Both in the former colonies as well as in Germany and Europe we are today confronted with the manifold and powerful legacies of colonialism and racism – cultural assets and artifacts, knowledge and human remains, language and linguistic usage, monuments and street names, collective memory and political relations. Thus, it is necessary to critically question collections, museums, knowledge, and politics and to reveal their genealogies and underlying racist conceptions.
Prof. Andrew Zimmerman | Robbery, Representation, Restitution, and Destruction
Across Europe and the United States, activists have been tearing down statues of white supremacists—politicians, slave traders, and military officers, and the like. This is surely part of the same engagement with the material traces of global white supremacy as the struggles to deal with objects of colonized peoples held in European museums. But the arts and crafts and tools of colonized people held in European collections should not, of course, be destroyed like the statues of white supremacists. These artifacts are, more or less, stolen property that should be returned as one part of a broader process of reparations. Even body parts—though they might also be considered as evidence for murder investigations—can be returned, at least partly on the basis of an analogy with stolen property. But what about the photographs and plaster casts of body parts that also form a part of many, if not all, collections? They are objects of representation rather than robbery. This paper will consider the violent processes by which these representations were taken as a way to relate them to the destruction of white-supremacist statues, in order to think about what justice might mean in regard to these objects.