Diasporas of Art: History, the Tervuren Royal Museum for Central Africa, and the Politics of Memory in Belgium, 1885–2014

Silverman, Debora L.

doi:10.1086/682912

Cited by 10 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 10 publications

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“…Over the past twenty years, the politics of commemorating the colonial past have become increasingly contentious in the former metropoles (Silverman 2015;Rea 2018), but less so in parts of Africa. In Zaïre (now DRC), all the statues honoring colonialists disappeared from view during President Mobutu's "authenticity" campaign from the late 1960s through early 1970s and were presumed to be destroyed.…”

Section: Monumentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Iconoclasms in Africa

Strother¹

2020

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

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This article demonstrates that a long history of iconoclastic struggles exists in numerous countries of sub-Saharan Africa and extends into the present. Exploring a range of motives and messages, I argue that iconoclasm targets people and their emotions and not just things, as monuments, devotional objects, and works of art become substitutes for those individuals, who are identified with them as patrons, makers, or caretakers. Iconoclastic controversies constitute a site where knowledge about the nature of representation and about the relationship of the past to the present is created and challenged. Whereas ongoing discussions about restitution have tended to foreground professionals in the culture industry, iconoclastic controversies provide a valuable opportunity to listen to self-identified stakeholders who claim a voice in determining the role of images in their societies, the question that lies at the core of the restitution debate.

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Section: Monumentsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Iconoclasms in Africa

Strother¹

2020

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

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“…The need to restore historical density to the inflow, display, and diaspora of objects in Tervuren collections clashes with a powerful and competing trend now visible both in Belgium and abroad: the emphasis on Africa as a continent, a geographic shape on a map rather than a series of countries with particular contexts and colonial legacies. 31 Produces a non-human scream.…”

Section: With What Voice-consciousness…?mentioning

confidence: 99%

On social practices which Donna Haraway calls "Teddy Bear Patriarchy"

Juresa¹,

Mendelsohn²

2019

Documenta

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Jelena Jureša’s video installation Aphasia consists of three chapters, each focusing on the absurdity arising from the collective silence surrounding crime and the compartmentalization of historical events, tracing the line between Belgian colonialism, Austrian antisemitism and the war in Yugoslavia. The film borrows the term 'aphasia' not exclusively from medical vocabulary—where it refers to trouble finding words or losing the ability to speak—but also from the writing of scholar Ann L. Stoler, who coined the term 'colonial aphasia', referring to the occlusion of knowledge in addition to collective amnesia, and the difficulty of generating a vocabulary that associates appropriate words, or concepts with appropriate things. Aphasia brings together compartmentalized historical events, through the history of racism and eugenics, focusing on the blind spots of history and the difficulty of speaking about the troubled past. The film charts the line starting with museum dioramas through photography to film, and sees them as deeply interwoven with imperialism and colonialism, used in order to produce a template for the blooming science of biological or physical anthropology.

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“…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%

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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Diasporas of Art: History, the Tervuren Royal Museum for Central Africa, and the Politics of Memory in Belgium, 1885–2014

Cited by 10 publications

References 10 publications

Iconoclasms in Africa

Iconoclasms in Africa

On social practices which Donna Haraway calls "Teddy Bear Patriarchy"

Congo Style

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