‘Guardians of Beautiful Things’: The Politics of Postcolonial Cultural Theft, Refusal, and Repair

Abstract

My dissertation examines how the retention, management, possession, ownership and control of material heritage looted from colonized nations during imperial wars helps create, shape, and maintain the enduring legacies of cultural and social imperialism. It then uses these insights to build a theory of imperial repair, which considers the restitution and repatriation of spoils of war an essential component of the modern decolonization process, and the rebalancing of relations of power between Europe and Africa. I develop these arguments through an in-depth analysis of the restitution debates surrounding the Benin Bronzes. On one side of the debate, the Nigerian government argues that the Benin Bronzes are central to their ancestral heritage, and continues to petition the United Kingdom for the restitution of these Bronzes, which were violently looted from the Benin Kingdom by British soldiers in 1897, and still reside in British museums today. On the other side, officials in British cultural and political establishments have consistently argued that the looted artifacts should stay in their “world culture” museums, even as their rationales for why they should keep the looted Bronzes have varied over the years. In studying the evolution of these debates, I demonstrate that the plunder of cultural patrimony is a constitutive, if understudied, element of past colonization and racial capitalism processes. Importantly, I also show how this past looting continues to actively perpetuate cultural neoimperialism and global racial domination in the present. The control, distortion and eradication of cultural materiality and national memory is an insidious form of hegemony that often goes unexamined in socioeconomic and political analyses of postcolonial inequality, yet is critical in understanding the persistence of uneven state development. As such, this project advocates for a revision of the ways in which sociologists conceptualize the constitutive elements of the colonial process, neoimperialism, and decoloniality. I argue that a full understanding of a country’s postcolonial development trajectory is incomplete without an exploration of the impacts of the legacies of cultural dislocation, theft and, ultimately, restoration.