Brutish Museums

Regular price €18.50
A01=Dan Hicks
African Art
african stolen art
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
art repatriation
Author_Dan Hicks
automatic-update
Benin Court Art
Benin Dialogue 2 Group
Benin Punitive Expedition
books about stolen art
British colonialism
british museum
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=ABC
Category=GLZ
Category=GM
Category=HBTQ
Category=HD
Category=NHH
Category=NHHA
Category=NHTQ
Category=NK
Cecil Rhodes
colonial art
COP=United Kingdom
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
George Goldie
Humboldt Forum
Language_English
looted colonial art
Macron Report
MC Hammer
Neil MacGregor
Niger Coast Protectorate
PA=Available
pan-Africanist thought
Pitt Rivers Museum
Price_€10 to €20
primitive art
PS=Active
Queen Victoria
repatriation of art
Royal Museum in Benin City
softlaunch
stolen art
stolen artifacts
stolen colonial art
United African Company

Product details

  • ISBN 9780745346229
  • Weight: 351g
  • Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
  • Publication Date: 20 Oct 2021
  • Publisher: Pluto Press
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Paperback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

Our Delivery Time Frames Explained
2-4 Working Days: Available in-stock

10-20 Working Days
: On Backorder

Will Deliver When Available
: On Pre-Order or Reprinting

We ship your order once all items have arrived at our warehouse and are processed. Need those 2-4 day shipping items sooner? Just place a separate order for them!

New York Times 'Best Art Books' 2020
'Essential' – Sunday Times
'Brilliantly enraged' - New York Review of Books
'A real game-changer'– Economist

Walk into any Western museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objects are all stolen.

Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of metal plaques and sculptures depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of Benin City, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections.

The Brutish Museums sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. Since its first publication, museums across the western world have begun to return their Bronzes to Nigeria, heralding a new era in the way we understand the collections of empire we once took for granted.

Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. His award-winning research focuses on decolonisation in art and culture, and academic disciplines, and on the role of cultural whiteness in ongoing histories of colonial violence and dispossession.