The Post/Colonial Museum

The African museum landscape is changing. A new generation of scholars and curators is setting international standards for the reappraisal and revision of colonial collections, the conception of curatorial spaces, and the integration of new groups of actors. In the face of the ghostly survival of colonial epistemologies in archives, displays, and architectures, it is a matter of breaking up institutional encrustations and infrastructures, inventing new museum practices, and bringing archives to life. Scholars and museum experts predominantly working in Africa and South America discuss the post/colonial history of museums, their political-economic entanglements, the significance of diasporic objects, as well as the prospects for restitution and its consequences. The contributions to this issue of ZfK are all presented in English. Based on the works of Waverly Duck and Anne Rawls, the debate section is devoted to forms of everyday racism and the way interaction orders of race are institutionalized.

Anna Brus (Dr. phil.) is a staff member of the art history department of the University of Cologne and a curator. From 2012-2016 she was a DFG scholarship holder of the graduate program 'Locating Media' at the University of Siegen with the project 'Colonial art in symmetrical perspective. Julius Lips and the Inversed Gaze'. Her research focuses on the history of art history and ethnology, the history of collections and exhibitions in a post/colonial context, and global colonial and contemporary art. Michi Knecht is a professor for social and cultural anthropology, co-speaker of the interdisciplinary research platform 'Worlds of Contradiction (WoC)' and co-founder of the BNCL, Bremen NatureCultures Lab at Bremen University. Her research focuses on the interconnections between knowledge practices and social forms. At the intersections of Anthropology and STS, she has investigated assisted reproductive technologies, political and religious movements, new forms of kinship, poverty and anonymity. Currently, she is rethinking problems of unrequited reciprocity in the context of object circulation under colonial rule and with post/colonial consequences and the history of object-extractivism. Martin Zillinger (Prof. Dr.), teaches social and cultural anthropology with a focus on the anthropology of religion and media at the University of Cologne.