scientists from many disciplines – including history, anthropology and art history – track the debate to dealing with colonial objects with increasing voltage. We welcome the fact that in the now published final report of Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy concrete proposals. Also, we consider the restitutions, as well as a proactive restitution readiness as a prerequisite, in order to overcome denied recognition and refused reciprocity. We therefore support the call for restitution. And yet, So important is the question of return is and so historic to Remember always has to do with questions of guilt and justice, morality and injustice, so little may be remembered, that the objects tell much deeper stories.
Therefore, the debate should not be limited to the claim for restitution or reparations. Rather, we should seize the opportunity that opened this discussion: the ability to take over a confrontation with these objects, a centuries – old – even if, in many respects, brutal, and violent-to snatch a common history of colonial Forgetting and responsibility for this entangled history in the present and the future. A story in which the people who made these things in Africa, Oceania, Asia, Australia and the Americas, used, traded, sold, and colonial violence is lost, just play a role as the people they robbed or purchased for shipping to Europe and needed there, and may have issued. The violence of the colonial domination relationship part of this story was.
A debate on colonial objects, as we call it, opens up new perspectives for the redesign of the present, and in particular with those regions with which Europe has Been associated with the colonial history and neocolonial economic relationships inextricably. Following Achille Mbembe, and others, could arise on the colonial objects have a unique opportunity to define, on the basis of a new look to the common colonial history of the relations of the countries and societies of Africa and Oceania, Asia, Australia and the Americas, together with these new and on a sustainable Basis. What we need now is:
1. A sustainable support of the many initiatives for workup, the local colonial history, in nearly all the larger towns and cities; as well as support both of the initiatives, political foundations, and individual museums, as well as the work of numerous researchers, who deal with colonial history, museum studies, as well as with the object and provenance research.
2. More involvement of political education and training institutions, as well as strengthening school-based initiatives.
This article dates back to the TIME no 52/2018. Here you can read the entire issue.
3. Support of the many, and in particular the community research and Museum initiatives going on in this country and in the countries of origin for quite some time and the particular challenges of provenance research, digitization, transnational cooperation and Restitution/re-use of objects to shoulders.
4. A Central Institution, for example, a Foundation that pools the enormous Knowledge that has already been collected, in Berlin, research, Museum work, and politics in Germany and will in future also in Europe, networked, new accents, initiatives, launches and the establishment of decentralised places of learning supports.
read more about the debate works from the Kolonialtzeit in the piece “the return – and more!” from the current TIME (for subscribers).
The above-formulated appeal was signed by:
Dr. Bettina Brockmeyer (Erlangen, Germany), Dr. Larissa Förster (Berlin), Dr. Bernhard Gißibl (Mainz), Prof. Dr. Rebekka Habermas (Göttingen), Prof. Dr. Ulrike Lindner (Cologne)
Dr. Robbie Aitken (Sheffield), Prof. Dr. Gabriele Alex (Tübingen), Dr. Caroline numbers participating (Cologne), Dr. Kokou Azamede (Lomé), Prof. Dr. Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst (Cologne), Dr. Felix Brahm (London), Dr. Anna-Maria Brandstetter (Mainz), Anna Brus (Cologne), Dr. Miriam Brusius (London), Dr. Jesse W. Bucher (Roanoke College), Prof. Dr. Hubertus tufts (Groningen)Nicola Camilleri (Pavia), Prof. Dr. Sebastian Conrad (Berlin), Prof. Dr. Hansjörg Dilger (Berlin), Prof. Dr. Heike Drotbohm (Mainz), Prof. Dr. Andreas Eckert (Berlin), Dr. Iris Eden Heiser (Berlin), Frank Edward (Dar Es Salaam), Dr. Sarah Ehlers (Munich, Germany), Prof. Dr. Geoff Eley (Ann Arbor), Dr. Anne Friedrichs (Mainz), Ricardo Marquez Garcia (Cologne), Prof. Dr. Stefanie Gänger (Cologne), Prof. Dr. Gabriele Genge (Duisburg/Essen), Christine Gerbich (Berlin), Prof. Dr. Joël Glasman (Bayreuth), Andreas Greiner (Zurich), Prof. Dr. Bernd-Stefan Grewe (University Of Tübingen), Dr. Tanja Hammel (Basel), Prof. Dr. Julia Hauser (Kassel, Germany), Daniela Hettstedt (Basel), Dr. Richard Hölzl (Kassel), Dr. Anette Hoffmann (Vienna), Prof. Dr. Isabel Hull (Cornell University), Nicola Jahn (Hamburg), Prof. Dr. Jens Jäger (Köln), Noelle M. K. Y. Kahanu (Hawaii), Dr. Alya Karame (Oxford/Berlin), Prof. Dr. Alexandra Karentzos (Darmstadt), Prof., Dr. Michi Knecht (Bremen), Prof. Dr. Reinhart Kößler (Berlin/Freiburg), Prof. Dr. Matthias Krings (Mainz), Dr. Anja Laukötter (Berlin), Professor Dr. Susanne Leeb (Lüneburg), Prof., Dr. Sara Lennox (Amherst), Prof. Dr. Carola Lentz (Mainz), Dr. Dörte Lerp (Cologne), Prof. Dr. Bea Lundt (Flensburg), Prof., Dr. Sharon Macdonald (Berlin), PD. Dr. Stefanie Michels (Hamburg), Dr. Esther Möller (Mainz), Dr. Dominik Nagl (Mannheim), Tristan Oestermann (Berlin), Prof. Dr. Johannes Paulmann (Mainz), Dr. Michael Pesek (Berlin), Karl Pohrt (Ann Arbor), Linda Advice Iller (Fribourg), Dr. Verena Rodatus (Berlin), Prof. Dr. Regina Römhild (Berlin), Prof. Dr. Kirsten Rüther (Vienna), Dr. Musa Sadock (Dar Es Salaam), Dr. Bernhard Schär (Zurich), Gabriel Schimm Roth (Hamburg), Dr. Philipp Schorch (Munich), Prof. Dr. Iris Schröder (Erfurt), Dr. Felix Schürmann (Erfurt), Dr. Holger Stoecker (Berlin), Junior Prof. Catherine Stornig (Giessen), Prof. Dr. Ulrike Strasser (San Diego), Prof. Dr. Benedikt Stuchtey (Marburg), Dr. Imani Tafari (Mona, Jamaica), Dr. Jonas Tinius (Berlin), Prof. Dr. Julia Carpenter (Basel), Professor Paul Turnbull (Tasmania), apl. Prof. Dr. Melanie Ulz (Osnabrück), Prof. Dr. Margarete Vöhringer (University of Göttingen), Dr. Ehler Voss (Siegen), Karolin Wetjen (Göttingen), Prof. Dr. Lora Wildenthal (Houston), Dr. Anna-Katharina Wöbse (Gießen), Dr. Joachim Zeller (Berlin), Prof. Dr. Aram Ziai (Kassel), Prof. Dr Martin Zillinger (Köln)
