Thread by @profdanhicks

✨ the paperback edition of #BrutishMuseums is officially published today, with a new preface and an updated list of museums holding Benin Bronzes! ✨
there are quite a few made-up words and concepts in the book, so to mark the day here are seven of them in a thread 👇

1/ Chronopolitics
the use of time as a mode of colonial domination, including the weaponisation of the discipline of Archaeology #BrutishMuseums

2/ Necrography
An account of death and loss. A death-history. An anti-biography. When applied to material culture, an alternative to the tired idiom 'the social life of things' or 'the cultural biography of objects' #BrutishMuseums

3/ White Projection
An enduring pathology of Victorian 'race science' and corporate militarism, characterised by a continual psychological switching of positions between the more powerful and the weaker party.
The pretence that the aggressor is in fact the victim #BrutishMuseums

4/ Euro-pessimisom
A critical framework recognising the knowledge European curators can gain from studying looted African objects is coterminous with the anti-Black colonial violence through which they were taken — until the work of cultural restitution is begun #BrutishMuseums

5/ World War Zero
The 30-year corporate-colonial war waged by European nations in Africa and across the Global South from the Berlin Conference of 1884 to WWI — previously represented as a series of discrete 'expeditions', rather than one ultraviolent attack #BrutishMuseums

6/ A Theory of Taking
A potential antidote to the relentless emphasis on 'gift-giving' in the anthropological study of material culture studies — accommodating questions of dispossession and consent #BrutishMuseums

7/ Cultural Restitution
The return (on demand) of looted objects taken and displayed as part of a colonial ideology of cultural supremacy during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. Also, thev sharing of knowledge of such collections so demands can be made #BrutishMuseums

oh, and you can support independent radical publishing by ordering the new paperback OF #BrutishMuseums directly from @PlutoPress rather than from Am*zon or similar
>> plutobooks.com/9780745341767/…

[ENDS]

in-person book launch next Wednesday at @blackwelloxford 👇👇