Cultural Considerations
University of San Jorge
Guardians of Beautiful Things?: The Politics of Postcolonial Cultural Theft, Refusal, and Repair
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cresa Pugh
This paper examines the politics of cultural theft under imperialism, specifically thinking through how social movements surrounding artifacts looted from former colonies now housed in Western museums reveal the ongoing social and political legacies of imperialism. At the height of the global Black Lives Matter movements in 2020, the world witnessed a surge of actions calling for the decolonization of ‘world culture’ museums and other public cultural institutions and monuments. I consider my research to be a pre-history of the conditions which facilitated the rise of the decolonial activism against cultural hegemony at the heart of the current movement for reparations. Drawing on historical records from six archives and ethnographic data collected across two continents over three years, the paper traces an ongoing history of restitution from 1960 to 1998 of postcolonial actors in Nigeria advocating for the restitution of their ancestral heritage, and the British cultural and political establishments whose ‘world culture’ museums have increasingly been called upon to decolonize their collections and practices. I contend that the plunder of cultural patrimony is a constitutive element of colonization and racial capitalism as well as enduring forms of cultural neoimperialism and global racial domination that have long been overlooked by scholars of race and empire. Further, I offer a theory of imperial repair which considers the restitution and repatriation of spoils of war an essential component of the process of modern decolonization and the rebalancing of relations of power between Europe and Africa.
Aga Khan Museum Curriculum Project : New Media and Technology in the Arts Classroom View Digital Media
Creative Practice Showcase Miranda Blazey
The Aga Khan Museum brings together the designs of architects from Japan, India, and Lebanon and the Toronto firm of Moriyama & Teshima. The Museum is the first of its kind in North America that focuses on arts of Islam and its relationship to other traditions and cultures around the world. For the purpose of this unit, we focus on the Aga Khan Museum. The architect of the Aga Khan Museum, Fumihiko Maki, worked in collaboration with His Highness the Aga Khan and came up with the theme of “light.” The light that flows through Maki’s building, or that radiates from so many of the objects exhibited, is a metaphor of the understanding and tolerance the Museum aims to encourage (Monreal, 2014,10). For this study, I introduce participants to traditional and contemporary Islamic Design through exploring the Aga Khan. We explore how students create their own architectural structures online and through 3D models inspired by the theme of light used in the Aga Khan Museum.
Featured Making With Place: How Place Holds History for Diverse Young Artists View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Charlotte Lombardo
Making With Place (MWP) artfully explores relationships between community, culture, place and public space, from perspectives of youth with lived experiences of systemic inequities. Grounded in community arts practice, MWP engages QTBIPOC (Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Colour) young people as artist researchers. Resulting MWP public art experiments theorize place in significant ways, illuminating contexts from historic to present. Central to this learning are reflections into how Place Holds History, with artworks creatively (re)mapping and disrupting "boxed geographies” related to colonial and capitalist structures and paradigms. Pieces include a video installation (re)mapping of urban landscape with Indigenous imagery and teachings; a queer medicine garden (re)mapping land and relationships across genders, racializations, and species; and digital storyscapes of houselessness (re)mapping accepted ideas of place by surfacing untold stories and hidden communities. This (re)storying of histories challenges essentialized notions of community through pluralistic imagery and discourse, to chart new ways of being together. In this time of global uprisings against colonialism and white supremacy, and amidst the inequitable impacts of Covid-19, MWP confronts negotiations of difference, interdependence and justice. How can this embodied and embedded theorizing, this Making With Place, help us all navigate collective geographies, so that new, brighter horizons can unfold?
