This book shows why being against violence now more than ever means repatriating stolen royal and sacred objects and restoring stolen memories", "Unflinching, elegantly written and passionately argued, this is a call to action.". Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 8, 2020. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Walk into any European museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. This book is destined to become the standard for understanding the relationship between colonial era museums in Europe and the places they are supposedly meant to educate the public about. A 152-word sentence. His award-winning research focuses on the restitution of African cultural heritage from Euro-American collections, focusing on the place of ideas of cultural whiteness in ongoing histories of colonial violence. This book is thought-provoking and the topic is relevant to these times. ", 'If you care about museums and the world, read this book', 'Hicks's urgent, lucid, and brilliantly enraged book feels like a long-awaited treatise on justice', 'Dan, your words brought tears to my eyes. Please try again. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. Dan Hicks, FSA (born 1972) is a British archaeologist and anthropologist.He is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford.His research is focused on contemporary archaeology, material culture studies, historical archaeology, and the history of archaeology, anthropology, and museum collections. Dan Hicks is professor of contemporary archaeology at the University of Oxford and author of The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution Topics British Museum He asserted that much of the history of such battles — unlike the battles of WWI and WWII — remains understudied. British expedition to Benin City in 1897 from The Brutish Museums. Rhodes Must Fall originated at the University of Capetown, South Africa, to remove a statue of the founder of Rhodesia, Cecil Rhodes, that stood on campus. Dan Hicks FSA, MCIfA (born 1972) is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. But Hicks cites a curator at the British Museum … Please try again. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. The author is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at Oxford, Curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, which might lead us to expect a work of objective and even-handed scholarship. So the first thing I do is I talk about this notion of World War O; the many individual expeditions as they’re called.”. After viewing product detail pages, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. It is with books like this that cultures are saved, by beginning truthfully to face the suppressed and brutal past. “I don’t think we can answer that question, of course. They are the effect of a stilling, as when detention interrupts transit, and of a fracturing, as when a shrapnel shell explodes at its target, and of a silencing, as when a gun is silenced”. We’ve all felt the wonder of going back to see a much-loved museum object. Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of metal plaques and sculptures depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of Benin City, Nigeria. Jürgen Zimmerer, a scholar in Hamburg who is an expert on Germany’s colonial history, remains unimpressed by the recent statement from the foundation. Professor Dan Hicks has recently published a book – The Brutish Museums – exploring the aforementioned scenario in depth. “New technologies, which were visual technologies … suddenly made visible anti-Black violence that had been happening for centuries in America,” Hicks said. Such returns are less about material stasis than human change. Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free. It is one of 868 plaques to show up in appendix 1 of Hicks’ book, “A provisional list of the worldwide locations of Benin plaques looted in 1897.”, Dan Hicks makes the case in his book The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence, and Cultural Restitution, published by Pluto Books, that these objects should be repatriated. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. One goal, he said his book, he said, was to promote the work of the Legacy Restoration Trust established in Benin city, Nigeria, where a new museum is planned to house the looted bronzes. Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford and Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Meticulously researched and gripping history of the British "punitive expedition" of the territory of Benin (now Nigeria). eISBN: 978-1-78680-683-3 Subjects: Museum Studies, Political Science, Archaeology There was an error retrieving your Wish Lists. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. He noted that the word expedition in English makes it sound like what the British were involved in were akin to Boy Scout outings. The Brutish Museums by Dan Hicks (courtesy the author and Pluto Press) “There is no more important question for western museums today than restitution,” Dan Hicks … The 99% Invisible City: A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design, Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating, Visualizing Empire: Africa, Europe, and the Politics of Representation (Issues & Debates), Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America (from Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter), Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits: Inside the Fight to Reclaim Native America's Culture, "A startling act of conscience. It remains an object which should be subject to these conversations.”, For this article the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields gave this response: “Newfields is very aware of the ongoing international issues surrounding works of art from Benin City, as well as others relating to a diverse array of cultures. The author is curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and uses the vitrine cases of objects in his own museum to meditate on what needs to be done, to begin to unravel the bloody colonialist history and the continuing violence represented in these stolen objects on display. “The Pitt Rivers has often returned human remains, even cultural objects, to First Nations in North America,” he said. Books Dan Hicks: The Brutish Museums. Come on. We work hard to protect your security and privacy. The book may not be to the taste of all political stripes, but the issues treated are pertinent to the current geopolitical state of things. Agree with the message, delivery not for me, I was really excited to get this book but unfortunately I struggled to get on board with the style. Dan Hicks is an archaeologist, art historian, anthropologist, professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a … the German Historical Institute in Paris. Dan Hicks’ The Brutish Museums is an honest critique of modern museum practice, calling for European and American archaeological and anthropological museums to confront their own legacies and to return objects acquired through acts of state … “You have to say that racism has to be part of this reason, maybe, for why Africa is being really treated differently from other parts of the world,” he said. Dan Hicks FSA is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. “The looting, I had not realized until writing this book, was not, as I had always been told, some official act where the governments or the nation-states or the crown officers for the colonies carefully took these objects and sold them off in order to pay for the expedition,” he said. Motivated by greed, nationalism, false rumors, and racism, British military demolished this area and killed possibly 70,000 people, subsequently stealing as much "loot" as they could carry. This article, which originally appeared as a preview to that event, was also published Dec. 11 in NUVO. “The cases are still there, but also, maybe, the Pitt Rivers reminds us of things that are also present in other museums, where the persistence of older ways of looking at world culture are harder to see.”. 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