Workshop
Cultures of Restitution: Decolonial Histories, Justice, and the Museum
Event Summary
“Cultural restitution” is often understood as a set of policies and practices that act on cultural objects: museum artworks that are returned from one country to another, for example. But cultural restitution is also a tremendously creative field, which itself produces cultural life: new languages, new forms of knowledge production, new communities of interest, new works of art. This workshop brought together a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and practitioners working with colonial and postcolonial heritage to inquire into these cultures of restitution, to delineate their histories, and to understand their capacity to shape new worlds.
The workshop culminated in an artist talk by Chidi Nwaubani, a co-founder of the artist collective Looty, which has experimented with the "digital repatriation" to Africa of looted objects housed in Western museums.
A recent Pozen News article previewed how panel participants approached the topic of restitution.
Co-sponsored by the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry and the Pozen Center for Human Rights, in partnership with the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society.