Paper short abstract:

What does it mean to encounter materials that have been objectified, museumised and contained often outside the contexts of their production, circulation and use? This encounter, especially with material from colonial contexts, is infused with the colonial violence and extraction.

Paper long abstract:

What does it mean to encounter materials that have been objectified, museumised and contained often multiply dislocated and decontextualised, outside the contexts of their production, circulation and re-use? This encounter, especially with material from colonial contexts, is infused with the colonial violence and extraction attendant to their journeys into the museum. Borrowing from Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga’s ideas, especially on being human, chivanhu, from a Zimbabwean cosmology-especially thinking through “mobile workshops and transient workspaces”, I am keen to explore how reactivating the ‘object,’ through art practices and other forms of communion, as well as locating the ‘object’ as part of indigenous forms of technology and knowledge, alerts us to the possibilities of knowing that are not present within the carceral histories and institutional practices that accompany ethnographic collections in museums. To learn from this material differently also demands a relinquishing and disinvestment from the modes of epistemic and institutional authority (racialised, gendered, oppressive in a myriad ways) through which the material arrives to us clothed in the garments of the ethnographic object. If the ‘objects’, to use Harry Garuba’s thought, are to be “teacherly texts”, then we must learn from them, in addition to many other things, the arts of transgressing the museum as carceral space and container.