Making African Connections: Decolonial Futures for Colonial Collections

Neck Ornament. (C) Trustees of the Powell Cotton Museum

Our project profile this month is by Nicola Stylianou, explaining what she gets up to when she's not being MEG web officer. 

This project, which is led by the University of Sussex and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, aims to further both conceptual and applied debates over ‘decolonizing’ public institutions.  In particular it explores the role of regional museums who are often overlooked in these discussions.  It focuses on three Museums in Sussex and Kent: Brighton Museum &Art Gallery, The Royal Engineers Museum and the Powell-Cotton Museum. These museums all hold collections of international significance assembled between 1890 and 1940, whose journeys to the South coast began in missionary, military and ethnographic encounters respectively.  The diversity of these collections, held in very different sorts of museums, provides an ideal opportunity for responding to the Tropen Museum’s (2017) call for recognition of complexity, not only in the histories of colonial holdings but also in potential ‘decolonial’ responses.  


 While the collections share colonial-era origins, they are in some ways radically different and thus provide an ideal basis for research into varied possibilities and constraints.  In each case museum staff and researchers are working closely with counterparts from universities, museums and heritage organisations in the places from where the collections originated.

The project launched in January and in February project partners from Sudan, Botswana, Namibia and various parts of the UK all met at Brighton Museum for the first project meeting.  The day began with a large group discussion and then broke into three groups to discuss the three museum collections. Winani Thebele, Scobie Lekhutile and Napandulwe Shiweda also spoke at a seminar on the topic of 'Heritage in Southern Africa:  debating decolonizing agendas'.

The three specific collections the project is studying are:

1)    Artefacts from Botswana (300 objects) that were loaned and later donated to Brighton Museum by Rev. Willoughby a prominent figure in the London Missionary Society (LMS).  Willoughby served in Southern Africa and while running a mission at Phalapye during the 1890s collected these objects.  Brighton Museum are working alongside colleagues from the National Museum of Botswana, the Khama III Memorial Museum and Brighton and Hove Black History to understand more about these objects.  

2)    Materials from the Namibia/Angola borderlands (approximately 3,000 objects) held in the Powell-Cotton Museum, a particular strength of the collection is Kwanyama material.  The objects were collected by sisters Diana and Antoinette Powell-Cotton during two expeditions in 1936 and 1937.  It is probably the largest collection of Angolan material in Europe and is supplemented by photographs, films, diaries and detailed notes. Extensive archival research is being done on this collection with advice from Dr Napandulwe Shiweda (University of Namibia).

3)   Artefacts from Sudan (153 objects) held at the Royal Engineers’ Museum in the UK as a direct result of British military aggression in the late nineteenth century.  These objects are being studied alongside letters, scrap books and photos. Research on this collection is being carried out with advice from members of the Sudanese diaspora and Shams Al Aseel Charitable Initiative, an NGO focussing on Mahdist material culture.

Reem Alhilou, JoAnn McGregor, Osman Nusairi and Fergus Nicoll look at scrapbook in the REM archive.

Planned outputs include a series of co-produced displays (2020), an online resource which will offer access to 600 historic artefacts as well as written and photographic archival material, an edited book, journal articles, new Wikipedia content, policy advice and the return (on loan in the first place) of nineteenth-century material to Botswana, for display at a regional museum: the Khama III Memorial Museum in Serowe. 

MakingAfrican Connections is funded by the AHRC. Project Reference AH/S001271/1

PhD Opportunity: The historic role of missionary societies in shaping children’s understandings of Britain’s place in the world

A Collaborative Doctoral Partnership studentship between the National Maritime Museum and the Sainsbury Research Unit, University of East Anglia, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council
 

The Hope of the World, Harold Copping

Start date: October 2019

Application Deadline: Friday 3rd May 2019 at 23h59min
Interviews will take place on Tuesday 21stMay 2019 in Greenwich

Supervisors
Dr Chris Wingfield (Sainsbury Research Unit)
Dr Robert Blyth (National Maritime Museum)

Project Overview 
In The Making of English National Identity (2003) Krishan Kumar argued that English identity was characterised by a form of ‘missionary nationalism’:

a nationalism that finds its principle not so much in equating state and nation as in extending the supposed benefits of a particular nation’s rule and civilization to other peoples. 

Kumar did not, however, particularly probe the ‘missionary’ component of ‘missionary nationalism’ – the degree to which exposure to missionary propaganda from a young age profoundly shaped the political, cultural and social attitudes adopted by many children in later life.

For generations of children growing up in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain,
 it was at Sunday school that they first came into contact with images of people living in other parts of the world. The scale of this impact should not to be underestimated. Susan Thorne (2006, 143) has suggested that ‘virtually every working-class child attended Britain’s massively popular Sunday Schools at one point or another’.

Images commissioned by Britain’s missionary societies formed part of their extensive educational programmes, and frequently embodied ideas about Britain’s providential role in the world (Brewer 2005). We might read these in terms of nineteenth-century ideas about ‘the White Man’s burden’, and as part of what we might now call historical constructions of ‘whiteness’, or perhaps more controversially 'the white saviour complex'.

As Britain embarks on a new chapter in its relationship with the wider world, it becomes increasingly important to re-consider the ways in which this relationship has been imagined in the past. While ‘decolonisation’ has become a buzzword in both museum and academic circles, it has frequently been associated with the attitudes and positions associated with ‘high imperialism’. This project is intended to develop a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which forms of benevolent paternalism were shaped and propagated in the context of British missionary societies, through their engagements with children and young people across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Full details of the project and information about how to applay are available on the UEA website.

Call for Papers: (Mis-)Representing Cultures and Objects: Critical Approaches to Museological Collections

A workshop at the University of Stirling, 16 May 2014

The issue of how we represent global cultures and associated material collections has been at the core of museological and postcolonial theory in recent years, with different formulations wrestling with the questions of how museums can address their histories and ensure the relevance of their collections. Key to this debate, are the terms employed for the objects themselves and the categories that museums deploy for the conventional purposes of interpretation and display. For example, the uncritical use of terms such as ‘religion,’ ‘art’ or ‘ethnography’ have a profound effect on how material culture is presented in museums and studied in universities.

There are a number of key factors in this debate. One is the provenance of the objects. Another is the ideological and – often – colonial context within which the objects were acquired. A third is the stated and inferred purposes of museums, which have their own ideological history. A fourth is the biographical positionality and status of the collector. There would also be the methods at different stages of acquisition for providing a description and valuation of the objects. And finally, there are the terms employed for the objects themselves and the categories that museums deploy for the conventional purposes of interpretation and display. For example, the uncritical use of terms such as ‘religion,’ ‘art’ or ‘ethnography’ have a profound effect on how material culture is presented in museums and studied in universities.

The University of Stirling, through the pioneering approaches to the study of categories under the descriptor Critical Religion, has been instrumental in deconstructing the term ‘religion,’ with a significant impact on the study of global cultures. Through a collaborative project between the University of Stirling and National Museums Scotland, this work has been applied to the context of Tibetan material culture and the western construction of Tibetan Buddhism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, in particular by missionary and military collectors. This has resulted in the completion of a PhD by Inbal Livne with the title Tibetan Collections in Scottish Museums 1890-1930: A Critical Historiography of Missionary and Military Intent.

Following on from this project, this workshop will explore the way in which academics within museums and universities are challenging historically assumptive terms in the identification, interpretation and use of material culture evidence. We will also examine how collaborations between museums and universities can encourage and develop new ways of examining museum collections.

The workshop will include a brief description of the collaborative Tibet project, and papers from museum professionals working directly on the practical application of these theoretical issues in relation to the display of Tibetan material culture.

We invite other scholars working on Tibet – or comparable contexts with history and identity represented in museum collections – to present papers that address one or more of the following, particularly as these different aspects relate to one another:

1. Missionary involvement in collecting for museums in the UK, and issues that arise in that context.

1. The construction of problematised terms such as ‘religion,’ ‘art,’ ‘ethnography,’ etc. in the context of the study of global material culture.

1. The examination of new and creative collaborations between museums and universities in developing the deconstruction of historically specific classifications of global cultural practices.

1. Historical processes of engagement and revision with regard to museum and archival collections.

1. The impact of postcolonial and postmodern thinking on museological and archival practice.

Please note that we are looking to publish a selection of papers from the workshop in an edited volume; acceptance of an abstract does not, at this stage, imply acceptance for publication, but all papers will be considered.  Further information on this will be forthcoming at the workshop.

Deadline for Call for Papers:

Please email abstracts of approximately 300 words to Rajalakshmi Nadadur Kannan at rajalakshmi.nadadurkannan@stir.ac.uk by 7 February 2014, to whom all queries should be addressed in the first instance.