By Zara Kabir
Colonialism is a stain of the old world that continues to bleed into the present. The ghosts of European explorers still haunt us today, their sins forming a heavy cloud that continues to shape and direct discourse on how a post-Colonial global world can learn from their mistakes, not simply escape them. The imperialistic nature of the Age of ‘Discovery’ left many European nations wealthy and the once thriving communities that they pillaged in poverty. Stripped of their culture, language, and artifacts, those living in colonies found the foreign language and practices of Europeans thrust onto them—there is nothing quite more true for those suddenly made subjects of the British Royal Crown.
The British Empire was once the world’s largest and wealthiest empire. Within nearly 70 years since the emancipation of the Indian Subcontinent from British rule and the start of rapid decolonization, we have been able to critically analyze the Empire and the methods through which it colonized nearly 1⁄4th of the world’s population at one time. Postcolonial theory has specifically allowed once colonized peoples to look back on their own histories and better examine the human costs of imperialism. Critical analysis of these complicated and bloody histories has manifested areas of concern, including spaces in which modern colonialism continues to exploit the Empire’s former subjects.
The 20th century saw World War I and II, both which crippled once powerful empires and increased calls for the independence of people who had long been subjects of a faraway crown. World War II in particular started a new age in world politics, where former colonies could finally defeat their colonizers. It would lead to a sweeping wave of anti-imperialism across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, as calls for self-determination and decolonization mounted against the once mighty colonizers of the Age of Exploration. The British Empire would soon come to be viewed as having no place in the second half of the 20th century.
Though the British Empire ceased to exist, proof of their centuries-long colonization remained in the form of museums. Museums are well established and respected institutions of learning. They house artifacts and art from various places, cultures, and time periods and allow us to learn about ourselves, others, and the overarching human experience. These homes of diversity and intellectual education have come to exist at a very bloody and disturbing cost. In order for us to grapple with the dark history of colonialism, that has resulted in the deaths, forced conversions, and forced servitude of millions of nonwhite/non European peoples, we must acknowledge the institutions that were borne from the blood of our ancestors. To explore decolonization as a concept within the sphere of the empire, we must also explore decolonization of the museum space, which are inherently products of colonization.
Museums have, in recent years, faced increasing calls to decolonize their collections and recontextualize them in their proper, bloody origins. This has affected museums in not only Europe, but in the United States and Australia as well. One particular museum currently in hot water over its colonially curated collections is the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. A proper symbol of the one power, strength, and wealth of British Empire, it is named after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. It is also one of the world’s largest museums, boasting a permanent collection of over “2.3 million objects that span over 5,000 years of human creativity.”[1] The V&A can find its origins in the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was housed in the gorgeously built Crystal Palace. Meant to be symbolic of the peak of the British Empire, the Victorian era gallery was the entire “Empire Under Glass”, as Jeffery Auerbach describes it.[2] It’s easy to see the problematic nature of White Britons coming together to view displays of the artifacts of cultures that their monarchy was actively uprooting in favour of their own. Colonialism destroyed the cultures, histories, and lives of so many people, and museums and exhibitions became showrooms for the spoils of a one sided war in which the victors always wrote (in this case, rewrote) history. Artifacts were wiped clean of their stains of struggle and resistance and presented as treasure instead. The stories told alongside reflected this. Colonizers were able to pick and choose with tales to tell, creating the settings, characters and their cultures to go with them. Conquest of non European people was celebrated in collection after collection throughout Europe as symbols of domination and proof of European superiority. It can then be argued that this tradition, without full decolonization, has continued in many museum spaces in the postcolonial era. The historically elitist nature of museums, such as the V&A which in its early years featured a restaurant that served visitors according to “first and second class menus, and a third class service for ‘mechanics and all workmen employed at the Museum Buildings and even for the humble working class visitors’”[3], only compounds the pain of the stolen artifacts that fill the walls of this museum.
What does it mean to decolonize in the post-colonial era of the 21st century? The Washington Post has defined it as “a process that institutions undergo to expand the perspectives they portray beyond those of the dominant cultural group, particularly white colonizers.”[4] While written in the context of American museums, it can certainly still be applied to the V&A. In fact, the V&A received a request from the Welsh Conservative MP Guto Bebb in March 2017 for the return of “two ‘firedogs’ taken from Gwydir Castle in Conwy, north Wales.”[5] While it can be said that Wales did not face nearly the same colonialistic horrors of other nonwhite nations, this is just one example of the troubling origins of many of the collections within the V&A. Such requests are also a part of the recent rise of requests for the return of artifacts from various museums, such as the V&A, that have amassed their collections as a result of colonial violence, either through direct pillaging, benefactors donating “private collections”, or monetary benefits that colonialism brought to Victorian era Britain.
An example of objects within the V&A that require decolonizing, whether through the return of the artifacts themselves or consented recontextualization, is the Ethopian collection which includes the Maqdala crown. The crown, an extraordinary example of African craftsmanship, entered British hands in the mid 19th century only after Sir Robert Napier pillaged the Maqdala fortress with 13,000 men. This attack resulted in the suicide of the Ethiopian ruler, Emperor Tewodros II. His suicide is particularly significant, as many Ethiopians have come to see it as “a symbol of defiance and dignity” in a country that defied colonial efforts until Mussolini in the 1930’s.[6] For this reason, these treasures are highly culturally significant to the history of Ethiopia, and the pillaging of these objects have remained as a great source of pain for the people of Ethiopia. However, many of the items within the collection, that features gold and silver jewelry and processional crosses, have remained in the hands of the V&A, even after repeated requests by the Ethiopian government for their immediate return. The head of the V&A, Tristram Hunt, has offered a “long-term loan” of the artifacts, which did not satisfy Ethiopian officials who have said “Britain must permanently return all artifacts from Ethiopia held by the Victoria and Albert Museum and Addis Ababa will not accept them on loan”.[7] Hunt responded with in a blog post on the V&A website, continuing to seeming sidestep the request and justify the museum’s “ownership” of the items: “As custodians of these Ethiopian treasures, we have a responsibility to celebrate the beauty of their craftsmanship, shine a light on their cultural and religious significance and reflect on their living meaning, while being open about how they came to Britain.”
Another example of objects that need to be redefined can be found in the V&A’s Japanese exhibits, which features artworks and prints which originated from European stereotypes of the “orient,” effectively exoticizing the Japanese people while not allowing their own voices to speak for them. Some rooms in the museum feature cloth and textiles put next to each other without much thought, and there is little information on how or why collections are being displayed. This is an example of the ways in which the British took objects of the colonial era to recreate “East Asia” according to the orientalist view of it at the time, without the voices of actual Japanese people to fill in the many gaps and correct the errors. One such work is a painting made in Europe in the “style” of traditional Japanese woodblock prints. In it we see the two women in kimonos in a typically Japanese house. Upon closer inspection, we see that these women look more White than Japanese. And the artist has appeared to have drawn their Japanese inspired work purely on what Japanese culture was thought to be. Indeed, this was a case of Japonisme[8], or the cultural fusion of Anglo-Japanese cultures which resulted in a heavy Japanese influence on some Victorian era trends. British women of the Victorian era became obsessed with Japanese culture, taking inspiration from the kimono and incorporating it in ways they saw fit. This can be understood as “colonizing from afar.” With much of the collection today organized in flawed ways and without the necessary Victorian era context, the exhibit is in need of an overhaul.
The final example of exhibits that require decolonizing is the V&A’s South Asian collections. The violent history of the British colonial conquest of the Indian subcontinent is undeniable, as well as the forced Britishizing of the Indian people that followed. It is uncomfortable, unsurprisingly, to see objects such as the expertly crafted white jade wine cup of Shah Jahan and extravagantly embellished gold turban ornaments of the Mughal Empire within the hands of British, on display so far away from home. The collection also features saris, headscarves, and shawls of ‘unknown’ origin. This fails the women who once wore them, and fails to explain how it was removed/ripped from her and how it ended up on display in a glass cabinet in Britain. The V&A in recent years has tried to rectify this, reexamining its South Asia collections that originated from the The India Museum which would eventually go on to enter the V&A collections in South Kensington. In a project titled The India Museum Revisited, the aim is defined in the context of decolonization and states: “In a post-colonial era, the East India Company’s museum has attracted commentators who have attributed to it [sic] motives unsupported by surviving archival and physical evidence. A new survey will establish an objective basis for future analysis.”[9] The main objective is to produce a proper narrative account of the South Asian collections using “information on donors to the collection and sources (provenances) of the exhibits.”.[10]
Possibly the best argument for decolonization of the V&A, ironically, comes from its own director. “Europe’s museums serve a nuanced purpose and shouldn’t automatically bow to calls to return artworks plundered by 19th-century colonisers,” Hunt writes in a June 2019 op-ed in The Guardian titled “Should museums return their colonial artefacts?” in which he manages to acknowledge the museum’s colonial history and attempts to celebrate it as a glorification of the Victorian era, all in the same breath.[11] What this close minded view fails to see is that the ‘glorious’ Victorian era was a result of the bloody conquests of the British Empire. By reducing colonial violence to the collateral damage of a bygone era, Hunt fundamentally refuses to acknowledge the sins of colonialism, and the damaging, long-lasting effects that the stolen artifacts found within the V&A’s permanent collection represents to the people whose ancestors were silenced and killed through violent colonization. Again and again in the 21st century, these same people continue to suffer from modern day colonization that has moved from their homelands into the spheres of museums, which have recreated the ‘glory’ of the colonial era without the voices of the people who were stolen from or mention of the blood on which the wealth of the British Empire was built. Hunt claims that “For a museum like the V&A, to decolonise is to decontextualise: the history of empire is embedded in its meaning and collections, and the question is how that is interpreted.” The British Empire did not give meaning to the objects in its collections; the people and the cultures of which they are products did. On the contrary, Hunt uses museum collections like the V&A’s as defense against the rising tide of nationalism in Europe in recent years. There is plenty irony in him quoting famous postcolonial philosopher Edward Said who stated that “partly because of empire, all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogenous, extraordinarily differentiated, and unmonolithic.” Hunt has chosen to defend stolen artifacts from colonized peoples because colonization allowed for the creation of heterogeneous communities; it appears that Hunt has conveniently “forgotten” that those subjected to colonialism had their culture stripped and stolen from them only to have it put on display in Britain while they were forced to assimilate into the Britishness of their new masters.
To its credit, the V&A has made some efforts to discuss the issue of decolonizing museum spaces, hosting an event in late 2018 titled “Troubling Objects: interrogating collecting and collections.” It aimed to discuss how we could “rethink both histories of collecting and the representation, interpretation and display of historical collections.”[12] While it’s definitely a positive step in the right direction, simply “rethinking” is not enough. Decolonizing explicitly rejects the glorification of the British Empire that museums like V&A have come to symbolize. To decolonize is to directly rebuke the legacy of the British Empire, and for many, this is still a difficult conversation. For colonized people and their descendants? They simply want the objects stolen from them centuries ago.
[1] “V&A · About Us.” https://www.vam.ac.uk/info/about-us.
[2] “Empire Under Glass – CSUN.edu.” https://www.csun.edu/sites/default/files/Empire%20under%20Glass_0.pdf.
[3] “100 Facts about the V&A – Victoria and Albert Museum.” http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/0-9/100-facts-about-the-v-and-a/.
[4] “‘decolonization’ of the American museum – Washington Post.” 11 Oct. 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/10/12/decolonization-american-museum/.
[5] “Museums grapple with rise in pleas for return of foreign ….” 18 Feb. 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/18/uk-museums-face-pressure-to-repatriate-foreign-items.
[6] “Why Britain Won’t Return Ethiopia’s Sacred Treasures – The ….” 9 Jul. 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/07/why-britain-wont-return-ethiopias-sacred-treasures/593281/
[7] “Ethiopia says British museum must permanently return its ….” 23 Apr. 2018, https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia-history-artefacts/ethiopia-says-british-museum-must-permanently-return-its-artifacts-idUKKBN1HU2M2.
[8] “Japonisme: The Japanese Influence on Victorian Fashion ….” 29 Mar. 2016, https://mimimatthews.wordpress.com/2016/03/29/japonisme-the-japanese-influence-on-victorian-fashion/?preview_id=10191&preview_nonce=614a9f7d5b&post_format=standard&preview=true.
[9] “V&A · The India Museum Revisited.” https://www.vam.ac.uk/research/projects/the-india-museum-revisited.
[10] “V&A · The India Museum Revisited.” https://www.vam.ac.uk/research/projects/the-india-museum-revisited.
[11] “Should museums return their colonial artefacts? – The Guardian.” 29 Jun. 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/jun/29/should-museums-return-their-colonial-artefacts.
[12] “V&A · Troubling Objects: Interrogating Collecting And Collections.” https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/93va8Elb/troubling-objects-interrogating-collecting-and-collections.
Zara Kabir (she/her) is a fourth-year student at New York University double majoring in Journalism and History. Her interests include covering underrepresented communities and giving a voice to the voiceless. She has written about various Muslim communities in New York City ranging from victims of fatal hate crimes to sexual and domestic violence. Currently, she is covering accessibility issues in the context of virtual learning on the City’s low-income black and brown students. She also enjoys engaging with history through a post-colonial lens to better understand globalization and cross-cultural exchange in urban settings. In her free time, Zara enjoys playing violin, journaling and scrapbooking, and attempting to knit.
