Anthology Film Archives

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DECOLONIZE THE MUSEUM?

December 13 – December 15

December 13-15, 2024

Frantz Fanon described the transformative whirlwind of decolonization as “a program of complete disorder.” Museums did not precede a world created through conquest, colonization, empire and genocide – they were a product of that order. Built to store pillaged objects, project visions of power, and prove who was “primitive” and who was “modern,” could museums and their rigid hierarchies and categories ever coexist with the liberating chaos of decolonization? As early as the 1970s – on the heels of African nations claiming independence – the call for restitution was introduced and has grown ever louder in recent years. The demand for the return of Africa’s looted cultural inheritance represents an intergenerational struggle of political and economic consequence, especially urgent for a contemporary youth deprived of their own past. 

DECOLONIZE THE MUSEUM? brings together documentaries made between the 1970s and today, framing an ongoing historical process and challenging what is too often an empty promise of justice. By turns conversational, traveling, clandestine, fantastical, and pedagogical, the films grapple with a heritage that is not only material but spiritual and social, showing objects that speak, scream, and thread the fabric of a Pan-African people’s history and collective identity. While the issue is not directly invoked, they occasion a reminder that African Cinema is also part of a broad inheritance that has not only been stolen but commodified and twisted into the profits of tourism and commercialism. This program addresses the limits of a circular debate and centers the evolving story the African continent and diaspora can tell itself about itself – and in that story, museums and restitution are only chapters, not ends.

Guest-programmed by Yasmina Price, who wrote the introduction above, as well as all the individual film descriptions.

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