Silent Objects and Persistent Ruins: Curating and surviving imperial debris

These five works, from varying disciplines and written at various stages of academic careers, all consider the cultural work of objects and places, particularly those whose histories are deeply entangled with colonial relationships. In doing so, they work across traditional disciplinary boundaries, and try to interpret the meaning and legacies of locations, collections and commodities, both real and imagined, in a post-colonial world. The fact that these studies are both interdisciplinary and post-colonial is crucial, and not coincidental: written by scholars from History, English, Anthropology and Art History, these works have to grapple with the fact that the museums, novels, intellectual property and copyright laws, and cultural categories they study are imperial artifacts, as are the very disciplines they employ to examine them. The works therefore find various ways to frame and define their objects of study. Three of these works explore discrete collections of specific objects: Sara Byala traces the history of a idealistic, "antiracist" museum of Africana, from its founding in 1935 to the present, which collected "the cultural remnants of any and all people of southern Africa" (4); Claire Wintle writes the "biographies" of objects from their original Andaman and Nicobar contexts, to their incorporation into private collections, to their inclusion in the Brighton Museum; and Suzanne Daly looks at the treatment and histories of four different commodities (Kashmir shawls, cotton, diamonds and tea) in Victorian novels. Haidy Gaismar takes a broader, comparative view, looking at how Māori and ni-Vanuatu cultural movements are bringing Indigenous and customary ideas about tangible and intellectual property into national and international legal frameworks, and tracing how specific institutions and objects can embody an alternative to dominant Western definitions, serving to "indigenize" and "provincialize" Europe. Finally, the collection edited by Ann Laura Stoler uses a series of case studies of post-colonial contexts to find "imperial ruins," using the frame of decay and debris to thickly describe the persistence of colonial relations, the roles of neoliberalism and globalization in perpetuating such relations, and the accommodations and survival strategies of those maneuvering in the margins. Through their different approaches, however, these studies all call our attention to the circulation of objects: the many hands and minds they touch; the social, geographical and cultural boundaries they cross; their continual redefinition and re-appropriation; their magical properties of carrying multiple layers of meaning; the Victorian development of institutions and cultural forms to house and represent them (such as museums, paintings and novels); and their stubborn silence outside of careful, detailed and thorough historical research and cultural analysis. In addressing the silence of objects, of the archival record and of the ruins left to us, these studies also highlight their authors' own acts of translation: across time, across cultures, across disciplinary boundaries, across divisions of gender, race and class, and between and among cultural forms. These works thus also raise issues about how difficult it is to think historically—that is, to meaningfully trace and explain change over time—and in culturally sophisticated ways about the aesthetic domain and material culture.

The three books that look at specific collections and commodities offer a wealth of original research, and show us how objects moving into collections become part of larger acts of translation into specific systems of interpretation and disciplinary narratives. Sara Byala's A Place That Matters Yet introduces readers to the little-known MuseumAfrica and the liberal (if limited) possibilities it imagined for ethnic and racial integration in pre...