✨ 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 👇👇

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More from @profdanhicks

19 Oct
the case of @tamaralanier vs @peabodymuseum is a landmark moment for museum ethics

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

>> ma-appellatecourts.org/pdf/SJC-13138/…
here is some background to the case theguardian.com/education/2019…
here is @thecrimson’s report on the verdict last March thecrimson.com/article/2021/3…
Read 4 tweets
5 Mar
@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)
Read 7 tweets
3 Mar
just updating my clippings Image
Image
Image
Read 5 tweets
3 Mar
“the destruction of the Kingdom of Benin was in retaliation for colonial insurrection” is not even the silliest claim in today’s FT review
ffs Image
it gets worse Image
Read 4 tweets
26 Feb
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.
Read 5 tweets
26 Feb
this opportunistic restructuring at the @V_and_A is a disaster for all who love museums

the V&A was never a historical museum — it's a museum of design

imposing a "chonological" structure is an attack upon the very purpose and ethos of the institution

theartnewspaper.com/news/radical-r…
solidarity with all those affected by this restructuring and whose jobs are under threat @VandPcs
Given this scale of loss, why not just cancel the white elephant that is V&A East instead?
Read 7 tweets

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