From Contested Ownership to (In)Voluntary Returns: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Postcolonial Fight for Restitution and Repatriation

The workshop and forum will be held in English. For further questions please contact PD Dr. Silvan Niedermeier (Principal Investigator in the Research Unit on “Voluntariness”).

About

Starting in the early 1970s, activists all over the world embarked on a decades-long fight for the return of Ancestral Remains and looted colonial artefacts from European and North American museums and collections back to their countries and societies of origin. They achieved substantive successes in their efforts, even though their struggle is far from over. The interdisciplinary workshop aims to reassess the fight for repatriation and restitution by bringing together questions of ownership and voluntariness that are addressed in the Collaborative Research Center “Structural Change of Property” (Universities of Erfurt and Jena) and the DFG-Research Unit on “Voluntariness” (Universities of Erfurt, Jena and Oldenburg). Focusing on questions of ownership, the workshop will examine how activists have tried to contest Western notions of ownership in the debates on repatriation and restitution and how Western museums and collection have reacted towards these efforts.

Moreover, the workshop will discuss how notions of voluntariness shaped and continue to shape repatriation and restitution efforts due to the lack of a legal footing of restitution and repatriation requests in most countries of the world. Specifically, it will ask to what extent the resulting practices of and emphasis on voluntary returns shape the power relations between claimants and Western museums and collections. Revisiting the fight for repatriation, the workshop will examine how activists over the past five decades have challenged institutional and scientific claims over their Ancestors. Moreover, it will ask to what extent voluntary returns of Ancestral Remains perpetuate colonial power relations between Western institutions and claimants and if legally mandated forms of return establish a more equitable approach to repatriation.

Regarding the fight for the restitution of looted colonial artifacts, the workshop will assess the strategies by which non-Western claimants have tried to destabilize Western claims of legal ownership and cultural guardianship in the last decades. In addition, it will examine how Western institutions resisted and circumvented these contestations of ownership. It will also address the question if the lack of a legal basis for restitution claims and the resulting practice of selective voluntary returns continues to uphold colonial power relations between the former colonizers and the formerly colonized.

Programme

Thursday, October 24

• 1:00-1:30 pm: Welcome
• 1:30-4:30 pm: Forum
• 6:00-7:30 pm: Panel discussion (in German) “Verstecken? Ausstellen? Zurückgeben? Die Restitutionsdebatte und das Erfurter koloniale Erbe”

Friday, October 25

• 9:00 am - 12:30 pm: Projects (Length of presentations: 20 min)