法国归还文物

Abstract 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 Current debates around restitution of looted art from Africa mostly ignore politico-economic aspects of neocolonialism, reflecting the trend in academia as well as the wider public to separate cultural from economic issues. This article first aims to show the importance of the plunder and looting of material belongings in the establishment of European colonial rule over the African continent. Building on this, the author then highlights the role that restitutions play in current international neocolonial relations and in the political economy of ethnological museums. The paper calls for a broader analysis of the political economy of postcolonial restitution to realise its anticolonial potential.

This paper addresses the issue of repatriation/restitution of African cultural objects in Western museums by analysing the terminology used to discuss the demands of return by African states and people. After analysing these used terms which differ slightly from one another, the paper overviews the various types of cultural objects that ended up in European museums. The chapter finally discusses the destinations of the reclaimed cultural objects in postcolonial Africa by showing that not only the original contexts of these cultural objects have changed, but also that the countries asking for the return of these objects should work toward cohering identities for the benefit of all.

This article aims to investigate the way the French government has utilized the restitution of African colonial artefacts to reshape its postcolonial identity. The decision to return African artefacts to their country of origin is studied from a national perspective, shedding light on the postcolonial evolution of the French society, and from an international perspective, placing this decision within the structure of international relations. This article demonstrates that the restitution of African colonial artefacts is part of a political strategy aimed at addressing the national and international criticisms directed towards the French government without having to implement the structural reforms necessary to truly resolve them.

Ghana’s post-independence governments have made a number of requests for the return of looted and illegally acquired Ghanaian cultural objects in the collections of European museums. While the majority of those requests were denied, a few were honoured. This paper assesses three of the demands and the aftermath of their return. It also examines the preparedness of heritage institutions and museums in Ghana inrelation to issues of restitution and repatriation. The paper identifies the numerous challenges confronting the museum and heritage sector in Ghana and concludes by calling on policy makers, traditional authorities, universities and the government of Ghana to deepen public awareness of cultural heritage, invest more in museums and heritage institutions to function well and revisit earlier demands that were denied.

… French culture minister Rima Abdul Malak, promising a sweeping change in French legislation regarding restitution of looted art. … for how France could responsibly return African cultural …

… he endorsed the repatriation of African artworks and artifacts from French museums to their … looted African artifacts, so far have been intransigently opposed to demands for restitution. …

ABSTRACT This policy review discusses the November 2018 Report on the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics – more commonly known as the Sarr-Savoy Report – submitted to the French president. The report provides an analysis as well as a number of strategies for returning a number of cultural items and artworks to African nations that were acquired by France during the colonial era. The report also claims that its aim is to establish a new relational ethics between France and African nations through heritage work and institutions. In this policy review, we will discuss the arguments and observations contained in the report, as well as the main recommendations it makes. Additionally, we will provide an overview of responses to this report, and of the realization and implementation of the report’s recommendations halfway through its five-year timeline. Finally, we will engage with the ethical and professional dimensions that stem from this important moment – a moment that represents a turning point in current restitution debates for French museums, libraries, and archives.

ABSTRACT In 2020, French senators voted to return 27 objects held in the country’s museums to Benin and Senegal. When speaking to the French Press, the French Minister of Culture, said, “the bill is not an act of repentance, but an act of friendship and trust (Selvin).” Without repentance, how can France hope to build friendship and trust with its former African colonies? Although extant literature (Curtis; DeBlock; Hicks; Maaba; Maples Munjeri; Nevadomsky; Roberts; Shyllon; and Thompson) provides insight into how France could restitute African cultural property, this literature has not explicitly considered the role that anti-Black racism plays in France’s resistance to the restitution of African cultural property. Therefore, we investigated the research question: in what ways might Critical Race Theory (CRT) inform policies and practices on the restitution of African cultural property from France back to African nations?

These requests are indeed confronted with various obstacles, whether it is the limited scope of the conventions, their non-retroactive nature, or the expiration of periods of limitation. In the absence of applicable international standards, plainti ff s must then refer to national laws and courts of justice in the States concerned in the dispute. However, due to the complexity of situations and the diversity of legal systems, legal proceedings are o ft en unpredictable and unsatisfactory. In these circumstances, many restitutions today are the result of alternative processes (voluntary restitution, mediation, or arbitration) which allow the participants to invoke moral, ethical, or deontological principles and lead to equitable solutions adapted to each situation.

… for Algeria’s French art offers an alternative narrative of restitution and decolonization that … the instrumentalization of restitution debates and the role of art in constructing the French and …

When French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on November 28, 2017, he announced his plans to temporarily or permanently return French state-owned African cultural possessions to their original source nations (Macron 2017). Museums with African art collections were sent into a tailspin as heated debates ignited across the world following the speech. Macron subsequently engaged the Senegalese economist and philosopher Felwine Sarr and art historian Bénédicte Savoy to write a formal report with restitution recommendations. Released in 2018, their report concluded that all cultural possessions in French museums acquired before 1960 without evidence of full consent from their original owners or guardians should be returned to Africa (Sarr and Savoy 2018),1 “essentially advocating the unconditional and comprehensive return of all such possessions” (Plankensteiner 2019: 357). Activists, philosophers, scholars, and museum professionals voiced varying, and often more nuanced, positions on restitution, ranging from calls for reparations instead of restitution to critical analyses of the politics, purpose, impact, and rationale of returning Africa’s cultural possessions.2 Macron’s speech and the 2018 report inevitably jolted African art scholars and museum curators into the realistic challenges of delivering evidence of ownership beyond the more commonly available history of an object’s “social life” within Western collections (Appadurai 1988: 3).3 As Forni and Steiner note,

It is no accident that so many accounts of the dramatic new turn restitution policy has taken in Europe begin with a mention of French president Emmanuel Macron’s now-famous November 28, 2017, remarks in Ouagadougou, where he called for “the temporary or definitive restitution of African cultural heritage to Africa.” Like the Tennis Court Oath of 1789, this was a rhetorical gesture self-consciously made for History with a capital H: in one single statement, Macron drew a sharp line between the Old Regime of cultural policy and the new. As recently as August 2016, the French state had steadfastly resisted calls from the Republic of Benin to return objects plundered during the Second Franco-Dahomean war (1892–1894); a bit more than a year later, the Elysée Palace Twitter feed reinforced Macron’s statements with the triumphant declaration that “African heritage can no longer remain a prisoner of European Museums” (Saar and Savoy 2018: 1). Macron’s grand gesture was not simply a matter of objects. In the official advisory report prepared at his request after this declaration, Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy noted that the French president’s proclamation “was inscribed within a much more general approach toward the emancipation of memory”—by which they meant that it was part of a broader effort to come to terms with France’s past as an imperial power (Sarr and Savoy 2018: 1). Since decolonization, metropolitan French political life has been marked by a strong tendency to minimize the violence and grotesque inequity of nineteenth and twentieth century imperialism. As recently as 2005, the French National Assembly overwhelmingly supported a law mandating that school curricula “recognize in particular the positive role of the French presence overseas” (Price 2007: 41). When it comes to the presentation of objects in French national museums, as Sally Price has incisively observed, this reluctance to face the colonial past in all its brutal specificity has promoted a mixture of universalizing aestheticism and cultural contextualization that censors the facts of colonial domination in order to evoke a “1950s-style ethnographic present” (Price 2007: 174.) Macron’s stance is very different. Rather than obscuring the realities of conquest in a haze of ahistorical primitivist fantasy, he has explicitly called colonization “a crime against humanity, a true example of barbarism.” Where his predecessors congratulated themselves for imagining France’s interactions with its former colonies as a “dialogue” among equals, Macron has instead proposed to take France down a peg by “earnestly apologizing to those toward whom we have committed these acts” (Sarr and Savoy 2018: 2). Macron is clearly aiming for a self-conscious break with the past, an effort to establish French national identity on terms better suited to the present reality of a globalized world— though it is true that he has remained oddly silent about the heritage of far-flung territories still under French control, such as New Caledonia. Inconsistent as it may have been, Macron’s declaration seems to have triggered something: in response, other former colonial powers have revived and intensified their own discussions about what to do with the African heritage objects in their national museums. The possibility of restitution, previously a subject more theoretical than practical, has begun to look like it might become a fait accompli. Increasingly the issue is not whether historically significant objects of African heritage should be returned, but rather when, how, and under what conditions. At the same time, however, archival evidence reveals a telling mixture of continuity and discontinuity that is important to acknowledge if we are going to understand the full ramifications of this incipient new phase in the lives of certain historically significant African objects held for the time being in French and other national collections. When these objects return, they will function in a context dramatically changed by the postcolonial emergence of the nation-state as the primary unit of political organization in Africa. As such, they will afford scholars opportunities to pose new questions and reassess old paradigms of interpretation. Surprisingly enough, this is not the first time the French government has taken measures to ensure that a number of African objects deemed culturally important remain on the continent. As early as 1921, administrators in Dakar, capital of the colonial federation of French West Africa (Afrique Occidentale Française, AOF), began discussing the possibility of creating a museum in the city that would house a mixture of ethnographic objects and natural-historical specimens. These early conversations took place in the context of a broader shift in French colonial governance. In the face of growing unrest, as it became clear among Africans that their military service in World War I would not be rewarded with new rights, a number of colonial administrators were drawn to what historian Raoul Girardet (2005: 268) describes as “colonial humanism,” an ideological conception of empire that, even as it privileged the epistemological position of the West, viewed the cultural difference of the colonized as a form of richness to be understood in ethnographic terms, rather than a John Warne Monroe is a historian of modern Europe at Iowa State University. He examines the places where the borders of “Europe” become porous: moments of cultural contact and commercial exchange that force us to question what this thing “the West” is and how it has come to be defined. His current research focuses on France and its African colonies between about 1880 and 1940; his book based on this work, Metropolitan Fetish: African Sculpture and the Imperial French Invention of Primitive Art, was published in September 2019. jmonroe@ iastate.edu 3 “[E]thno-symbolists consider the cultural elements of symbol, myth, memory, value, ritual and tradition to be crucial to an analysis of ethnicity, nations and nationalisms” (Smith (2009: 25). 4 https://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/monde/ afrique/felwine-sarr-le-poids-de-l-impense-colonial_2058754.html 2 Bénédicte Savoy organized a symposium with this title at the Collège de France on June 21, 2018. See “Du droit des objets (à disposer d’eux-mêmes?),” https:// www.college-de-france.fr/site/benedicte-savoy/symposium-2017-2018.htm.

… African countries and Paris. As example, we can cite the restitution of the African cultural heritage … Macron seems to have shown the will to reinvigorate the relations of old date with the …

… President Macron: the first, over the restitution of African objects … on how Macron used cultural diplomacy, through restitution, to … Africa and Algeria. In conclusion, the chapter considers …

There have always been pressures from within French society and from Africa for the restitution of items of African cultural patrimoine. Newly elected President Macron announced that it was time to return items of African cultural heritage. He appointed a commission to report what, how, and when. The article traces these recommendations, resistance to them, and outcomes. As of this writing, almost nothing has been returned. And the pandemic has halted official action for the moment and possibly for the foreseeable future. However, concerned individuals and groups are beginning to take the matter into their hands. The story is not finished.

… to sub-Saharan Africa, President Macron commissioned a … return of African cultural heritage items back to Africa, raising … concerns sub-Saharan Africa and considers the different forms …

The debate on the repatriation of tangible and intangible cultural heritage and belongings has developed a broad dynamic in recent years. This sudden activism raises questions. What is its background, what are the goals behind it, and how are they to be achieved? Is it primarily about African or rather European interests? It is essential to reverse our gaze and consider how things look from an African perspective. The circumstances vary greatly from state to state. The article focuses, on the African side, on the Great Lakes region, extended to include Tanzania to cover the entire former German East Africa. On the European side, the cases of Germany and Belgium are examined in more detail. To date, the issue of restitution has primarily been approached from a European perspective. As a result, essential aspects have been and continue to be neglected. The effects and consequences of restitution in the target country deserve central attention. This is not least about the relationships between actors at the central state level and local interest groups. The possibilities and limitations of museums and other local cultural institutions must also be considered. The example of Burundi is used to discuss best practices in the restitution of tangible and intangible cultural heritage.

… When it comes to the debate on the restitution of cultural property both in Africa and outside … on the restitution of African heritage,” commissioned by French president Emmanuel Macron, …

ABSTRACT First as candidate and then as President, Emmanuel Macron has elevated colonial memory policy as a key site for the performance and enactment of the dual values of rupture and reconciliation that underpin his broader programme. While this has led to significant symbolic shifts in the French state’s narrative of its colonial history, this article argues that this memory policy cannot and should not be disaggregated from his wider neoliberal project. Through a detailed contextualisation and analysis of President Macron’s interventions in the field, I contend that colonial memory policy simultaneously reflects, legitimises, and constitutes the ‘neoliberal political rationality’ his administration seeks to perpetuate. Under Macron, a limited recognition of France’s responsibilities for colonial violence has been accompanied by an effort to neutralise the political potency of the past, obscure its enduring legacies, assign authority over it to designated experts and delegitimise those who contest this logic. The article illustrates how memory policy has become a means of sublimating contemporary political demands, arising in part from historic structural injustices, into the manageable and managed process of consensus-making that is the hallmark of neoliberal governmentality.

… The analysis of the diplomatic speeches given within the … the idol in the MacKenzie collection Art Gallery—as well as … “We thank President Macron and expect a favorable follow-up to …

I argue that the field of transitional justice is a useful lens to explore the politics surrounding apology and restitution between former colonizers and the formerly colonized. While existing scholarship has so far treated apologies and restitution of looted art restitution as separate ways of atonement, this paper investigates both as indicators of a country's norm change toward postcolonial reconciliation and justice. The paper analyzes the political debates in France and Germany surrounding apologies and art restitution as instances of belated “coming to terms” with their colonial past. I argue that both form part of a broader societal change surrounding a state's history and its current identity. In response to increasing demands for apologies and restitution from African states, changing international norms of addressing colonial violence, and domestic mobilization, both states have made slow and incomplete progress toward postcolonial reconciliation and justice. They have agreed to return certain objects and apologized for specific colonial atrocities, albeit not for colonialism writ large. Ultimately, the debates highlight how these transitional justice forms each come with their own political, legal, and cultural challenges that complicate and delay engagement with the past. It was ultimately various social pressures from within and outside, in the form of lawsuits by victim groups and official demands for apology and restitution, that led to domestic mobilization toward more open engagement with colonial pasts.

… Restitution of art and cultural objects … As with the agreement concluded between France and Nigeria in 2002 concerning return 97 by France of the Nok statues subject to a long-term …

… This agreement commits France to the repatriation of all objects claimed by the co-… first significant restitution that emerged from this report, involving 26 works looted by the French from …

Calls for restitution and provenance research over colonial objects have embraced museums globally. The two theoretical undertakings complement one another. Governments, heritage institutions and individuals are reviewing the provenance of their colonial collections and returning them to descendant communities. Widely publicised return undertakings and ceremonies attest to this. Scholars and curators have revolutionised their thinking, approaches and writings with an intent to decolonize narratives associated with the colonial holdings. Conversations through seminars, conferences, workshops and political statements complement the efforts. However, the returns are usually presented as voluntary gestures, driven by morality, redress, equality, correction of colonial wrongs and calls for human rights. This article argues that there are also legal obligations as evidenced by developments in Europe and America today. The article methodologically interrogates three intertwined subjects: 1. the current state of affairs with Africa’s colonial heritage; 2. the customary laws on collective ownership of heritage by communities as a contributory catalyst to the migration of heritage; and 3. an ignored factor in the quest for repatriations and the development of national legal structures by states that hold colonial objects. The argument is that these should be balanced; the returns are not only based on morality and goodwill by hosting states, but are also enforced by legal obligations. The paper further argues that all stakeholders should be taken on board in provenance and restitutions, particularly the descendant communities, their wishes and customs. These present as part of ‘best museum practise’ and the decolonization narrative.