Cultural Politics: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Date and Time
The Return Era: The Global Politics of Cultural Restitution
Speaker
- Rouven Symank, John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University.
Contact
Hannah Stone
hannahstone@g.harvard.edu
Abstract
Cultural restitution has become one of the central political languages through which societies renegotiate the afterlives of empire. Disputes over the return of looted objects such as the Benin Bronzes have moved from the margins of heritage policy into mainstream public debate, not least in the context of renewed nationalism and wider controversies over colonial statues and street names. Yet restitution is not simply a matter of European controversy or legal ownership. As objects begin to be returned on a larger scale, it has become one of the few arenas in which claims about historical injustice are made politically global and
institutionally tangible.
This talk explores the debate through a question that, until recently, could scarcely be posed in concrete terms: what happens when objects are actually returned? Following recent restitutions to Senegal, Namibia, Ghana, and Nigeria, it traces the politics of return across the overlapping colonial legacies of France, Germany, and Britain. Moving between European and African museums, it shows what restitution sets in motion on the ground: ceremonies and exhibitions, contests over authority, new claims on the past, and diplomatic bargains struck in the name of redress. All of these, I argue, take shape in ways that are distinctly political and are approached here through political theory with an ethnographic sensibility. Rather than proceeding from abstract theory, the talk begins with the objects themselves and the larger questions they bring into view. From there, it asks a more unsettling set of questions: what if returns do not redress injustice, but instead obscure older asymmetries—or even generate new ones? How are democracies to reckon with their colonial past at a moment when the international order is moving away from liberal norms? By examining restitution through the lens of recent returns, this talk speaks to scholarly debates while also reaching a wider audience interested in museums, empire, public memory, cultural politics, and the changing terms of historical repair.