✨ 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
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
@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.