In order to reappraise discourses on the restitution vs. retention of Africa’s cultural heritage, Eyssette examines the Musée du Quai Branly (France), the AfricaMuseum (Belgium), the British Museum (UK), and the Humboldt Forum (Germany) as one representative spectrum for analysis showing the mutual imbrications of their changing strategies and practices. After detecting biases in retentionist arguments on security, accessibility, law, and ethics, Eyssette stresses symmetrical shortcomings in restitutionist discourses on provenance research and the instrumentalization of heritage for economic gains or post-colonial rebranding. The conclusion determines whether these four institutions are retentionists, rhetorical restitutionists, or truly reformed restitutionists.
Abstract-Africa is either subject to centrifugal accounts which offer a fragmented picture of its past and potential or to centripetal examinations that tend to extrapolate their results to disconnected parts as if the continent could be melted into a single analytical unit. The purpose of this article is three-fold. The first part aims at demonstrating that even though Afro-pessimists and Afro-optimists resort to the same criteria, their insufficient correlations lead to dichotomous conclusions. The second part seeks to show that while the emergence narratives might explain occasional phenomena, they fail to include human and technological factors which reframe the African debate into the Renaissance paradigm. By focusing on digitalization and education, the third part intends to shift the academic research towards the spill-over effects of Internet in what arguably constitutes Africa's Renaissance.
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