here is the submission my colleague @nickmirzoeff and I have written in support of Tamara’s case against Harvard—to see these images of her ancestors returned to her
✨ 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
@MCHammer a short thread of the five known Benin ivory hip-ornament masks—small portraits of Idia, first Iyoba (Queen Mother) of the 16th-century Benin Kingdom 👇
@MCHammer 1/ This ivory Idia mask is in the British Museum. It was looted by Sir Ralph Moor in the sacking of Benin City, and later bought by the @britishmuseum from anthropologist Charles Seligman #BrutishMuseums
@MCHammer@britishmuseum 2/ This is the ivory Idia hip-ornament mask, also looted in 1897, that is currently in the @LindenMuseum in Stuttgart, Germany (but was formerly in the @Pitt_Rivers second collection)
can someone close to @TristramHuntVA please persuade him that this is NOT the moment to resurrect Hugh Trevor-Roper's claim that there is no history in Africa?
even the British Museum lumps Africa and Asia with the Americas!
This proposed scheme is Trumpian in its world-view
the ideology that claims the global south exists outside history has a history.
the V&A scheme is almost precisely that adopted when Oxford divided collections between the multi-department @AshmoleanMuseum and the @Pitt_Rivers in 1884 — the same year as the Berlin Congress.