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Reading the Empty Shelves: Thoughts on Imperial Debt, Reparation, and Museums

This chapter engages with the temporal politics of imperial debt and post/decolonial reparations. By examining three novels that explore museum spaces and cultural artifacts in three African counties (Nigeria, Mozambique and Angola), we argue that literary creativity constitutes a fertile ground where the task of imagining and materializing reparation is already underway. The chapter also urges for an expanded topographic approach to processes of reparation, countering the idea that Western museums are the main actor involved in the process of decision making related to how to right the wrongs of colonialism and imperialism. In the three novels analyzed in this chapter, imperial debt and reparation are presented as structural, worldmaking processes, in which personal stories and cultural objects are indissolubly entangled into planetary logistics.

Authors

Carlos Garrido Castellano

Year
2024
Publication Name
Liverpool University Press
Category
Book chapter
Full Citation

Reading the Empty Shelves: Thoughts on Imperial Debt, Reparation, and Museums. In Maureen Fadem (ed.) Imperial Debt. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Link to Publication
https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/

ARTFICTIONS

Assessing the Contemporary Art Novel in Spanish and Portuguese: Cultural Labour, Personal Identification and the Materialisation of Alternative Art Worlds,

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