Stadt: Würzburg

Frist: 2021-09-30

Beginn: 2022-06-24

Ende: 2022-06-25

In both the ex-colonial and the ex-colonized worlds, visions of Africa and its colonial past have become incarcerated in stereotypes, dichotomies, and historical misrepresentation. Especially in European Cultural Heritage, we see a mixture of these ambivalent subjects and habits of lack of self-searching. But the restitution debate in Europe on cultural objects from Africa (Sarr/Savoy 2018) and the Black Lives Matter movement, which also reached Europe in 2020, have set the course for a questioning of the colonial essence of Cultural Heritage. Recent questions about history politics, cultural memory and cultural traditions are now also – and above all – debated in public. Museums, Cultural Heritage institutions, Universities with their collections and their self-image are now more than ever in the spotlight of the dynamics of a global debate.

The conference is co-organised by the universities of Edinburgh, Padua and Würzburg and will take place in Würzburg on June 24 and 25, 2022. The event will be under the umbrella of the Coimbra Group, an association of long-established European multidisciplinary universities of high international standard.

In the course of the conference, we aim to discuss the following questions:
- How can Cultural Heritage be decolonized in science, society, politics, and institutions to avoid ideological extremism?
- Are there national differences and similarities in Europe?
- Who are the actors and networks involved in defending the status quo or in decolonizing Cultural Heritage?
- What are the direct and indirect consequences of unreflect and stereotypical Cultural Heritage in Europe?
- How can the ‘decolonialization of Cultural Heritage’ contribute to the field of development cooperation with the African continent?

The conference will be organized within four sessions:
1. Historical misrepresentation: The concealment of colonial history in Cultural Heritage
2. The survival of Stereotypes: Reflections on the Imaginary within Cultural Heritage
3. University’s collection: Current states and new approaches
4. European Museums: Restitutions and new displays

Abstracts of max. 300 words and a short bio of max. 200 words should be sent to julien.bobineau@uni-wuerzburg.de and giuliana.tomasella@unipd.it by September 30, 2021.

Beitrag von: Julien Bobineau

Redaktion: Robert Hesselbach