Killmonger in the Museum (Injury and Restitution)

VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

SPEAKER: Jonah Siegel, Rutgers UNIVERSITY

Who owns the objects in the museum, and with what title to that property? What do our certainties about rightful ownership and theft suggest about the concepts subtending the museum? This talk uses the occasion of the emotions released by key scenes in the 2018 Marvel movie Black Panther (and some brief treatment of Henry James’s 1877, The American) to reflect on the intellectual politics of the movement towards restitution of art objects that has been so influential in recent years. It suggests that this development, which appears to be driven by a self-evident progressive aspiration, may also be understood as an ongoing confession of the failure of will of the revolutionary project in which museums arose.