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Paper short abstract:

With specific reference to a collection of late nineteenth-century southern African objects at the Horniman Museum, this paper addresses the production of intimacy through object research, and explores possibilities for alternative ways of ‘knowing’ in the absence of provenance information.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to explore the issue of archival absence in colonial-era collections of African material heritage through a reframing of object research as a labour of intimacy, capable of evoking feelings of frustration, grief, loss and longing. With specific reference to a collection of objects from southern Africa compiled by Henry J. Hodgson in the late-nineteenth century and held at the Horniman Museum in London, I explore the ways in which researchers experience, navigate and produce intimacy, even (and perhaps especially) in cases where there is little provenance data. In the case of the ‘Hodgson collection’, despite containing a number of deeply intimate and personal objects likely chosen for their easy portability, we know little about the collector and even less about the people from whom the objects were sourced. By drawing on Black feminist interventions into the archive, this paper questions whether the multi-sensory work of handling and researching objects is able to provide alternative avenues of ‘knowing’, such as speculative or impossible histories. Furthermore, it questions, what are the pitfalls of inventing intimacy in the spaces left behind by archival omissions, and in which scenarios is it more appropriate to heed calls for “narrative restraint”? Finally, this paper also questions what the future of such objects should be, given that they are so often precluded from debates on restitution by their relative lack of provenance information.