A history and theory of colonial loot: an exploration into “Sri Lankan” artefacts in British museums

Wanniarachchi, Senel (2024) A history and theory of colonial loot: an exploration into “Sri Lankan” artefacts in British museums. PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.

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Abstract

This research explores a series of artefacts with relationships to Sri Lanka which are currently housed in, or have historically been housed in, various British museums. These objects have been pawns within an Orientalist propaganda project which did the important moral and philosophical groundwork that made colonialism possible and acceptable. Such propaganda legitimised the violence of colonialism by presenting colonised geographies as exotic and backwards landscapes that needed the “civilising mission”. Today, “looted” museum objects are also sites onto which ethnonationalist fantasies have been projected by those in the postcolony, especially various elite groups that reside there. These discourses on repatriation often position these objects as missing elements of long lost “authentic” heritage. Within a context in which the objects themselves pre-date the “invention” of the postcolonial nation-state, such discourses also belie and reproduce various forms of exclusion. The research asks: if European museums have been embedded in colonial propaganda networks which Orientalised colonised geographies and beings, what might a visit to these sites in the contemporary as a “postcolonial” subject look like? What histories might emerge from such a visit? Can that which has been stolen, be a starting point for thinking through not only what has been lost and needs to be recuperated but also what could have been different? What could still be different? Historically, these have been sites of (epistemic, representational) violence and subjugation with profoundly material consequences; in the contemporary, they might carry stories about the entanglements between the colonial past and the way we live in the present. Hidden in these stories might also be some clues about how we can leave behind better archaeologies for the future. Combining archival and ethnographic methods, the research considers the extraction and museumisation of a series of objects and asks how their materialities and histories can inform and complicate existing historical and theoretical work on postcolonialism and (de)coloniality. More specifically, the thesis intervenes in theoretical dialogues on Orientalism, (post)colonial ambivalence, subaltern studies as well as critical animal studies scholarship. The conviction is that there is some insurgent potential in attending to these objects and their histories that existing frameworks on restitution might not be able to capture.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Additional Information:	© 2024 Senel Wanniarachchi
Library of Congress subject classification:	A General Works > AM Museums (General). Collectors and collecting (General) D History General and Old World > DA Great Britain D History General and Old World > DS Asia G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > GN Anthropology J Political Science > JV Colonies and colonization. Emigration and immigration. International migration
Sets:	Departments > Gender Studies
Supervisor:	Hemmings, Clare
URI:	http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/4869

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