Thinking With | Possessions, Revisited

The conversation has as its aspiration to think through the stakes of what it means to engage the concept of “possess/ing” in the context of what we collectively refer to as ethnographic and/or world museums. We enter into this conversation with four explicit—and seemingly, at best remotely related—intertexts:

• First, what Nicholas Thomas notes is a “sense of urgency around art and empire […] driven most conspicuously by student and activist campaigning for the ‘decolonization’ of curricula, universities, public culture and representations of heritage and history” (15).
• Second, this above inquiry is itself  at once undergirded by and rendered concrete in the crucial question of ownership of those actual “objects” that constitute the vast collections of our museums, what the project Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value, and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums describes as the “debates” around the “growing contestation over what to do with colonial heritage held in museums [which] reveals polarized positions.”
• Third, the theory and scholarship around the lexical intendant other of possession—that is “dispossession,” which constitutes the title of a chapter in Nicholas Thomas’s book: “Landscapes: Possession and Dispossession.” That is, what does it mean to think questions of environmental degradation, (non)sovereignty, or even the very notion of the aesthetic without noting how our present world is predicated on the systematic dispossession of those globally understood as less privileged and/or belonging to a Global South/Global Majority on the part of those with European and Europeanly-informed privilege? And how does possession as a concept of extraction, but also of being-self-through-each-other trouble our dichotomous conceptions of who is victim and who is perpetrator, as per Michael Rothberg?¹
• Fourth, how do our museums staunchly remain wedded to the canonically defined disciplines that make it difficult to create fluidity among the categories of art, ethnography, nature, and history, which continue to order not just the world’s humans, but also the world’s species and materials into rigid civilizationally conceived hierarchies of being?
• And finally, the contested question of what it means to be possessed—the European word, often understood as degrading²—and used to designate an entire philosophy of “the universe,” which in the words of Souleymane Bachir Diagne allow to “open up ourselves to the object, the art object in particular, by means of a rhythmic attitude that puts us on the same wavelength with it.”³

This conversation then asks, the following questions:

• In a context of massive colonial and colonially informed neoliberal dispossessions, what does it mean to amalgamate a philosophy of “harmonious combination of rhythms” with the act of “self-possession” or “repossession,” which Kaiama L. Glover describes as “animat[ing] the stakes of the (formerly) colonized individual’s exposure to the regard of the metropolitan Other (and, later, vice versa)”?⁴
• How are the often conflicting definitions of value and ownership that inform conversations around restitution, themselves undergirded by the philosophical tenets that inform these objects very existence?
• In Nicholas Thomas’s words, how do “art and art’s narratives” constitute “vital” discourses for working through the “ongoing negotiation” (21) of what it means to live together in the what Wayne Modest refers to as the afterlives of the colonial?
• How are we to always keep the fact present that our museums represent those who are alive now and here, in all of our notions of now and here. For, if in her deliberations of the twenty-first century museum, Deborah A. Thomas reminds us that “restitution should be a methodology, not an event, the beginning of a conversation rather than the end—and that it should be grounded in relationships in which we are being responsive to the living,”⁵ then how does possession as concept make more present the fact that “Indigenous” lives have not passed away, but in fact continue to have “life and salience” in the most present-day expressions of our collective lives?

1. Michael Rothberg. The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford UP, 2019).
2. Yvonne Daniel. Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomble (Bloomington: University of Illinois Press, 2005): 13.
3. Souleymane Bachir Diagne. “African Art As Philosophy. Senghor, Bergson, and the Idea of Negritude,” in IncarNations. (Bozar Books. SilvanaEditoriale, 2019): 34.
4. Kaiama L. Glover. A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (Duke UP, 2021): 7.
5. Deborah A. Thomas as cited in Expedition. 63.3 “Critical Conversations: Reimagining the 21st Century Museum.” Fall/Winter 2021.