Post-colonial heritage restitution as recognition struggles

Abstract

This article examines struggles for postcolonial heritage restitution in international politics from the perspective of the problem of recognition. It views restitution not only as physical object movement and as transfer of legal ownership of cultural items, but also as political struggles involving reclamatory speech acts by Indigenous groups. Taking as a starting point three passages depicting contemporary restitutive claims made by an Indigenous Australian, the Rapa Nui people, and the Māori, it argues that restitutions have a radical political and ethical potential to redress cultural dispossessions, to cast into relief ongoing misrecognitions and to challenge colonial power dynamics. This requires reframing restitutions beyond the international legal discourse and highlighting their connection to the pursuit of epistemic justice. The article concludes that acts of ancestral heritage reclamations link restitution to demands for acknowledgment of the structural beneficiary positions of societies currently holding that heritage in their museums. They also demand that through heritage returns these societies relinquish their economic, political and epistemic privilages and undergo a loss. Thus, they reframing restitution—from a benevolent gesture of returns modelled on a logic of a gift to substantive politiacal acts of giving up power.