Contested Heritage: the Politics of Cultural Treasures

Who owns a cultural heritage, and who has the right to safeguard it? Western museums, once assured in their remit to relocate and showcase world art and artifactual treasures, now face serious ethical, legal, and political questions about the justice and propriety of claiming and collecting other peoples’ cultural heritage. Whether prodded by protest or coerced by (recently instituted) antiquities law, institutions have been made to exhibit a heightened consciousness of their colonial pasts, re-contextualizing artifacts and in some cases outright repatriating them to their countries or areas of origin. But what’s at stake, for both museums and nation-states (Western and non-Western alike), when we consider the colonial foundations of amassing and displaying cultural objects? What does it mean to “decolonize the museum?” What’s left after it’s decolonized? How can we assess the claims of modern nation states to the ownership of pre-modern objects? How can we think about cultural heritage at all (alongside perhaps related concepts of essence, authenticity, and nationality)? What does it mean to own the past?

In this course, we will explore questions of culture, ownership, and decoloniality in the context of current debates in museology, archaeology, and art history. We will explore various cases studies, such as the Priam’s Treasure from Troy, the Benin Bronzes, the Parthenon Marbles, and the Bust of Nefertiti, as we assess the success and failure, scope and limits, of recent attempts to rectify the displacement of cultural works. Throughout, we will consider the very definition of “cultural heritage”—what it can mean, what it entails. Is cultural heritage necessarily a local phenomenon, or can it have a global expanse? In addition to examining archaeological contexts and formally analysing works of art, we will read from works by James Clifford, Lynn Meskell, Aaron Glass, Colin Renfrew, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cressida Fforde, Amy Lonetree, and Bettina Messias Carbonell.