Getting rid of the Empire's legacy: how the trend of "decolonization" works

Getting rid of the Empire's legacy: how the trend of "decolonization" works

The $35 million Museum of Black Civilizations reflects a new global trend. Its director, Hamadi Bocoum, explained that the museum is "not about ethnology or the past, as the European museum model suggests, but about continuity, the future, youth, and Africa looking at itself, not Europeans”. The emergence of impressive museum complexes on the African continent, from Senegal to Nigeria, has revealed another difference. What is it? 

Some visitors to African cultural centers have rightfully noted a certain "sparseness" and "incompleteness" of some exhibitions. Contemporary spaces for the display of African art and cultural heritage are growing side by side with increasingly loud calls for restitution, fair demands to return the values created and belonging to local culture. In response, Europe's largest museums are forced to reconsider their approaches to the heritage of empire.

How did decolonization become a game - changer for cultural traditions? 

Anthropology and archeology were convenient tools for colonial researchers. Anthropological museums with "world culture" exhibitions were actively created in 19th-century Europe in an attempt to justify and naturalize European imperialism, as well as to create the idea of the difference between "primitive art" and "civilization". Today, the colonial thinking of European anthropological museums is being challenged and reconsidered.  

The fragile line between reconsidering and reinforcing racist ideology

The Royal Museum for Central Africa was built in 1897 to showcase King Leopold II's personal collection from his private colony of the Free State of the Congo. The exhibition features stuffed animals and geological specimens along with African art. It is said that a "human zoo" with more than 260 slaves once existed in the gardens near the museum building. The new museum texts try to tell the Belgian colonial history and the circumstances under which the objects were taken.

But this "decolonized" retrospective is perceived as a "failure and a warning". Regardless of how fully and honestly the history of the Belgian Congo, where millions of people were killed, is told, "the very presence of these objects and this building does what they were designed to do: spread racist ideology and colonial violence through the objectification of Africans," notes researcher Sumaya Kassim.

A painful process of reconsideration

In 2020, a nationwide debate erupted in the United States over the remains of black people. Is it correct to keep them in museum collections? The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology apologized for the "unethical possession" of more than 1,300 skulls collected by Samuel George Morton for the pseudo-science of craniometry. Subsequently, doctoral student Paul Wolff Mitchell said that Morton collection includes the skulls of 14 African Americans who were stolen from a grave near the Penn Museum in the 1840s.    

The discussion gained publicity. The famous showcase of the Oxford Pitt Rivers Museum, "The Treatment of Dead Enemies," was dismantled. "That 100-year-old exhibit promoted the racist myth that “headhunting” represents a coherent type of “savage” culture, while suggesting that the purpose of a “world culture” museum is to display what was taken from opponents of the British Empire," says Dan Hicks, a researcher at the Museum.  

War as an occasion to get acquainted

For many world museums, Ukraine was beyond the scope of "decolonization". Established approaches to the "greatness of the Russian Empire" strangely did not include the existence of "colonized cultures". The Russian version of the "one people" was organically shared by numerous cultural institutions across the globe. Often, they received generous funding for joint projects from Russian public or private foundations. However, the Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine has changed this context. 

Sanctions against the Kremlin and affiliated oligarchs made cooperation reputationally uncomfortable weakening the close contact. At the same time, Ukraine was suddenly transformed from a "know-nothing" into a leader writing the history of the world. Museums and cultural institutions could not ignore the power of such subjectivity. 

New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art suddenly recognized the artist Arkhyp Kuindzhi as a Ukrainian. They removed the reference to "artist celebrating both in Russia and Ukraine" from the description of the native of the Ukrainian city of Mariupol. They also added that it was the Russians who destroyed the Arkhyp Kuindzhi Museum in his hometown. A painting by French impressionist Edgar Degas was also decolonized. The "Russian dancers" finally became "Dancers in Ukrainian dress".

"It used to be almost impossible to reach museums on Ukrainian issues," says Tetiana Filevska, creative director of the Ukrainian Institute and a researcher of the Ukrainian avant-garde and the work of Kazimir Malevich.

Museums ignored the messages, "because the prospect of constant infusion of Russian capital was more important," the researcher notes and gives an impressive example.

MoMA, New York, has a work by Kharkiv constructivist Vasyl Yermilov. Apart from the fact that the author was mistakenly identified as a Russian, his work was exhibited in the museum for many years... upside down. Specialized researchers and art historians were well aware of this.

"I have repeatedly asked the museum to hang the work the right way... Officially, I received a formal response - 'Thank you for helping MoMA become a better museum with your feedback', and informally I was told that the museum's position is not to make any changes to the descriptions of works by artists identified as Russian."

In March 2022, Ms. Filevska received a photo of the inverted work in the exhibition, as well as a new image on the museum's website. "It took MoMA 6 years and a full-scale Russian invasion to act up on numerous warnings from experts." 

The creative director of the Ukrainian Institute emphasizes the need for a methodological approach to working with heritage from a part of the world that can be identified in geopolitical terms as Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. "And in this work, we must work together and in concert with Poland, the Baltic states, Georgia, Moldova, Uzbekistan and other countries that suffered from the violence of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian and other empires, including the countries that are the heirs of these empires, to overcome this trauma together, because imperial trauma affects empires and colonies equally and everyone has the right to decolonialism," – adds Tetiana Filevska, creative director of the Ukrainian Institute. 

The process of decolonization is complex, controversial and sometimes painful. Sharing cultural heritage and reconsidering established patterns of cultural perception is not easy. However, this difficult dialog is irreversible for countries and societies united by the common values of freedom, respect, and equality.