De impact van Congo in het Museum van Belgisch Congo in Tervuren (1897-1946)

Couttenier, Maarten

doi:10.2307/j.ctt9qf1wc.9

Cited by 6 publications

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“…Maarten Couttenier (2005) and Sarah Van Beurden (2015a) have traced the colonial machinations of Belgium's Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA), in Tervuren (figure 4). Van Beurden examines the relations between the RMCA and the National Museum Institute of Zaire (today, the National Museum of the Congo) to investigate how Congolese artworks were deployed in fraught postcolonial relations.…”

Section: Shifting Focusmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many scholars have discussed how the king's supposed antislavery mission in Africa served at the founding exhibition of the RMCA as a disguise for a system of ruthless extraction (see, e.g., Couttenier 2005;Dunn 2003;Flynn 1998;Hochschild 1998;Silverman 2015;Van Beurden 2015a). Taking this duplicity as a given, I emphasize recurring themes of progress linked to annexed nature in order to understand the forms of primitivism and racial hierarchy embedded in the exhibition's structures.…”

Section: Introducing Art Nouveau Via the Congo: The Congo Pavilionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Congo Style

Sacks¹

2023

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Congo Style presents a postcolonial approach to discussing the visual culture of two now-notorious regimes: King Leopold II’s Congo Colony and the state sites of Mobutu Sese Seko’s totalitarian Zaïre. Readers are brought into the living remains of sites once made up of ambitious modernist architecture and art in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. From the total artworks of Art Nouveau to the aggrandizing sites of post-independence Kinshasa, Congo Style investigates the experiential qualities of man-made environments intended to entertain, delight, seduce, and impress. In her study of visual culture, Ruth Sacks sets out to reinstate the compelling wonder of nationalist architecture from Kinshasa’s post-independence era, such as the Tower of the Exchange (1974), Gécamines Tower (1977), and the artworks and exhibitions that accompanied them. While exploring post-independence nation-building, this book examines how the underlying ideology of Belgian Art Nouveau, a celebrated movement in Belgium, led to the dominating early colonial settler buildings of the ABC Hotels (circa 1908–13). Congo Style combines Sacks’s practice as a visual artist and her academic scholarship to provide an original study of early colonial and independence-era modernist sites in their African context.

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Section: Shifting Focusmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introducing Art Nouveau Via the Congo: The Congo Pavilionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Congo Style

Sacks¹

2023

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“…The exhibition of these artefacts in museums played a determining role in the construction and dissemination of racial hierarchies on the scientific as well as cultural level (Bennett, Cameron, Dias 2017; Macdonald 1998). As the facial casts were, especially during the 1930s, an integral part of museum spaces open to the public – in institutions such as the Florentine museum of anthropology, the Musée de l'homme in Paris, the Natural History Museum of Vienna and the Belgian Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (Couttenier, 2005) – they acquired the status of material scientific proof of the existence of races. Their hierarchical arrangement in the rooms – following a graduated pattern supposedly reflecting the evolution of mankind – thus served to corroborate theories on the racial classification of humanity.…”

Section: Casts From Nature: Anthropological Artefacts For Mass Produc...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Images of black faces in Italian colonialism: mobile essentialisms

Piccioni

2022

Mod. Italy

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This study analyses the essential question of the role of visual and material culture in the construction of a mass racial ideology during the Fascist colonial empire. The hypothesis behind this essay is that representations of the facial features of colonised populations may be understood as agents that transform what are in fact inconsistent and vague notions of identity and race into concrete and effective ontologies, both in the scientific field and in the popular imaginary. The facial casts made by the anthropologist Lidio Cipriani and exhibited in the race pavilion of the very popular Mostra triennale delle Terre italiane d'Oltremare (1940) in Naples, the anthropological photographs and illustrations of the infamous journal La Difesa della razza (1938–43), and the advertising images representing African women's bodies, both gave consistency to the notion of race and incarnated its protean nature made up of narratives, metaphors, fantasies, and prejudices constructed and accumulated over time.

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“…Having been undergoing renovations for five years, and the reopening having been postponed many times, this museum represented a colonialist vision of Congo until 2013. The permanent exhibition had not been modified since the 1950s and the independence of Congo dates back to 1960 (Couttenier, 2010).…”

Section: When Everything Beganonce Again In 2018mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Belgian debate on restitution since 2018

Zian¹

2021

Tijdschrift Over Cultuur &Amp; Criminaliteit

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TitleThe Belgian debate on restitution since 2018 -A perspective on the political acts shaping Text This article analyses political discourses in the light of the vocabulary and suggestions contained in the parliamentary resolutions proposed in 2019 dealing with the restitution. It appears that the discourses are committed but the developed suggestions are mild. This apparent contradiction can be explained through Hanna Pitkin's work on political representation. Using this analysis, two reflections are proposed in the conclusion: one on the Belgian case with regards to the European context and the other on the current expectations of society. Keyword 1 Restitution of cultural heritage Keyword 2 Belgium Keyword 3 parliamentary documents Keyword 4 decolonisation Keyword 5 return Area of Law Area 1 Area 2 Area 3 Area 4 Area 5 12 E.g.: the statue of Robert Milligan in London, Colston in Bristol, Leopold II in Antwerp and Pierre Belain in Martinique.

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De impact van Congo in het Museum van Belgisch Congo in Tervuren (1897-1946)

Cited by 6 publications

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Congo Style

Congo Style

Images of black faces in Italian colonialism: mobile essentialisms

The Belgian debate on restitution since 2018

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