Elizibeth Marlowe reviews The Brutish Museum for the International Journal of Cultural Property:
Dan Hicks’s new book, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, has made a splash. Designated by the New York Times as one of the best art books of 2020, featured on blogs, podcasts, webinars, and in mainstream newspapers, the book and its author, the professor of contemporary archaeology at the University of Oxford and curator at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, are suddenly everywhere. This Zoom-enabled ubiquity can be understood in the context of the larger historical reckonings of 2020 and 2021 – a global pandemic fueled by global capitalism, climate change, and incompetent governance; a breaking point in the long saga of police brutality against racial minorities and white indifference to it; a toppling of statues to colonialist and Confederate leaders around the world; and, as I was finishing the book, a final attempt to impeach a hate-mongering US president for fomenting rebellion against the very democratic institutions he swore to serve. In its passionately argued call for the restitution of cultural artifacts looted in one of the most notoriously brutal episodes of colonial violence, The Brutish Museums encapsulates the zeitgeist.
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- Bookshop.org link for Dan Hicks’, The Brutish Museum’.
- Elizabeth Marlowe, Review of Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. 345 Pp. Pluto Press, 2020., International Journal of Cultural Property 1 (Cambridge University Press).
