Paper short abstract:

In many post/colonial settings the demand for restitution and the building of museums is part of a broader demand for 'restitutive work'. Exploring museum spaces in a Moroccan landscape of accumulated violence, we argue that research on restitution dynamics and its publics has yet to begin

Paper long abstract:

The Rif has long been perceived as a dissident territory; at the same time marginalized and having undergone unprecedented colonial violence. Exploited and literally poisoned by the Spanish colonialists, after independence the Moroccan state has been blamed for neglect and violent oppression. The memorization of social and political histories in the Rif is entangled in competing narratives of belonging and resistance extending across communities in Morocco, Spain, and the Rifian Diaspora. Memories of the anti-colonial fighter Abdelkrim el-Kattabi go along with the construction of a Mediterranean past and a pre-colonial liberal culture of co-existence. In a contested museum landscape, ranging from local history museums in the Spanish enclave of Melilla through governmental museums dedicated to the national history of anti-colonial struggle to private museums dedicated to locally contested war leaders, the creation of a new regional museum has been turned into a battleground for different factions of local and transnational publics. Promoted as part of the community reparation program that addresses systematic violations of human rights until the end of the reign of king Hassan II (1999), the demands for a new museum and restitution extend well beyond the repatriation of colonial collections. While most of them remain outside of Morocco, the few objects that were repatriated are withhold by the authorities from the designated museum space. This presentation explores how the 'restitutive work' (Rassool) that has been projected onto the re-building of museums and the restitution of objects, comes into conflict with fragmented publics and the recalcitrant pasts they inhabit