Museus, representação e poder: reivindicação de artefatos culturais africanos e resistência na política internacional

Abstract

The monograph starts from the phenomenon of claiming African cultural artifacts to try to ascertain aspects of culture in the postcolonial context. In this attempt, historical events that confirm the conditions of obtention by looting and by ethnographic missions on the African continent, as well as the development of the issue over the years for which African countries and civil society have dealt with the technical paradigms that deny the return of the African heritage. As a deepening of what this question represents, the intention was to keep cultural objects from the territories explored in European museums in the nineteenth century. It is confirmed that the huge musealization of African heritage served the ideology of imperialism in its endeavor to universalize and spread the civilization of the white man to the rest of the world. Due to the power of techniques of exhibition and visualization much of what affects the intercultural relations of contact between Europeans and colonized people is still felt today within the practices of ethnographic museums. Finally, a research of the postcolonial approach with authors who theorize about representation, culture, power, domination, identity and resistance confirm an ethical-aesthetic-materialist cut and demonstrate that broader than the attempt to decolonize museums is the renegotiation of power relations in the postcolonial era.