Paper short abstract:

This presentation discusses the reconfiguration of Ottoman genealogies in the curation of Cape Town's Islamic heritage through an anthropological study of the Effendi Room exhibition within the Bo-Kaap Museum.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation focuses on the Effendi Room exhibition within the Bo-Kaap Museum that was curated under the supervision of a Turkish heritage entrepreneur in the late 2010s. A product of the apartheid’s racialized cultural policies, the Bo-Kaap Museum was established in 1978 on the house of an evicted Cape Muslim family. Based on the vision of Izak David du Plessis for preserving the racial purity, authenticity and uniqueness of the Malay community, the museum has historically reinforced the exotic image of the Cape Malay. After the end of the apartheid regime, Iziko developed a new framework for collaborating with the communities that experts previously objectified in the museums. This paved the way to the collaboration between the Turkish heritage entrepreneur, the evicted family and the Iziko which resulted in the curation of the Effendi Room exhibition. While commemorating the evicted family through the display of photographs and objects from the family archive, the exhibition reconstructs the Islamic heritage in Cape Town by foregrounding the Ottoman genealogy of the community leaders. Studying the representation of the Ottoman imperial past in the museum space, this presentation analyses the reconfiguration of Muslim genealogies, rewriting of Islamic history and reconstruction of Islamic heritage in post-apartheid South Africa.

Paper short abstract:

In distinguishing between repatriation and restitution, this paper makes an argument for restitution to be understood not as events of return but as restitutive work, that empowers African claimants, and that proposes restitution as a social process of social recovery, & the basis of a new museology

Paper long abstract:

In the settler colonial societies of the Americas, Australia and New Zealand, the concept of repatriation has signaled a politics of sovereignty between the state and indigenous communities, with returns (as in the case of NAGPRA) to take place on a proactive basis. While repatriation and restitution are often held to be synonyms or signalling a difference between an international and a local return, this presentation argues that in the field of African restitution work, the notion of repatriation refers to the legal, administrative and logistical work done by European institutions in effecting returns, as an urgent means of cleaning their hands. Recent scholarship and activist research that have argued that restitution has experienced a process of gentrification have not understood the political distinction between repatriation and restitution. This presentation makes a case for restitution to be understood not as an event of return, but as a project of restitutive work, indeed of restitutive work as a new field of museum formation and transformation. Herein, restitution has to be embarked upon and understood as a project of local claims, local empowerment and local social restoration. Far from being a new dispossession, this era of restitution heralds the possibility of rethinking museum beyond governance and preservation, with a new concept of care rooted in restorative justice.

Paper short abstract:

British sociologies of racism have shown the 1960s-80s to be foundational to constructions of British racism. Yet this period remains overlooked in contemporary museum critique. This paper will explore the legacies of self-declared ethical best practice developed during this time, and its impacts.

Paper long abstract:

Whilst sociologies of British racism have always placed significant emphasis on the 1960s-1980s as foundational to the institutionalised landscape of whiteness in Britain today, these formative years have largely been overlooked within post-colonial critiques of the UK museum sector. This paper will explore how territorial decolonisation, self-declared anti-racism, liberalism, technocratic expertise and museum ethics intersected with the increasing professionalisation of the sector. It will draw on archives of the UK Museum Ethnographers Group and the Museums Association to argue that these formative years structurally embedded inequalities, oppressions and entitlements within notions of best practice. It will argue that this continues to shape the limits within which decolonial work must engage today. It will focus in particular on how “best practice” is encased within a self-articulated ethical completeness, based on narrowly defined public responsibility and access. And how this continues to restrict the possibilities for more human futures for collections and belongings from the African continent through policy and process.

The paper will focus on defining themes of the era, including multiculturalism and anti-racism, museum documentation, processes of material care and public responsibility through the regulation of policy.

Paper short abstract:

In this presentation, I propose to think of anthropological museum and academic collections as part and parcel of the production of racialised hierarchies that were crucial to the enforcement of capitalism as a world economy, and thereby also served as a means of production of capital themselves.

Paper long abstract:

Racial capitalism, a concept originally proposed most prominently by Neville Alexander in South Africa and Cedric Robinson in the USA, has recently been reintroduced to the analysis of a variety of subjects, ranging from climate justice (Gonzalez 2021), a re-assessment of reproductive labour and racial capitalism (Bhattacharyya 2018), a re-evaluation of Alexander’s contributions (Vally and Motala, forthcoming), as well as edited volumes on the histories of racial capitalism (Leroy and Jenkins, 2021) and colonial racial capitalism (Koshy et al., 2022), to name but a few. While interpretations of both key terms – racial and capitalism – differ, a unifying claim lies in the assertion that racialised hierarchies of exploitation are central to capitalist production.

In this presentation, I propose to think of the foundation of anthropological museum and academic collections not only as part and parcel of the production of these racialised hierarchies, but also as a means of production of capital themselves. I aim to provide a theoretical framework in which the appropriation of anthropological collections, their decontextualisation and integration into a racialised classificatory order, can be understood as part of wider processes of dispossession of those who were constructed to be at the bottom of the hierarchy, and an accumulation of capital on the side of those who were supposedly superior. Such an understanding allows for an interrogation of current claims for restitution as a possible means of redistribution.

Paper short abstract:

This paper critically examines the political, social and institutional settings in which archaeology was introduced in Namibia. I re-examine professionalised, academic and administrative archaeologies and argue that the colonial origins of archaeology have an effect on the current practices.

Paper long abstract:

This paper critically examine the political, social and institutional settings in which archaeology was introduced and continues to be practiced in the Namibia. Archaeology developed alongside colonialism in Africa. It became an apparatus for knowing about the strategic resources that could be found in Namibia. Through the processes of recording sites and artefacts archaeology provided information that was useful to the colonial administration. However, the narratives that were produced about Namibia excluded the perspectives of the local people. I re-examine professionalised, academic and administrative archaeologies in Namibia and argue that to a greater extent the colonial origins of archaeology have a compelling footprint in the current practices of Archaeology in the country. I therefore, argue for a reframed archaeological practice that recognises the experience and knowledge of the local communities as a way of decolonising archaeology in Namibia. Such an archaeological practice is socially engaged and challenges the authority of the professional.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses ‘missing’ objects from eastern African collections in Europe, examining how museums and auction houses in manufacturing disappearances of objects into private collections also silence the historical record. Colonialities endure through these profit driven disappearances.

Paper long abstract:

Where do objects collected under conditions of imperial duress go? Current restitution discourse usually focuses on collections with infamous acquisition histories. But not everything collected under such conditions entered museum collections, and not everything that enters museum collections remains there. Objects have a price, something rarely referenced when discussing historical ‘ethnographic’ collections. Imperialists collected objects not just as ‘ethnographic specimens’, but because of their retail value, determined by desires of museums and collectors in the global north. This financial calculation usually lies dormant, to be activated in times of economic pressure. Here enters the auction house, which in selling off collections for museums not only contributes to their ‘unmaking’ but separates objects from their historical record, silencing them in the process. Once in custody of the auction house, paper archives rarely travel with objects to their new owners, who are afforded total anonymity. Museum rhetoric of care affords no space for discussing the loss of objects in their care. This paper follows attempts to trace what was amassed by three nineteenth century imperial collectors in eastern Africa: Count Teleki, Captain Bottego and the James brothers. The remains of these collections are now housed in Hungary, Austria, Italy and the UK. It critiques how auction houses dehistoricize collections from their coercive acquisition conditions, and how museums ‘unmake’ themselves and deny discussion of this history by selling off collections in individual lots to private and inaccessible buyers. Colonialities endure not solely through the museum proper, but its relational institutions and structures.