A Crisis of Legitimacy

Tools

Twitchin, Mischa. 2025. 'A Crisis of Legitimacy'. In: Memory Studies Association Annual Conference, 2025. Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic 14-18 July 2025. [Conference or Workshop Item]

No full text available

Official URL: https://msaprague2025.dryfta.com/

Abstract or Description

Pressing questions of restitution signify a crisis of legitimacy for European museums, symptomatic of the long process of decoupling from the colonial-modern paradigm. Erstwhile “ethnographic” collections (now called collections of “non-European arts” or the arts of “world cultures”) were founded as part of what Donald Preziosi calls the “epistemological technologies” of these museums, now seen as revealing of their self-representation rather than revealing of the “other” cultures purportedly represented by them. How is this situation exposed in the various contradictions expressed in the current display concerning the Benin collection at Berlin’s Humboldt Forum – not least, between a affirming the contemporary politics of “tradition” (with respect to the Kingdom of Benin) and the broader national politics of the state of Nigeria? Questions of cultural memory in this museum politics are not limited, of course, to institutional claims concerning “provenance research”, as if these concerned “property” rather than vehicles of and for cultural legitimation (“memory politics”). Addressing Memoryscapes, Social Justice, Mourning, Displacement (amongst other key themes of the MSA conference), my presentation will engage not only with the historical past but with the historical futures that are present in the relations between “museums and memory”. This discussion of Benin in Berlin is, then, oriented by Felwine Sarr’s observation that: “For the African continent, reopening the future begins with a reinvented relationship with its traditions and its cultural resources, avoiding the pitfalls of fetishisation and self-hatred. Such reinvention makes possible the remobilisation of symbolic capital with the power of germinating and reactivating one’s cultural and social resources” (2023: 120). How do such “cultural and social resources” admit of the ethical questions entailed in thinking the potential(s) of “crisis” in museums, as a site equally of and for “crisis” in memory studies?

Item Type:

Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)