizing nations are still exerting control over others.

#5. Decolonization can become colonized

Perhaps not shockingly, decolonization as a cultural and psychological process can itself become colonized. This often takes the form of the "white savior" mentality. Well-meaning white people all too often get caught up in wanting to do the "right thing," but they speak over and dominate groups who should be leading. In the piece "It's Time to Decolonize The Decolonization Movement," a colonized decolonization process has several traits, including the use of language that "reinforces the hegemony of Europe and North America over the rest of the world" and "the absence of a commitment to justice and engagement with community-led justice and liberation movements." A colonized decolonization process also conflates "diversity" with decolonization and fails to critically examine how power works. As decolonization becomes a more common buzzword, it will be co-opted by organizations (and individuals) who haven't done the work to understand what it really means. This is just another form of colonialism.

What does decolonization look like in action?

Decolonization as an independence process for nations often takes the form of warfare, but what about the other definition? What does decolonization look like as a social, cultural, and psychological process? Here are three examples:

Decolonizing food systems

When countries colonize other countries, they try to change everything, including the food systems. Take North America as an example. For thousands of years, Indigenous people farmed and hunted. According to a piece on the Food Revolution Network, these were complex systems that protected biodiversity, let crops grow even in extreme weather, and made plants more resilient against pests. When colonists arrived, they disrupted everything by forcing Indigenous people off their land and banning them from farming or hunting. The U.S. government also forced Indigenous people to live off foods like canned meats, dairy products, sugar, and other items not part of a traditional diet. Food insecurity is still prevalent today, as are health issues related to unhealthy diets. Decolonizing the food system looks like preserving knowledge about traditional agriculture systems, lobbying for food sovereignty, working to recover stolen land, and more.

Decolonizing mental healthcare

Isn't mental healthcare based on science? How can that be "colonized?" It's colonized just like anything else: a colonial power occupies a nation and imposes its views on psychology, mental health, and treatment. Today, that means most people don't know psychologists or experts who aren't white, or that many non-Western cultures see many mental health issues differently. The mental healthcare field has also been the cause of horrific pain through the promotion of racism and eugenics. Decolonizing involves reckoning with mental healthcare's history, examining collective healing models, and understanding the impact of generational racism and colonialism.

Decolonizing education

In countries harmed by colonial powers, education has been colonized beginning in preschool and spreading through graduate school. Not so long ago, education wasn't even available to everyone, and despite progress in areas like gender equality, access issues persist today. Once someone is at school, most curriculum is packed with books, methods, and ideas from Western writers and academics. Pre-colonist knowledge and thinkers from other cultures are ignored or added as an afterthought. Changing the curriculum is a good start, but "decolonizing your bookshelf" (a popular phrase on social media) isn't the end goal. Decolonizing the education system also means examining power structures, what (and who) is valued in the classroom, how conflict is addressed, how students and staff are supported, and more.

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Decolonization 101: Meaning, Facts and Examples

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"Decolonization" is a term you may have heard in progressive spaces, especially during conversations about restorative justice, Indigenous rights, anti-racism, and so on. What does it mean? In this article, we'll explore the two main definitions of decolonization, five important facts to know about it, and three examples of decolonization in action.

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The 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property urges States Parties to take measures to prohibit and prevent the illicit trafficking of cultural property. It provides a common framework for the States Parties o…

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Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)

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Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)

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Since 1990, Federal law has provided for the repatriation and disposition of certain Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. By enacting NAGPRA, Congress recognized that human remains of any ancestry "must at all times be treated with dignity and respect." Congress also acknowledged that human remains and other cultural items removed from Federal or tribal lands belong, in the first instance, to lineal descendants, Indian Tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations. With this law, Congress sought to encourage a continuing dialogue between museums and Indian Tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations and to promote a greater understanding between the groups while at the same time recognizing the important function museums serve in society by preserving the past. ( US Senate Report 101-473 ).

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Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (U.S. National Park Service)

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Since 1990, Federal law has provided for the repatriation and disposition of certain Native American human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. By enacting NAGPRA, Congress recognized that human remains of any ancestry "must at all times be treated with dignity and respect."

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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o - Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

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Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o - Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature

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Browse through the many books that Boydell and Brewer publish, an academic publisher based in Suffolk and New York.

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Linda Tuhiwai Smith - Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples 

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Linda Tuhiwai Smith - Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples 

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Walter D. Mignolo - The Politics of Decolonial Investigations by 

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Walter D. Mignolo - The Politics of Decolonial Investigations by 

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Subjects
Postcolonial and Colonial Studies, Sociology > Social Theory, Theory and Philosophy > Postcolonial Theory

In The Politics of Decolonial Investigations Walter D. Mignolo provides a sweeping examination of how coloniality has operated around the world in its myriad forms from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. Decolonial border thinking allows Mignolo to outline how the combination of the self-fashioned narratives of Western civilization and the hegemony of Eurocentric thought served to eradicate all knowledges in non-European languages and praxes of living and being. Mignolo also traces the geopolitical origins of racialized and gendered classifications, modernity, globalization, and cosmopolitanism, placing them all within the framework of coloniality. Drawing on the work of theorists and decolonial practitioners from the Global South and the Global East, Mignolo shows how coloniality has provoked the emergence of decolonial politics initiated by delinking from all forms of Western knowledge and subjectivities. The urgent task, Mignolo stresses, is the epistemic reconstitution of categories of thought and praxes of living destituted in the very process of building Western civilization and the idea of modernity. The overcoming of the long-lasting hegemony of the West and its distorted legacies is already underway in all areas of human existence. Mignolo underscores the relevance of the politics of decolonial investigations, in and outside the academy, to liberate ourselves from canonized knowledge, ways of knowing, and praxes of living.

"Even regular readers of Walter D. Mignolo will find a wealth of new insights, analyses, and topics as he brilliantly considers some of decolonial theory's current controversies and new applications. With his hard-hitting insistence on the problems of Eurocentrism, Mignolo's spirited explanation and defense of decolonial theory is illuminating." - Linda Martín Alcoff, author of Rape and Resistance

"Walter Mignolo's oeuvre fiercely demands that we need to move beyond an engagement with the Euro American prison house of concepts and forge a theoretical vocabulary that is not merely an inheritance of colonialism. The decolonial option is premised on transcending amnesia-the manifestation of the colonial wound-toward traditions of intellection from the Global South. This new book shows yet again his uncompromising and ardent delineation of emancipatory landscapes of thought." - Dilip M. Menon, Mellon Chair in Indian Studies, University of the Witwatersrand

"Mignolo's book collects a significant contribution into various key issues around decoloniality and the ongoing movement beyond Eurocentric modernity. . . . A powerful intervention developing decolonial thought in thinking paths forward and alternative futures rather than fixating or being limited to critique." - Ali Kassem, Ethnic and Racial Studies

"A hugely provocative, far-reaching, comprehensive and accessible book for scholars engaged across disciplines, geopolitical focuses, and languages. It proposes a particularly valuable provocation for scholars of European languages, especially challenging those of us for whom the jumping-off point for our analysis is so deeply situated in Modern Languages' Eurocentric knowing and its attendant tactics of domination as factors to be taken for granted. It challenges and rewards the reader through its significant contributions to theory and the routes it offers to decolonial futures." - Rebecca Ogden, Modern Language Review

"Mignolo is at his best in his analysis of the nation-state and the limitations of Western political theories. . . . Mignolo's magnum opus The Politics of Decolonial Investigations is a sober description of the history of the world of the last five hundred years, its atrocities, and injustices, but it also gives us hope by describing the world that is emerging from underneath the ruins of Western civilization." - Breny Mendoza, Society for U.S. Intellectual History

"The Politics of Decolonial Investigations constitutes an essential point of entry for all readers interested in decolonization. Thanks to its ability to synthesize complex problems within the field and Mignolo's constant reflection on how to exercise epistemic rebellion in the face of the colonial power matrix driven by coloniality, this is undoubtedly a book that will guide the new generation of researchers into the distant future." (translated from Spanish) - Omar Osorio Amoretti, Spanish and Portuguese Review

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Duke University Press - The Politics of Decolonial Investigations

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“Even regular readers of Walter D. Mignolo will find a wealth of new insights, analyses, and topics as he brilliantly considers some of decolonial theory’s current controversies and new applications. With his hard-hitting insistence on the problems of Eurocentrism, Mignolo’s spirited explanation and defense of decolonial theory is illuminating.” — Linda Martín Alcoff, author of Rape and Resistance

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Dan Hicks - The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution

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Dan Hicks - The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution

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New York Times 'Best Art Books' 2020
'Essential' - Sunday Times
'Brilliantly enraged' - New York Review of Books
'A real game-changer'- Economist

Walk into any Western museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objects are all stolen.

Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of metal plaques and sculptures depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of Benin City, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections.

The Brutish Museums sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. Since its first publication, museums across the western world have begun to return their Bronzes to Nigeria, heralding a new era in the way we understand the collections of empire we once took for granted.

Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. His award-winning research focuses on decolonisation in art and culture, and academic disciplines, and on the role of cultural whiteness in ongoing histories of colonial violence and dispossession.

'A real game-changer'
- The Economist - New York Times 'Best Art Books' 2020 - Coco Fusco, New York Review of Books - CNN - Charlotte Lydia Riley, Guardian - Ben Okri, poet and writer - Victor Ehikhamenor, visual artist and writer - Bénédicte Savoy, Professor of Art History at Technische University - Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University - Bryan Appleyard, Sunday Times - MC Hammer - Los Angeles Review of Books - Ana Lucia Araujo, Public Books - Financial Times - The Baffler - Africa is a Country - 'Counterfire'
'Timely'
- Nature
'A bombshell book'
- Los Angeles Times
List of Plates
Preface
Preface to the Paperback Edition
1. The Gun That Shoots Twice
2. A Theory of Taking
3. Necrography
4. White Projection
5. World War Zero
6. Corporate-Militarist Colonialism
7. War on Terror
8. The Benin-Niger-Soudan Expedition
9. The Sacking of Benin City
10. Democide
11. Iconoclasm
12. Looting
13. Necrology
14. 'The Museum of Weapons, etc.'
15. Chronopolitics
16. A Declaration of War
17. A Negative Moment
18. Ten Thousand Unfinished Events
Afterword: A Decade of Returns
Appendix 1: Provisional List of the Worldwide Locations Of Benin Plaques Looted in 1897
Appendix 2: Provenance of Benin Objects in the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (the 'First Collection')
Appendix 3: Sources of Benin Objects in the Former Pitt-Rivers Museum, Farnham (the 'Second Collection')
Appendix 4: Current Location of Benin Objects Previously in the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Farnham (the 'Second Collection')
Appendix 5: A Provisional List of Museums, Galleries and Collections that May Currently Hold Objects Looted from Benin City in 1897
Notes
References
Index

Published by Pluto Press in Nov 2020

Paperback ISBN: 9780745346229
Hardcover ISBN: 9780745341767
eBook ISBN: 9781786806840
Audiobook ISBN: 9780745347806

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New York Times 'Best Art Books' 2020 'Essential' - Sunday Times 'Brilliantly enraged' - New York Review of Books 'A real game-changer'- Economist W...

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Ariella Aïsha Azoulay - Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism 

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Ariella Aïsha Azoulay - Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism 

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A passionately urgent call for all of us to unlearn imperialism and repair the violent world we share
In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences.

Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasised the possibility of progress while trying to destroy what came before, and voraciously sought out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums.

By practising what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas to the Congo ruled by Belgium's brutal King Léopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions - an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums - to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics.

Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as "past" and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.

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In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences.Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to his

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Alice Procter - The Whole Picture: The Colonial story of the art in our museums & why we need to talk about it 

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Alice Procter - The Whole Picture: The Colonial story of the art in our museums & why we need to talk about it 

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The colonial story of the art in our museums & why we need to talk about it

By Alice Procter

If you think art history has to be pale, male and stale - think again.
Should museums be made to give back their marbles? Is it even possible to 'decolonise' our galleries? Must Rhodes fall?

From the stolen Wakandan art in Black Panther, to Emmanuel Macron's recent commitment to art restitution, and Beyoncé and Jay Z's provocative music video filmed in the Louvre, the question of decolonising our relationship with the art around us is quickly gaining traction. People are waking up to the seedy history of the world's art collections, and are starting to ask difficult questions about what the future of museums should look like.
In The Whole Picture, art historian and Uncomfortable Art Tour guide Alice Procter provides a manual for deconstructing everything you thought you knew about art, and fills in the blanks with the stories that have been left out of the art history canon for centuries.

The book is divided into four chronological sections, named after four different kinds of art space:
The Palace
The Classroom
The Memorial
The Playground

Each section tackles the fascinating and often shocking stories of five different art pieces, including the propaganda painting that the East India Company used to justify its control in India; the Maori mokomokai skulls that were traded and collected by Europeans as 'art objects'; and Kara Walker's controversial contemporary sculpture A Subtlety, which raised questions about 'appropriate' interactions with art. Through these stories, Alice brings out the underlying colonial narrative lurking beneath the art industry today, and suggests different ways of seeing and thinking about art in the modern world.
The Whole Pictureis a much-needed provocation to look more critically at the accepted narratives about art, and rethink and disrupt the way we interact with the museums and galleries that display it.

Reviews

Paperback

320 pages

ISBN

9781788402453

Publisher

Cassell (6/1/21)

Dimensions

10.2 x 2 x 13.5 inches

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If you think art history has to be pale, male and stale - think again.Should museums be made to give back their marbles? Is it even possible to 'decolonise' our galleries?...

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Amy Lonetree - Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums

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Amy Lonetree - Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums

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"Thoughtful and compelling. . . . Recommended. All levels/libraries."-- Choice

"[An] interesting and important new book."-- Anthropology Review Database

"Lonetree analyzes the complexities of developing exhibitions through collaborations between museum curators and Native communities, with the goal of telling stories that honor the Native worldview and way of knowing, challenge stereotypes, and speak the hard truths of colonization."-- Minnesota Historical Society Press

"An important new volume for understanding museum representation in different contexts."-- Ethnohistory

"A challenging and, at times, heartbreaking text. . . . Should be mandatory reading, for graduate level anthropology, museum studies, arts administration, and history classes dealing with Native American cultures and representation. Working museum professionals will gain much from this book, as well."-- Journal of Folklore Research

"Lonetree offers a powerful and meditative study. . . . [It] is an uncompromising yet candid statement that no matter how far Western museums have come in their representations of Native Americans, there is still much work to be done."-- Indigenous Peoples' Issues and Resources

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Decolonizing Museums | Amy Lonetree | University of North Carolina Press

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"Thoughtful and compelling. . . . Recommended. All levels/libraries."-- Choice "[An] interesting and important new book."-- Anthropology Review Database "Lonetree analyzes the complexities of developing exhibitions through collaborations between museum curators and Native communities, with the goal of telling stories that honor the Native worldview and way of knowing, challenge stereotypes, and speak the hard truths of colonization."-- Minnesota Historical Society Press "An important new volume for understanding museum representation in different contexts."-- Ethnohistory "A challenging and, at times, heartbreaking text.

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Angeline Boulley - Warrior Girl Unearthed

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Angeline Boulley - Warrior Girl Unearthed

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2023

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Activist Mwuazulu Diyabanza draws attention to looted African art through unconventional method

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Activist Mwuazulu Diyabanza draws attention to looted African art through unconventional method

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Activist draws attention to looted African art through unconventional method

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Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, UK - Radical Hope, Critical Change

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Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, UK - Radical Hope, Critical Change

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Radical Hope events will reimagine museum practice. They will focus on how Western museums have relied on colonial ideas that have erased the many ways of knowing and being of people from around the world in favour of promoting one viewpoint.

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from Museums Association

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Decolonising museums is an ethical commitment. Here we outline principles to support decolonising practice. Using these alongside existing frameworks, such as our Code of Ethics and Culture&'s Black Lives Matter Charter, can offer direction and support. These principles apply to everyone working in and with museums, at all levels.

We encourage you to use these principles individually and with your colleagues, considering what they mean for your work.

01. Challenge neutrality

Museums are not neutral and never have been. The notion of neutrality maintains power and silences the experiences and histories of many. To challenge neutrality is to recognise that colonial values and biases are embedded in many museums. Challenging neutrality can ensure museums mean more, for more people.

02. Acknowledge power and privilege

Challenge structural inequalities and all forms of intolerance, discrimination and marginalisation.

03. Build relationships

Grow sustainable, meaningful and equitable relationships with those who are underrepresented and misrepresented within museums.

04. Value all forms of knowledge and expertise equally

Build knowledge through the exchange of ideas, and value it as you would institutional knowledge. Narratives have multiple perspectives and are not fixed.

05. Be brave

Sometimes ethical practice may not align with traditional 'best practice' standards. Be ready to challenge norms and encourage taking risks within your institution.

06. Be accountable

Be transparent about museum practices. Admit the challenges involved, invite and be open to scrutiny, take responsibility and commit to learning and growth.

07. Do the work

Decolonisation is active, long-term work, which requires sustained action and resourcing. Go beyond the thinking to the doing.

08. Take care

Care for yourself and all those who are part of this work.

09. Be creative

Doing the same things will get the same results. Work differently, be imaginative and inspired in creating meaningful change.

10. Aim for justice

Remember who you are doing this for and why. Work with them to achieve justice on their terms.

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Decolonising museums is an ethical commitment. Here we outline principles to support decolonising practice. Using these alongside existing frameworks,

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The British Museum: Collecting and empire trail

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The British Museum: Collecting and empire trail

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Learn how colonial relationships shaped the British Museum's collection in this object trail.

From around 1500 to the mid-20th century, a number of European countries established overseas empires - Britain's empire was the largest. The British Museum was founded in 1753: its history and collection are shaped by empire and the colonial exploitation of people and resources.

This trail highlights objects that were predominantly acquired during the age of empire and shows the different, complex and sometimes controversial journeys of objects that would become part of the Museum collection. Sometimes objects were acquired directly but often they were collected first by individuals, organisations or companies, passing through several owners before coming to the Museum.

this trail can be completed in a single visit and will take around 60 -70 minutes. It takes in several different galleries which are on the Ground floor. When you visit the object in the gallery you'll find more information about how the Museum acquired it.

Three-object trail - this trail is ideal if you only have 30 minutes to spare.

Further objects will be added to this section over the next 12 months as the result of ongoing collaborative work and research.

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Learn how colonial relationships shaped the British Museum's collection in this object trail. From around 1500 to the mid-20th century, a number of European countries established overseas empires - Britain's empire was the largest. The British Museum was founded in 1753: its history and collection are shaped by empire and the colonial exploitation of people and resources.

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Uncomfortable Art Tours with Alice Procter

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Uncomfortable Art Tours with Alice Procter

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Alice Procter runs Uncomfortable Art Tours as The Exhibitionist

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"In New Show, Tlingit Artist Nicholas Galanin Shows What Decolonization Actually Looks Like"

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"In New Show, Tlingit Artist Nicholas Galanin Shows What Decolonization Actually Looks Like"

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5 January 2024 by Harrison Jacobs from ARTnews

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Nicholas Galanin, Neon American Anthem (red), 2023.Neon by Noble Neon, Seattle, WA; Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York SITE SANTA FE commission with the support of Peter Blum Gallery, New York and Becky Gochman; Photo Brad Trone

Nicholas Galanin's wide-ranging new exhibition, " Interference Patterns," at SITE Santa Fe opens with something that the multidisciplinary Tlingít and Unanga x artist posits is uniquely American: a scream.

His new site-specific installation, Neon American Anthem (red), consists of a neon sign inviting visitors to "Take A Knee and Scream Until You Can't Breathe" in front of a grid of doormats. The last several years have provided plenty of reasons to heed Galanin's invitation and unleash a catharsis of emotion in this crimson-lit room. The piece threads together many different protest movements: Galanin created the work in response to climate change and other contemporary crises, but the piece in its final form ended up alluding to Black liberation and the kneeling gestures seen at football games.

Neon American Anthem, which is also currently on view at the Seattle Art Museum, is a perfect encapsulation of Galanin's practice, which is sharply critical of systems of power and often acts as a mordant commentary on art world institutions, taking them to task for their continued role in colonialism. As Galanin explained in a recent interview with ARTnews, when the Seattle Art Museum first approached him about the piece, he was queried about how institutions could decolonize, a question he said he is often asked as an Indigenous artist. When his first proposals-to return tribal objects to their communities-were rejected, he arrived at the current work which, in its own way, bluntly unsettles the institutions that house its versions.

"It's interesting for me to see these engagements in different institutional spaces," Galanin said. "It's been getting strong feedback ... but it's also been difficult. [SAM] has had a hard time with it. They're supporting the work, but it is engaging and challenging the entire institutional structure."

When visitors engage the work by screaming, it is disruptive across the museum. At SITE, a contemporary arts space sprawled across a single floor, you hear the screams throughout the central lobby and many of the adjacent galleries.

The work is just one of 24 in "Interference Patterns," Galanin's largest exhibition to date. The show includes sculptures, installations, and video that each contend with the past, present, and future of Indigenous peoples. The results are thought-provoking, heartwrenching, and boldly liberated, often all at the same time.

Take for example, 'kʼidéin yéi jeené (You're doing such a good job)', a 2023 video work that features Galanin speaking off-camera in Tlingít in words of support, love, care, endearment, and affirmation to his son, whose delighted face centers the screen. The video is paired with Loom, a 2022 sculpture mimicking a totem pole; it is constructed out of children's desks and deconstructed chairs carved with Tlingít formlines in pencil. The work references the long history of North American residential schools that forcibly removed Indigenous children from their families in order to assimilate them into white American or Canadian culture. Adjacent to that work is Indian Children's Bracelet, a pair of small handcuffs engraved with clan tattoos, another reference to the prison-like detainment these schools inflicted upon their Indigenous students. The sculptures symbolically reform and repair past generational traumas, turning them into new Indigenous symbols. The deeply personal video work does so more literally. Galanin ensures his child receives the care and love that entire generations of Indigenous children never did.

According to Galanin, there's one other act of reclamation hidden in the piece. In the process of making the video, he taught himself to speak Tlingít. "I was relearning a language that was removed from my culture via forced assimilation and colonial violence as near as my father's generation," he said.

An installation view of 'kʼidéin yéi jeené (You're doing such a good job)' and other works by Nicholas Galanin at "Interference Patterns, 2023 Installation view, SITE SANTA FE.Brad Trone/Courtesy of SITE Santa Fe

Such are the "Interference Patterns" indicated in the exhibition's title, which could have less artfully been titled "Actually Existing Decolonization." For instance, in the room following Neon American Anthem is photographic documentation of Never Forget, his 2021 installation for Desert X in Palm Springs, California. For that project, Galanin constructed 45-foot-tall letters spelling out "INDIAN LAND" in the manner of the iconic Hollywood sign, which was originally constructed to promote a whites-only development. Galanin's sign sardonically references liberal society's now-ubiquitous land acknowledgements while also refusing to accept the historical loss of sovereignty they still imply.

"It was a literal call for settler landowners to return the land back," Galanin said of Never Forget, which encouraged participation through a GoFundMe that has, to date, raised $56,000. The artist added that he is currently working on a future project, initiated by the SITE show, to return land to Indigenous communities.

Again and again in "Interference Patterns," Galanin points the way towards true redress. In World Clock (2022), a monoprint depicts a New York Times front page reporting the return of Manhattan to the Lenape; below, stacks of the most recent editions of the paper pile up. The distance between the two front pages, especially in recent weeks with daily stories about airstrikes on Gaza, can be a dislocating experience. The installation is meant to cease when the actual Times matches the monoprint.

"That might seem impossible to some. And it might seem really necessary and the only way forward for others," said Galanin. "What I've learned about a lot of my work is that there has to be some envisioned future in it."

In Galanin's experience, posing that envisioned future forces those who believe it impossible into quantitative conversations about why. Suddenly you've proven what has actually been taken or removed from those Indigenous communities, and that's where the real conversation begins.

An installation view of three works from Nicholas Galanin's "Architecture of Return" series at "Interference Patterns" at SITE Santa Fe. Brad Trone/Courtesy of SITE Santa Fe

In the case of Indigenous objects and human remains-both of which became central to the national conversation this year, following investigations into the Smithsonian Institute, the American Museum of Natural History, and other institutions-Galanin provides maps for what has been taken in his "Architecture of Return"series, begun in 2021. Those works display architectural blueprints of the aforementioned institutions painted onto deer hides, with escape routes and the objects in question also depicted. On a nearby plinth rests Purchase (2022), a set of copper lock picks handmade and engraved by Galanin with text from provenance cards of Indigenous objects at AMNH.

Galanin said he has witnessed the challenges associated with the repatriation of Indigenous objects, both as an active instigator and as a community member on the sidelines. He explained that many Indigenous people now have different belief systems or practices than when the objects were originally taken, which creates complications over how the objects should be buried or cared for if they are returned. Does one follow current belief systems and practices, or does one rely upon historical ones? Further, what does one do when members of the community hold conflicting beliefs, as is often the case?

Meanwhile, Galanin is currently working on a new project to get a Tlingít mask on loan from the British Museum, so that he could replicate it and train a younger Indigenous artist how to carve masks in the process. Yet, as he tells it, the project has been stymied by the cost of shipping-around $60,000-and institutional bureaucracy.

"That's just to loan it!" he said. "Things are shifting, but very, very slowly."

An installation view of The Value of Sharpness: When It Falls (2019) by Nicholas Galanin at "Interference Patterns" at SITE Santa Fe.Brad Trone/Courtesy of SITE Santa Fe

Bubbling beneath the surface of the critiques, redresses, and reclamations that Galanin enacts in the various works on display is the acknowledgement that the tools provided to do so by the institutions in power are inadequate. Several of the most stunning pieces in the exhibition use porcelain to drive home this point. In SITE's lobby is The Value of Sharpness: When It Falls (2019), an array of 60 porcelain hatchets decorated with Delftware floral motifs and gilded edges that hang in an arc, as if just thrown, from clear threads. That work is echoed later in Break in Case of Emergency, a 2022 group of porcelain sculptures of fire axes encased in glass boxes. The axes, like the hatchets, represent "the tools we have been given in replacement by an oppressive government," Galanin explained. Purely decorative and fragile by nature, they cannot save or protect or provide. "The real value of the hatchets is that, when they break, there will finally be a sharp edge that we can utilize as a tool," he added. The master's tools, indeed.

The question of interpretation, and misinterpretation, runs through Galanin's work. All of the SITE Santa Fe show's wall text is written by the artist. It is shorn of obscurantist language, and typically makes critiques or interventions plain for any viewer to understand. In some cases, he said, doing so is an acknowledgement of just how little most people know about Indigenous life and history; in others, it is protection against misrepresentation. "Often, [Indigenous artists] are asked to explain why we're here in these spaces and institutions. Then when we get there, and ironically, sometimes we're told, 'Well, don't tell us because we want to be able to contextualize it,'" Galanin said. "And then it continues to be completely misread and misrepresented by someone who's had zero experience in Indigenous communities, arts, creative process, practice, or connection to our place and world."

At its core is the conviction that Indigenous culture requires Indigenous people to make it real. Colonial knowledge extraction is dead on arrival, as it always was. The work Unconverted/Converted, a 2022 diptych of a deer hide and then a panel painted according to a digitized image of the hide, makes the loss of knowledge in translation visually obvious. The digitized hide lacks texture and detail. For "Intellectual Property," a 2020 series of photographs, Galanin simply refuses the knowledge transfer. The photographs display the materials needed to make the Indigenous objects indicated in the title, but no other explanation or context is provided.

"It reinforces the idea that our knowledge is also our property. It enforces the idea that it lives with us and it continues through us," said Galanin. "To this day, we still know how to create and get these things to us and for our communities."

Solidarity across movements and marginalized peoples is threaded through the exhibition. Galanin's strategies may have been developed in response to his historical and contemporary conditions, but they reach out beyond the Indigenous community. Another porcelain work, American Talking Stick, is shaped like a police baton, sarcastically contrasting Indigenous talking sticks-used at large gatherings-with the tools of police violence, wielded against protesters and marginalized peoples.

"It's becoming more and more apparent to many, I hope, that the collective liberation of all communities is at the core of any of our conversations," Galanin said. "That's something that humanity and the world has been faced with. We're seeing it play out in many ways right now, in ways that have shifted."

In November, Galanin made that solidarity tangible when he and Merritt Johnson asked the National Gallery of Art to remove their sculpture from its current exhibition on contemporary Indigenous art. They asked the museum to do so "due to US government funding of Israel's military assault and genocide against the Palestinian people," as they wrote on Instagram.

After screaming, it seems, comes the real work: cultivating solidarity and taking actions that can foster tangible change.

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In New Show, Tlingít Artist Nicholas Galanin Shows What Decolonization Actually Looks Like

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In 'Interference Patterns,' Nicholas Galanin contends with Indigenous history, contemporaneity, and fictions in thought-provoking ways.