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Dan Hicks

@profdanhicks

28 Oct

it's been a very busy week for the return of looted objects from France to Bénin 🇧🇯 and from the UK to Benin City, Nigeria🇳🇬

here's a summary of what's been going on (THREAD) 👇

@quaibranly

1/ a "farewell exhibition" is being held at the @quaibranly
displaying the 26 items of the Trésor de Béhanzin, looted from the Abomey Palace in the Kingdom of Dahomey in 1892—which will be returned to Cotonou next month
The exhibit is open till Sunday quaibranly.fr/fr/expositions…

@FelwineSarr

2/ a major conference was held to mark this landmark return, with speeches from many of the key players including Prof @FelwineSarr and Prof Bénédicte Savoy @KuK_TUBerlin — who compared this watershed moment to the fall of the Berlin Wall: "there was before, and there was after"

Read 9 tweets

Dan Hicks

@profdanhicks

26 Oct

just catching up with the Policy Exchange “History Matters Principles for Change” culture war manifesto, and 60 seconds in my first observation is that “the UK’s leading think tank” appears not to understand the difference between English Heritage and Historic England

@MuseumsAssoc

also direct contravention of @MuseumsAssoc ethical guidelines on donors and curatorial integrity here

it will also surprise Oxbridge Governing Bodies that Policy Exchange think that the university’s Vice Chancellor might be a “stakeholder” in their decision-making — while evidently elected student bodies, alumni, unions, the wider public, etc may not be

Read 4 tweets

Dan Hicks

@profdanhicks

20 Oct

✨ 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

Read 10 tweets

Dan Hicks

@profdanhicks

19 Oct

@tamaralanier

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…

@thecrimson

here is @thecrimson’s report on the verdict last March thecrimson.com/article/2021/3…

Read 4 tweets

Dan Hicks

@profdanhicks

5 Mar

@MCHammer

@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

@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

@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