Museum Cooperation Between Africa and Europe: A New Field for Museum Studies ed. by Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, and Raphael Schwere (review)

Museum Cooperation Between Africa and Europe: A New Field for Museum Studies is a significant contribution to the critical discourse on a fundamental question: What is a museum? The compendium comprises papers presented at the December 2016 conference of the Swiss Society for African Studies (SSAS) and the Swiss Anthropological Association (SAA), Museum Cooperation between Africa and Europe: Opportunities, Challenges and Modalities. Organized and hosted by the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich, it was convened for the presentation of papers by academics and museum practitioners on critical issues and theories detailing a wide range of varying transcontinental cooperative projects over several decades. The editors, Laely, Meyer, and Schwere, selected thirteen case studies by sixteen contributors. The assembled chapters demonstrate detailed outcomes and proposals documenting a number of cooperative projects in Africa springing from, or in response to, distinct political and cultural histories, multiyear scholarly research projects, transnational grant programs, and traumatic internecine wars described through the lens of postcolonialism.

The essays detail and review varying museum-related partnerships, collaborations, and networks representing projects carried out between African museums in ten countries¹ along with governmental and nongovernmental bodies in North America and Europe.² The wide selection of programs was directed and managed by an array of museum professionals, curators, educators, archeologists, anthropologists, a royal court (in the case of Cameroon), and start-ups by independent artists reaching out to surrounding communities.

The editors' introduction—"Rethinking Museum Cooperation Between Africa and Europe: Do We Need a New Paradigm?"—considers the tense debate that opened the 2016 conference during an especially fraught exchange on asymmetrical relationships of the many participants who had to labor with inequalities of political/cultural power, lack of sustainable infrastructure, and shortage of financial support. Each of the thirteen essays challenges conventional Western definitions of museums, both established and contemporary. As a result of widely varying encounters, the editors worked to organize the papers into four sections: Mapping the Field: History and Context of Museum Cooperation Between Africa and Europe; Local Communities and International Networks: Partnership Relations; Accessibility of Collections from Africa; and Critique and Evaluation of Museum Cooperation.

Two forewords provide a framework for the essays. "Heterodoxy and the Internationalization and Regionalization of Museums and Museology" by Anthony Shelton is a thoughtful overview of collection practices and definitions of collaborations in anthropological museology. "Building a Critical Museology in Africa" by Ciraj Rasool lays a groundwork for rethinking museum collections, leadership, and international development.

Within the surge of recent scholarship on decolonization and repatriation, a number of authors make clear that there is much to be gained from zooming out to examine the difficult history of establishing museums in Africa. With thoughts on the fundamental struggles of postcolonialism, relevancy, and lack of financial support, essays take on notions of cultural ownership: its collection, possession, representation, and presentation. The evolution of partnerships as described in this volume has implications for international relations and roads to repatriation—and for not only visions of inclusion but also sovereignty and control by local communities and potentials for new forms of engagement. Their accounts shape compelling demands for museum decolonization and straddle new debates among colleagues about what museums are, along with their mission statements representing signiicant and highly divergent collecting, exhibition, interpretation, and preservation objectives. Each of the case studies in this volume can be read for insights into speciic project challenges and lessons reflected within specific (albeit a narrow number of) African countries and/or ethnic groups and the questions of sustainability and support that they pose.

Essays in Part I argue for major shifts to African models that could serve in the construction of a new museology positioning partners as equals, including and more often prioritizing (reviwer's emphasis) community voices and indigenous knowledge systems, and extending to restitution and repatriation, among...