RestArt

The restitution of knowledge: returning African colonial artefacts and decolonizing European museums. An international law perspective.

The overall objective of RestArt is to offer a new understanding of the status of African colonial cultural items held in European museums by shedding light on the current debate over their repatriation through the lenses of international law and efforts to decolonize it.  It does so by overturning the terms of the current academic debate which is strongly dominated by European scholars, despite the fight for restitution of African cultural heritage being led by Africans. The academic, legal, and gender dimensions of this decolonial fight have been overlooked in Europe.  As Bénédicte Savoy has stressed, the fight for restitution was, and is, not simply articulated along geographic, political and generational lines, but it has a specific gender dimension.  Both in Europe and Africa, women have strongly contributed to largely unsuccessful campaigns for repatriation of colonial cultural objects. This gendered dimension of the debate has gone largely neglected in European scholarship. Addressing the aforementioned gaps, RestArt intends to contribute to a paradigm shift in the discourse on repatriation of African cultural heritage by including in its remit African primary and secondary sources and highlighting the role played by women. RestArt tries to demonstrate that European states have a legal duty to return colonial artefacts acquired without the consent of the communities of origin. In line with the position of the Africa Union, it therefore challenges the common argument of former colonial powers that, although morally appalling, colonialism was not illegal according to the standards of the time.  As postcolonial scholars have argued, the European colonial project can also be interpreted as a form of cultural control over the colonized populations that created mechanisms of knowledge-production and power relations of an oppressive nature that have gone so far unchallenged.  The near-monopoly of Western museums’ possession of the global South’s cultural heritage in particular represents one of the continuities between the age of empires and our time. It is estimated that a mere few universal collections host between 90 and 95% of African cultural heritage.  Museums historically served as a ‘legitimating device for an ideology of white supremacy that naturalized colonialism – not merely a side effect of empire but an essential technology thereof’.  In recent years, as demonstrated by protest movements like the ‘urban fallism’, the urge to engage with the multi-layered legacy of colonialism has gained momentum.  Consequently, there have been efforts to address colonial violence through investigations and litigation in the institutions and courts of European countries. Art historian Alice Procter has led the ‘Uncomfortable Art Tours’ in the British Museum highlighting the colonial origin of several artefacts acquired through violence. Furthermore, the European Parliament has encouraged the development of EU guidelines on restitution of colonial artefacts.  It is hence high time to confront the legacy of colonialism by exposing the legal status of colonial cultural heritage in European museums. Relying on an emerging body of non-Western findings inspired by postcolonial studies, RestArt presents an innovative scholarly contribution by adopting a new perspective centred on the critical analysis of primary and secondary sources from former colonies relating to the status of colonial artefacts including an important diversity and gender perspective.

Pietro SULLO - 04/09/2025 – 03/09/2027