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Brutish Museums
Conférence de Dan Hicks
ouvroir
2022-11-07
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Brutish museums

Intro

rencontres sur la décolonisation du musées CELAT (qc uLaval) et IPAC (Paris)

subvention sur les gouvernances des musées

Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford

Dan Hicks

Reflexions around the Brutish museums

The Brutish Museums. The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution 2020, University of Oxford

Decolonising and Museums

  • Decolonization is not a metaphor, Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang 2012
  • The wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon 1961
  • Césaire

Samaya Kassim, the museum will not be decolonised, mediadiversified

I do not want to see decolonisation become part of Britain’s national narrative as a pretty curio with no substance – or, worse, for decoloniality to be claimed as yet another great British accomplishment: the railways, two world wars, one world cup, and decolonisation.

Pitt Rivers - The Evolution of Culture 1874-1875

nearly all the weapons used by the Australians to show hypothetically their derivation from a single form

theory is based on violence

Rhodes must fall Ox movement @RMF_Oxford

Pitt-Rivers museum is one of the most violent spaces in Oxford

At that time, the museum felt pretty good about themselves

  • had restituted objects
  • hosted events and activities

Art and culture were put to work to make certain colonial views last:

  • durational forms of art
  • once you put up an exhibition or a monument, it's incredibly difficult to take them down

Cecil Rhodes statue, Oriel College, Oxford

Benin case

  • objects that were taken with violence
  • violence is told and retold as they open their doors
  • display cases are another tool in the armoury, in the tactic of war that sought a claim to sovereignty; to the destruction of religion and ancestral history; cultural dispossession to create a ground zero
  • speed at which the objects were stolen and the exhibited
  • objects were put into the room with bronze age: we are taking your culture and sticking it into the bronze age

1894:

  • openin of pitts museum
  • division of Africa to European nations
  • invention of the machine gun : culture model based on weaponery

Benin 1897

  • punitive expedition
  • did not happen in a colony (European nations did not loot their colonies); different forms of colonialism: militarist extractivist form of colonialism that went with company land and protectorate land → Royal Niger Company / Niger Coast Protectorate (palm oil & rubber)
  • 10'000 objects looted, 1200 bronze plaques + brass sculptures, carved ivory tusks, coral work, ivory, wood, metal

Movement for restitution for the 100 year anniversary, including by Bernie Grant MP

What does it look like for the museum

Accountability and justice

  • making lists
  • forms of restitutions