Deadline June 1 2023
This special journal issue edited by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Jessyca Hutchens will look at histories of repatriation particularly as they relate to new artistic and community responses to repatriation processes, politics, and actual returns. It will aim map out both longer histories of repatriation of cultural heritage from colonial and settler-colonial countries and institutions to homelands and original communities, and focus particularly on the past decade of artists’ responses to repatriation processes and the ways these are embedded within larger contexts of cultural continuation and revitalisation.
With focused case studies within Australia, Benin Republic, Mexico, Namibia, and Nigeria from the project Repatriates and related studies, this collection often uses current repatriation as a very specific departure point for its analysis. Rather than espousing universal or general theories of repatriation and its attendant political, ethical, and legal issues, the issue foregrounds an analysis of the unique ways that contemporary artists’ responses complicate the typical frameworks applied to repatriation discourses and debates. This includes a focus on the way artworks and creative projects can add material, aesthetic, affective, spiritual, and cultural registers to the way repatriation is grappled with. Such responses can move beyond simply the representation of debates and issues, but can become entangled within repatriation as a form of institutional and social encounter, and enact forms of community self-determination within politically fraught and uneven processes. Perspectives on repatriation are thereby reframed through artistic strategies such as intervention, counter appropriation, institutional activism, knowledge sharing, and cultural revitalisation.
Including eminent scholars and emerging theorists, this collection aims to open up repatriation discussions into spaces beyond mere analysis of process. Contemporary art artist and community-led cultural production in relation to repatriation, serves not only as a vector through which such debates are moved on or challenged, but can provide their own active processes, and ways of doing and seeing, that create new possibilities for what returns can mean and do. The contributions come both from the stakeholders within repatriation processes such as AIATSIS, Humboldt Forum, and National Museum of Namibia, often in co-written chapters with community members and artists.
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Open Call: Authors may include any writers of any discipline including artists and curators writing histories of contemporary art and repatriation and historians looking at the longer span of engagement as part of these processes.
If you are interested in contributing please email jess@repatriates.org, khadija@repatriates.org, and verena@repatriates.org with a short narrative biography of maximum 250 words and an abstract of your contribution of around 300 words by June 1 2023 with a view to a final draft by early 2024 and a prospective publication date of late 2024/early 2025.