Post-colonial heritage restitution as recognition struggles

Abstract

This article examines struggles for postcolonial heritage restitution in international politics from the perspective of the problem of recognition. It views restitution not only as physical object movement and as transfer of legal ownership of cultural items, but also as political struggles involving reclamatory speech acts by Indigenous groups. Taking as a starting point three passages depicting contemporary restitutive claims made by an Indigenous Australian, the Rapa Nui people, and the Māori, it argues that restitutions have a radical political and ethical potential to redress cultural dispossessions, to cast into relief ongoing misrecognitions and to challenge colonial power dynamics. This requires reframing restitutions beyond the international legal discourse and highlighting their connection to the pursuit of epistemic justice. The article concludes that acts of ancestral heritage reclamations link restitution to demands for acknowledgment of the structural beneficiary positions of societies currently holding that heritage in their museums. They also demand that through heritage returns these societies relinquish their economic, political and epistemic privilages and undergo a loss. Thus, they reframing restitution—from a benevolent gesture of returns modelled on a logic of a gift to substantive politiacal acts of giving up power.

Reframing restitutions as reclamatory speech acts

I start this article with three short vignettes, depicting embodied and affective speech acts that have accompanied ongoing struggles by representatives of Indigenous groups and communities for the returns of misappropriated and translocated tangible cultural heritage and ancestral remains by cultural and epistemic institutions of former colonial states. ¹ The reader will likely be familiar with the first two cases, which have received international media coverage attracting broad public attention, and which concern struggles for postcolonial returns by Aboriginal Australians and Torres Strait Islander people and the Rapa Nui people petitioning the British Museum for repatriation (or at the very least a cultural loan) of the Hoa Hakananai’s moai. The third vignette documents my conversation with the Sydney-based Māori artist and activist Victoria Hunt regarding restitutive endeavors of Māori groups engaged in negotiations for return (in the form of cultural exchange) of a ceremonial meeting house with English Heritage Trust (see Zolkos, 2025). I outline the linguistic and bodily interventions undertaken by participants in these restitutive struggles as a linguistic action and suggest that, their differences notwithstanding, they exert a similar illocutionary force: present in the interventions is an optative mood, which means that at hand are expressions of wishes, requests and demands. My postulate is that in all three situations we witness political speech acts of reclamation.

While each of the situations comes with unique contexts and histories, the reason for opening the article with these passages is that they expand discussions of postcolonial returns beyond the physical movement of objects and the legal transfer of ownership to actual restitutive struggles and to practices of reclamation, thus throwing into relief the critical and normative nexus of restitution and recognition. Broadening our definition of restitutions beyond state-initiated and state-controlled, carefully curated public events, changes the epistemic optic through which they are typically approached. The following speech acts of reclamation both situate restitution as a redress and repair for past misrecognitions that, as scholars have shown, were at the core of colonial cultural dispossession and pose a demand for recognition as acknowledgment (cf. Markell, 2003). I argue that they help reframe restitution beyond its dominant juridical discourse and beyond the frame of “returnism,” infusing restitution with the power to contribute to dismantling the structures of colonial benefit and epistemic privilege. They align restitution with the goal of undoing or, as Ariella Azoulay puts it (2019), unlearning, political fantasies which scaffold the constructions of a benevolent liberal subject position that undertakes the return, that is, who “gives back.”

• 1. During Charles III’s inaugural visit to Australia in October 2024, the celebratory event of his address to members of parliament was interrupted by a fervid cry. Dressed in a traditional possum skin cloak, the independent senator for Victoria, a Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurring woman Lidia Thorpe made a remonstrative exclamation: protesting Charles III’s status as Australia’s sovereign and a head of state, she called for a treaty between Aboriginal and Islander nations and the commonwealth. ² She also demand the return of ancestral remains looted during England’s colonization of Australia. “This is not your land. You are not my king [. . .],” Thorpe shouted, “Give us what you stole from us—our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people.” In one swooping motion, Thorpe refuses to be silent, to welcome Charles, to acknowledge his authority, and to engage in a mutual interaction. ³ At hand is thus a refractory utterance of a repairative demand as Thorpe breaks the silence conventionally expected in the situation and articulates her protestations and demurs as reclamation of what has been stolen.

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• 2. In November 2018 an official delegation from Rapa Nui led by the (then) governor of the island, Tarita Alarcón Rapu, traveled to the British Museum and backed by the government of Chile, delivered a petition for the return or (at the least) cultural loan of the Hoa Hakananai’s moai, held in the museum’s collections for nearly 150 years. ⁴ During the subsequent press conference, Alarcón Rapu, for whom the visit was the first ever opportunity to see Hoa Hakananai’s, issued a plea. It was addressed not only to the museum, but to the British society, who was thus implicated as witnesses and beneficiaries of unjust colonial enrichment. Visibly emotional, she said: “We came all here, but we are just a body. You, the England people, have our soul. [. . .] You have [been] keeping him for hundred and fifty years, just give us some months that we can have him.”(France-Presse, 2018; Smith, 2018) Importantly, Alarcón Rapu articulated the museum’s ownership of Hoa Hakananai’s using language that undermined his status of a museal artifact of a cultural object and property, by referring to the moai as an ancestral being and by describing her community’s separation from him ⁵ as an experience of spiritual dispossession and a severing of a relation, not ‘merely’ a material loss.

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• 3. Between 2017 and 2019, the Sydney-based Māori activist and artist Victoria Hunt discussed with me the role of her performative and visual artworks in a struggle for a restitution of Māori meeting house, Hinemihi, currently owned by the British National Trust. A key feature of Hunt’s art activism, including her 2019 film TAKE about Hinemihi’s misappropriation, was that Hunt refused to assume a position of a supplicant of the former colonizer’s benevolence and demanded that restitution be accompanied by truth-telling. Embodying a defiant subject position, in TAKE Hunt re-frames heritage return as a process of rematriation and repair by re-establishing relationships, and through stewardship and care practices, rather than simply demanding transfer of ownership (see Zolkos, 2025). What is problematic for Hunt is not only that Hinemihi was illegitimately appropriated and relocated, but that her placement on the Onslow estate ensued a status change to a possession and a commodity. During one of the conversations, I asked Victoria what she wanted to achieve through her art and activism—what would she want to see happen, other than Hinemihi’s actual return to her custodian community? Hunt answered that she wanted ‘them’ (the National Trust, possibly the Onslow descendants) to acknowledge that in the current holding was not an inanimate and passive ‘thing’, but a being endowed with agential and affective powers, someone who acted on and exerted effects in the world.

By selecting these three (very different) examples of global restitutive endeavors taking place today, I aim to reframe restitution from its definition as a singular goal of return and ownership transfer and toward restitution as ongoing practices of reclaiming, including a myriad of activities (discursive interventions, political activism and artistic productions). The term “postcolonial restitutions” connotes thus not merely accomplished acts of return of misappropriated cultural objects to communities of the traditional caretakers and custodians from knowledge institutions in the global North, including museums, state archives and private collections, but also the accompanying endeavors centered on reclamatory speech acts. The three vignettes opening this article show that such reclamatory speech acts can take the form of demand (Hunt), or a plea (Alarcón Rapu), or even a refusal to interact (Thorpe).

Importantly, the epistemic shift from restitution as a goal to restitution as a struggle and a practice of reclaiming implies also a shift in normative political imagination organizing and inspiring restitutive politics and activism today. It is a move away from understanding restitution as a time-restricted, objective-centered and singularly focused on physical object movement, to restitution as open-ended, complex and dynamic political practices. I suggest that we can fruitfully describe these interventions as provocations that throw into relief (and push against) asymmetrical configurations of power defining ongoing conditions of “colonial governmentality” (Coulthard, 2014: 15) and colonial capitalism (see Barber, 2020). Accomplished acts of heritage return and declarations made by politicians in the West about restitution of cultural items to the former colonies have met with critique that, despite the official rhetoric of empowerment, these are carefully calculated acts aimed at solidifying relations of dependence and control in an era of competition for global influence (see e.g. Monroe, 2019). My choice of the term “provocation” as a motif that, I suggest, runs through all three vignettes, is meant to underscore two different meanings of the verb “to provoke.” First, each of the speakers causes a discomfort and uneasiness, and in Thorpe’s case, we could perhaps even call it a scandal. Following Azoulay’s perspective (2015: 11), I would suggest that Thorpe makes a scandal in the sense that she undertakes an action that “scandalize[s] a wrong” by bringing into the sphere of visibility what “has gone unnoticed or was even trivialized and accepted as part of the rule of law based on a differential body politic.” Regardless of the specifics mood of their illocutionary force—whether they are pleading, demanding, or repudiating—the activists, artists and community representatives in these stories refuse to accept the subject positions assigned to them in the institutional discourse. In the case of Alarcón Rapu and Hunt this means that instead of articulating their claims in the language of international law that reduces the items at hand to “cultural property” and “inanimate objects,” they insist on their spiritual and relational meanings as potent and agential beings, and thus, to paraphrase Tully (2000: 470), pose “a challenge to a prevailing rule or norm” (to borrow James Tully’s fortuitous formulation from a different context). But there is also a second meaning of the verb “to provoke” that can be fruitfully recalled here, and which the literal translation of pro-vocare as “calling forward” another’s voice (response). All three restitutive reclamations in my vignettes capture discursive, embodied and affective events that pro-voke in the precise sense that they incite or urge a response (this is not to say that they are able to determine what that response will be or even to ensure that they won’t be ignored and denied a response). Following this line of argument, in the final part of this article I will suggest that, understood as provocations calling for a response, the restitutive (reclamatory) speech acts urge not simply a physical return and ownership transfer, but an acknowledgment (a verbal response).

I want to suggest further that when postcolonial returns are framed in these communicative terms and through a speech act theoretical perspective, they cast into relief moral and political connections between restitution and recognition. First, they position restitution as a corrective and redressive response to “diachronic harms” (i.e. past and ongoing, see Lenta, 2000) that consisted of appropriations, extractions and translocations of cultural heritage from the global South to the global North (and, within the state, from Indigenous groups to metropolitan museums). I argue that these extractive practices have been underwritten by systemic failures to recognize—both the dispossessed groups as human persons and their cultural productions on terms established by the pre-colonial systems of meaning and knowledge. Drawing on Tarik Kochi’s conceptualization of recognition as a “hinge concept” (2018), I suggest that restitution is not only a struggle for re-acquisition, transfer of ownership and physical object movement back to the original communities (cf. Chuchu and Ngumi, 2021), but also as a repair of misrecognitions that have been bound with the colonial history of cultural expropriation. Next, following Hayden’s notion of misrecognition as “voiding the world” (2018), I propose that cultural colonial dispossessions imply misrecognition not only in the sense of direct withdrawals of recognition, but as an elimination and destruction of conditions within which reciprocal recognition can take place.

Another connection between recognition and restitution is that the embodied speech acts of heritage reclamation can be thought of as expressions of self-recognition in Paul Ricœur’s sense of self-affirmation. From this perspective, actors engaged in restitutive claim-makings, including Indigenous activists, community representatives, artists and scholars, are viewed as “agent[s] capable of devising, pursuing and accomplishing activities that make things happen in the world” (Hayden and Schick, 2016: 12). Of course, Ricœur’s account, which traces the tradition of self-recognition to Western antiquity (2007), needs to be recontextualized to suit critical Indigenous positions that situate the capacity to exert effects in the world within their relational and communal systems of meaning, knowledge and practice. ⁶ This leads me to identify a third point of connection between restitutive ethics and recognition, which is that of recognition as acknowledgment and a demand for historical truth-telling and for epistemic justice (see e.g. Dudgeon and Bray, 2024; Horthemke, 2021; Kovach, 2021; Tuhiwai Smith, 2016). I will argue that such acknowledgment is not merely an admission of veracity and validity of marginalized perspectives, but that it also requires that societies engaged in acts of “giving back” undergo an experience of “giving up”—their economic, political, and epistemic privilege, as well as capitulation of the fantasy of masterful and invulnerable subject that scaffolds colonial relations (see e.g. Frosh, 2013; Hook, 2008).

The proposed normative and critical reframing of restitution as a practice of recognition can offer a way out of a key problem faced by postcolonial efforts at object movement, which Akpang (2024) describes as their “neo-imperial politicizing” that reduces them to instruments of “soft power” whereby former European empires maintain influence in their former colonies and that empowers political and economic elites, rather than origin communities or custodian groups. Mbembe (2018) has warned that the restitutions which are undertaken on terms determined by the institutions and states currently in possession of the disputed items can undermine endeavors by the anticolonial exponents of object movement. This is particularly the case when returns become carefully planned and strategically curated affairs akin to re-branding, isolated from questions of historical responsibility, and when they provide an opportunity for the former colonial actors “to feel good about themselves.” Mbembe’s intervention serves as an important reminder that there is nothing automatically “liberatory” or “empowering” in heritage restitution (see also Sieg, 2021); as benevolent acts of return—“gifts” in Azoulay’s sense (2015)—they risk reinforcing differential and detrimental power positions of the colonized peoples. In turn, while not addressing the issue of heritage returns directly, Simon Barber in his insightful text on the convergences between Māori philosophy and the late Marx has shown that the capitalist transformation of objects into commodities has historically disrupted a more complex, relational and non-binary notion of things as integral to what he terms “geometry of life” (2019: 67). Reframing restitutions through the prism of radical anticolonial ethical positions, activates their potential to subvert, rather than sediment, hierarchical political relations, and to claim them for transformative projects, including recognition of those “modes of life” that colonial capitalism has disavowed, dominated and “flatten[ed out]” (Barber, 2020: 71).

The “hinge concepts” of restitution and recognition

In this section I develop the idea that reclamatory speech act by Indiegnous activists, community representatives and activists engaged in struggles for return of custodian heritage can be fruitfully viewed not only as efforts at legally and physically retrieving and rehoming their cultural items, but also as redressive and repairative response to the misrecognitions that were part and parcel of these items’ appropriation and translocation. To this end, I borrow Tarik Kochi’s notion of recognition as a “hinge concept” through which he brings together the mutually imbricated notions of political and juridical recognition on the one hand and economic accumulation on the other, thus forging a link between “juridical forms and moral conceptions of value, worth, dignity and entitlement” (Kochi, 2018: 94). Without reducing recognition to economic relations in any determinist sense, Kochi adopts an antagonist view of it with reference to ancient republic where, he argues, “the labor of the slave opens the political space of citizenship, and thereby allows the citizen of the ancient republic the leisure of time to actively participate in plural, agonistic political process,” with each subject “holding and affirming in each other a shared sense of social being” (2018: 87–88). In Kochi’s reading of Hegel, the agonistic and delibrative quality of political life in the ancient polis is at the same time solidified through affirmative practices of mutual recognition among the citizens and contains within its structures elements of exclusion and coercive relations of labor and production. As a hinge concept between political and economic relations, the concept of recognition in Kochi’s antagonistic and struggle-centered perspective implies not a process where the subject is granted, or endowed with, certain rights or a status, but a demand for, and a strife (or even an uprising) against, conditions of unfreedom (cf. Buck-Morss, 2000, 2009). Insofar as recognition requires critical reflection about and consciousness of one’s dispossession, including the role of affects such as resentment, outrage and moral indignity, recognition does not signify merely efforts for “the apportionment of rights” within the liberal order, but, rather, bespeaks a strife for a more radical political and economic reorganization and for redistribution of power and resources (Kochi, 2018: 94). ⁷

I extend Kochi’s conceptualization of the interconnection (“hinge”) between the demands for economic justice and political recognition to post-colonial contexts to questions of the decolonization of museal collections and the repair for cultural dispossession. In (settler) colonial contexts, as well as in societies that experienced internal colonization (cf. Burgos, 2023; Turner, 2018), the redistribution that Kochi points at, involves acts of “giving back” natural resources, land, knowledge and cultural heritage. The antagonistic framing of recognition as a “hinge” of political and economic struggles and economy helps link recognition claims made in the restitutive campaigns to protests against injustice of colonial dispossession. As Coulthard persuesively argues 2007,Coulthard persuesively argues 2014: 6–16), when applying Marxist theory in postcolonial contexts it is important to shift from the primary focus on questions of accumulation and exploitative labor to land dispossession and extractivism. For Sarr and Savoy (2018), the account of colonial expropriation must also heed structural acquisition of cultural wealth through the dual trajectory of colonial art market and the institution and discourse of modern museums, or what they dub the parallel “economic capitalization” and “symbolic capitalization.” Some recent developments in international law and policy-making reflect these legal and ethical complexities of repatriating and redressing colonial-era appropriations, and their harmful effects on the communities of origins (see e.g. Förster et al., 2024). ⁸ Among others, the German norms and guidelines governing repatriation, established through such policy initiatives as the 2019 National Framework Principles for Dealing with Collections from Colonial Contaxts, pivot on a broad notion of Unrechtskontext; acquisitions and accruals made in unlawful or unjust contexts (Förster, 2022). The framework signals policy-makers’ recognition that the issue of colonial-era takings is irreducible to acquisitions classifiable as loot or plunder under the rules of international law, and adds provenance research, dialog promotion, and establishment of transparent and open databases to the repertoir of redressive tools (in addition to repatriation). ⁹

While the provenance of the objects transferred to, and held at, Western museums does not form a homogenous history—it is important to acknowledge that the acquisitions happened through diverse means, and did not always involve plounder or unfair procurement (see e.g. Akpang, 2024)—Coulthard’s argument is useful for the discussion of restitution and recognition because it provides a theoretical perspective that helps contextualize the formation of colonial-era museal collections, also those that cannot be characterized as loot and plunder, in relation to asymmetrical power relations of the colonial encounters, and within structures of domination that ensued. Moreover, while Christine Mungai (2018) has challanged the argument that the colonial-era collections of the Western “universal museums” were “incidental or adjacent to the colonizing enterprise,” Mbembe (2018) has postulated that postcolonial restitution project needs to embrace the critique, or “demasking,” of the official stories of cultural procurement, which calls “the fiction of colonial acquisition.” Rather than individual “voluntary transactions between [economic and political] equals in a free market where the value of the object was determined by objective mechanism,” these procurements need to defined as structural and systematic acts of annexation or confiscation. In effect of these acquisitions, regardless of whether they occurred through means of direct violence and plunder, the translocated cultural items were subject to epistemic processing by being subject to “colonial circulations” (Mbembe, 2019). These distinct patterns of commodity circulation (cf. Appadurai, 1986) were designed as a “one-way ticket for objects” through “innumerable technicalities, explanations, policies, and laws [put] firmly in place to prevent the return of objects” (Chuchu and Ngumi, 2021). The items acquired economic value and generated profits; immobilized and isolated from the originary systems of knowledge and practice, they were subject to discursive and institutional control and “diasporized” (Basu, 2011).

The three restitutive vignettes at the opening of the paper furthermore illustrate Kochi’s point (2018: 98) that affects—indignation, resentment and grief—are pivotal for resistance against injustice. Acknowledging the role of feelings and emotions as forces driving many recognition struggles, Kochi articulates a perspective that further helps identify in the reclamatory speech acts by Thorpie, Alarcón Rapu and Hunt demands for recognition. In Kochi’s account, the subject of recognition is not a suplicatory passive recipient, who becomes endowed with rights and benefits by the sovereign power, but their active and defiant claimant. This further echoes Azoulay’s distinction (2015: 9) between the sovereign discourse on rights, which follows “the logic of a gift” where rights are being granted “from above,” and the civil discourse on rights, which follows “the logic of a demand” with rights being claimed “from below,” and which takes place “at sites of uprising, protest, and resistance.” In the case of Thorpie’s, Alarcón Rapu’s and Hunt’s speech acts, at hand is a subject position that actively claims—adjures, importunes, prompts—restitution. Highlighting reclamatory speech acts as “combined struggles” for restitution and recognition, reveals a normative and critcal conception of restitution that is effectuated by, and constitutes a response to, practices of claiming. Viewed from the perspective of international cultural heritage discourse, the emphasis on reframing restitution by stressing its agonistic dimention (and the use of reclamatory language as an exercise of counter-power) imbricates with the postulates of the human rights to culture, ¹⁰ which help expand restitution beyond acts of physical return or the narrow definitions of ownership (the key example of this approach is the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples that places the issue of returns in the broader context, and as a contributing element of, cultural practices, protection and revitalization, as well as that of self-determination, see e.g. Pulitano, 2012; Teng and Ryan, 2018; Tünsmeyer, 2022; Wiessner, 2013; Xanthaki et al., 2017).

The embodied and affective speech acts by Thorpie, Alarcón Rapu and Hunt do not express the position of a passive recipient of the sovereign’s goodwill; rather, they adopt a stance of a claimant who is actively engaged in the processes of recovery, by breaking through configurations of colonial power and by asserting traditional custodianship over their cultural belongings. As I have previously mentioned, a key aspect of Alarcón Rapu’s and Hunt’s interventions is the refusal to describe the items at hand using the language of inanimate objects (“artifacts,” “property,” “things”). By blurring the binary distinction between persons and things, which Roberto Esposito, among others, has defined as foundational to Western law and philosophy (2015), their utterances divest ethnographic museums and collections of colonial providence of their identity of benign and innocuous places of learning, preservation, knowledge and safeguarding of “humanity’s legacy” (see e.g. Stahn, 2024). They and present them instead as violent institutions of unjust enrichment, holding traditional belongings “captive.”

Finally, these reclamatory speech act can be thought of as not only struggles for recognition, but as expressions and practices of recogntion in their own right. This meaning of recognition comes close to Paul Ricœur’s philosophical conception of “recognizing oneself” (2007:69–149). It presents recognition as affirmation and assertion of the self as “an agent capable to devising, pursuing and accomplishing activities in the world” (Hayden and Schick, 2016: 12). When viewing struggles for cultural heritage return as practices of self-recognition and as expressions of “solidarity within an in-group” (and, potentially, with other groups engaged in postcolonial heritage retrieval), it is important to note that Ricœur does not equate self-recognition with the individualistic act of “purely autonomous free will” (Hayden and Schick, 2016: 12) Rather, he emphasizes social and moral actors’ dependence on others, depicting self-recognition as a practice that is accomplished in relations with and by the virtue of others. This relational aspect of self-recognition is cast into a sharp relief by critical Indigenous and postcolonial scholars problematizing the state-centric recognitive paradigm, who focus instead on recognition-based relations and mutual obligations within minority populations, and by way of forming solidarity with other subaltern groups. This reframes recognition away from actions centered on the petitioning of the state (to be granted autonomous rights) to collective practices “self-actualization” and the retrieval of resources and power by the communities (see Coulthard, 2014).

Restitution as redressing misrecognition and “repairing the world”

The striking feature of the three speech act of claiming restitution is a refusal to locate cultural colonial dispossessions in the past. Instead, Thorpie, Alarcón Rapu and Hunt depict these dispossessions as unresolved and unrectified events; even though might have taken place a century (or centuries) earlier, they create an obligation in the present for a redressive and repairitive response. As such, these speakers “push against” positions that view colonization as a matter of the past and insist that colonial history remains “open.” I suggest further that all three speakers imply, directly or indirectly, that the history of cultural annexaction has been bound with (continuing) misrecognitions in that has involved not only the denial of recognition to the creators and custodians of these items as human persons or as being fully human, but also to the cultural items themselves. In Thorpe’s outburst, the seizure of ancestral remains means their extraction from their kinship communities and their objectification and de-humanization as ethnographic or scientific “material.” Alarcón Rapu’s mournful plea for the return of Hoa Hakananaiʻa as a “soul” of the Rapa Nui pivots on a claim that the British Museum “holds him captive,” and points to a failure to acknowledge the deep spiritual connection between the moai and his custidian community. Hunt’s position also clearly suggest that the “epistemic processing” of Indigenous heritage as museological objects is a case of misrecognition. Her demand that the current legal holders of Hinemihi should acknowledge her spiritual belonging has remained unchanged despite the transfer of legal ownership, and that Hinemihi is endowed with agential powers, calls out the epistemic injustice of reducing Hinemihi to an inanimate “thing” and of erasing her spiritual meanings.

The broader historical context in which restitutive reclamations intervene has been outlined by postcolonial and critical Indigenous scholarship as epistemicide accompanying the physical transfer of objects and their incoporation into museal collections in the West (see e.g. Wyse, 2015; do Mar Castro Varela and Tamayo Rojas, 2020). It signifies a process of violent de-signification that has striped cultural heritage items of their places and meanings in pre-colonial systems of thought by inserting them into discourses of museology and attributing to them labels of “ethnographic exhibits” and “artifacts.” In consequences of their categorizations in accordance with Western esthetic and art historical categories (see e.g. Arke, 2012; Hall and Tandon, 2017; Kassim, 2017; Line, 2018), these idems have been subtracted epistemologies integral to their creation, custodianship, use and practice (Vogel, 2014). Furthermore, Akpang (2024) argues that “misconstrued narratives” of Indigenous peoples’ artifacts became instrumentalized by modern ideologies of race and racial supremacy, which justified colonization. He suggests that within the discursive and esthetics settings of ethnographic museums these items substantiated and materialized “sciences and philosophies that asserted that Blacks were inferior, irrational, and evolutionary deselected at the base of the social pyramid of ontological density, with skin color serving as a signifier of modernity.”

From this perspective postcolonial reclamations and restitutive struggles set to correct and redress not only the physical and legal processes of cultural annexations, assignations of ownership and object diasporization (cf. Basu, 2011), but also the misrecognitions intrinsically bound with them. As such, restitutions should respond to the broader psycho-social and cultural effects of colonial heritage appropriation, which critical scholars have long emphasized. Sarr and Savoy (2018: 8), list economic, intellectual and esthetic aspects of appropriations, detailing their detrimental consequences in regard to “spirituality, creativity [and] transmission of knowledge.” Mbembe (2018) also makes the point that with the extractions of heritage items, the colonized groups were deprived not only of their tangible presence but of an “enormous reserve of potential,” while Sarr (2019) speaks of cultural dispossession as “incommensurable loss” of “reservoirs of creativity and [of] a force of generability.” These critical perspectives radicalize restitution as a political and ethical project of seeking justice by point to the limits of the juridical discourse of heritage return in that transfers of ownership and physical returns still leave unrectified losses that have been incurred through cultural extractions but are irreducible to the material and economic dimension, and that cannot be put right or be compensated for. Mbembe speaks of the aporia of restitution, insisting that recognizing these limits and thresholds of the restitutive project is one of its very condition. He says (2018): “this world that has been lost, no one will ever be able to restitute to us,” and asserts that “there are things that we will never recover; [. . .] they cannot be compensated for; [they are] beyond restitution.” Understanding what losses have been incurred through cultural extraction requires an acknowledgment in the present that the harms are irreducible to physical annexation, and that they also connote severance and devitalization of communal bonds and practices, and a wound to collective capacities for creativity and imagination.

In his insightful essay “Lost Worlds” Hayden (2018) uses to concept of misrecognition to probe the question of harms sustained by colonized groups due to the devastation and depletion of their culture. He depicts colonial violence against cultures and communities as an impairment of group’s capacity for recognition. While Hayden invoke the philosophical language of “evils” (rather than “loss”), there is an overlap between his focus on cultural genocide and mine on heritage dispossession. Hayden (2018, p. 111) discusses the genocidal destruction of Aboriginal Tasmanians, who they were violently coerced to “renounce ties to their land, to their language and culture, and to each other—indeed, forced even to deny their own historical reality, that is, their world as a shared repository of memory and experience.” In restitution debates there is a similar understanding of annexed objects as “containers” or “place-holders” of traditions, knowledges, and relationships (in the words of Ngumi (2022), the objects have held a place for other (related) losses: “for people who died, for communities that were erased, [. . .] [for] land that was grabbed”). Hayden (2018: 105, 106) defines cultural genocide as a case of “radical non-recognition” that pivots on “reducing others to the point of non-being on both an individual and collective level.” Rooted in Arendt’s political philosophy of public appearance and of a shared or common world, Hayden’s conception of misrecognition aligns closely with postcolonial and Indigenous critiques of heritage appropriation as a denial or withdrawal of recognition that consists of a violent process of “voiding the world.” He defines it as “annihilation to non-existence [. . .] of a shared world that should be both the constitutive ground and the affirmative outcome of mutual recognition” (2018:106; emphasis in the original). The world-in-common has multiple components, including material products of human artifice and creativity, which “prop,” “furnish” and “scaffold” relationships and interactions. It follows from this (Arendtian) account that cultural heritage objects are co-constitutive of the world insofar as they “confer relative durability and stability on the social fabric,” and allow for cross-generational continuities and learning. The world is a “collective repository of a past, the meaningful condition of a present ans the potential expression of a future” (Hayden, 2018: 110). The acts of world-building through artifice, creativity and imagination are constitutive of the “intermediary third dimension that is irreducible to the persons who relate through and to it,” and that provides a holding-space for the relations and interactions that gather around it. Shifting the emphasis from a “conventional dyadic” notion of recognition to a conception of a “meaningful context” enabling recognition, Hayden (2018: 109–110; emphasis in the original) thus argues that “[. . .] by treating world as having the same ontological status as self and other, existing as definite and historically specific ensamble of relations between different persons, we place recognition within a triad of self-world-other.” This imbricates closely with Mbembe’s point that retrieving cultural wealth has been recognized, since the beginning of declonization movementes, as a condition of achieving freedom and independence: “[the] Africans [making repatriative demands] believed they could not become free in the absence of culture that [framed] their past.”(“Panel Discussion between Achille Mbembe and Andreas Eckert,” 2018).

To sum up, Hayden’s (Arendtian) perspective helps link heritage dispossession and misrecognition not (only) because violently severing communal ties to these items is a direct denial of the recognition of the colonized subjects as persons and as political equals (cf. Mills, 1997) and an epistemic reduction and distortion of their artifice, but also because it meant a profound impoverishment of their world on the whole. This has effectively compromised and impaired the people’s capacity for recognition. If, as Hayden argues (2018: 10; emphasis in the original), recognition is to be “distinguished not only by reciprocity between plural persons but [also] by the presence of an acknowledged common world, a third, shared object of concern which serves as the site of political coexistence around which persons are constituted together,” then this triadic notion of recognition offers a new (and I think important) lens through which postcolonial restitution as a redress and repair of misrecognition can be viewed. This reframes restitution as a reparative action posited against a normative ethical horizon that extends beyond the immediate goal of object movement; rather, it seek to repair worlds that were fractured and dispossessed.

Restitution as acknowledgment of historical truth and as an act of abdication

Accomplished acts of return of disputed objects from former colonial knowledge institutions might be met with laudatory responses from (some) global audiences, but, as numerous critics point out, there are no guarantees that they will contribute to reorganization and redistribution of cultural wealth and power globally; “away” from the former colonial actors to colonized groups and societies (see e.g. Akpang, 2024; Koffi, 2020; Mungai, 2018; Ngumi, 2022). It is also uncertain whether (and how) restitutions in and of themselves can contribute to undoing legacies of colonialism in (and beyond) Western museums, or whether they empower and wield reparative effects for Indigenous groups. In case of state-to-state returns, all too often the beneficiaries of restitutions have been political and economic elites in the receiving states (Akpang, 2024). Insofar as the legal and institutional terms of such returns are set primarily by these items’ colonial holders and legal owners in the global North, and negotiated with legal representatives and political elites, even in the case of successful restitutions, hierarchical relations and colonial narratives can be left intact and can even become more entrenched). Problematic situations include loans (rather than permanent repatriations), divisions of the collection (rather than returns), or when restitutions are politically and legally conditioned, or when restitutive processes are deliberately isolated from claims for self-determination, for return of misappropriate land, or for monetary compensations, etc. Even more so, as Akpang argues (2024), the focus on so-called “returnism” discourages broader critical debate about, and reform of European museums in regard to, their historical entanglements in colonialism through “fossilization and inferiorization” of non-European cultures. For Akpang (2024) key in this context is the question of uncontested objects, and he argues that the non-Western heritage remaining in European museums is an opportunity for “ethical restitution” and for “dismantling colonial museum practices and reconceptualizing [these collections’] presentation to gain respected universal significance.”

I will call those acts of return that fail to upend relations of domination and to disrupt asymmetrical power configurations “benevolent returns” in accordance with Mbembe’s point (2018) that when restitutions are discursively framed as acts of generosity or charity on the part of the former colonizer, they can actively suppress the question of ethics of redress for historical wrongs and the moral and political obligations (he has somewhat controversially suggested that if returns of the collections are to provide an opportunity for Europe to “feel good about itself,” then African countries should refuse to receive them). Regarding the question of recognition, acts of restitution framed top-down as “benevolent returns” are examples of what Judith Butler has described as performative “punctual act[s]” that are bestowed, once and for all, by the dominating subject upon the other (Butler, 2021: 47; see also Schick, 2022: 601). Restitutions modeled on “the logic of the gift” (granted by imperial institutions) are “punctual” not merely in the sense of singular events, but because they are framed as completions or closures that exhaust these institutions’ obligations vis-à-vis the claimants. The paradox of these state-centric (and Eurocentric) returns is that they are deliberately designed to be non-replicable and bring to a halt subsequent claims and demands; to strengthen or to immunize, as it were, the institutions against further restitutive struggles (in my critical analysis of the Danish National Museum’s repatriation of a segment of its Greenlandic collections to Nunatta Katersugaasivia Allagaateqarfialu [Greenland National Museum and Archives] I suggest that the act of return was at the same time an act of legitimized retainment of the remaining part of the collection; see Zolkos, 2023).

One such case of a carefully scripted and designed “benevolent returns” was the 2020 statement by Roselyne Bachelor, the French Cultural Minister, on the occasion of the Senate’s vote to return objects to Benin and to Senegal. Bachelor used restitution to disavow, rather than acknowledge, historical responsibility, and she claimed that the return should not to be misunderstand as “an act of repentance”; rather, they were “an act of friendship and trust” (in McGivern, 2020). Describing Bachelor’s statement as attempt to define the “semantics of exchange,” Chuchu and Ngumi (2021) have argued that it sought to dissociate heritage returns from historical contexts, as well as from restitutive ethics, including accountability, acknowledgment, critical self-reflection and truth. The notion of “benevolent returns” thus means both that returns take place in the contexts of starks material and ideational power disparities between the actors involved and that they can serve as modalities of “colonial governmentality” (Coulthard, 2014: 15). “Benevolent returns” are opportunities for European states to reshape and “smoothe out” power relations with former colonies in a competitive global context. These highly politicized returns impel the receptive states to orient themselves toward the former colonial states by acknowledging their efforts and good-will, and by expressing appreciation and gratitude.

Mbembe elucidates the political and ethical problems with “benevolent returns” as a destortion of restitutive ethics by also describing them in terms of misrecognition. For him, colonial dispossession, which occurred at multiple and intersecting levels of economy, power relations, extractivism, and epistemicide, has created a set of ethical obligations (which he elucidates by invoking a figure of “debt”) that should be considered and responded to in the present. These obligations go beyond calls for ownership transfer or physical restoration of objects back to the origin communities. They also include, as I argue, acknolwedgment obligations: to “tell the truth” about provenance and the conditions that have enabled the heritage acquisitions, and to consider their multifaceted impact, as well as to generate a critical reflection about the role that Western museums have historically played in undermining traditional knowledge systems, while justifying colonial activities. Here lies another connection between restitution and recognition: when viewed from the radical ethical anticolonial perspective, restitution cannot be reduced to “returnism”; instead, it requires acknowledgment and critical reflection, or what Mbembe calls the “capacity to tell the truth.” This demand for acknowledgment is clearly present in the speech acts that open this article as, in their unique ways, the three actors both articulate restitutive demands and exact truth-telling. Thorpe “scandalizes the wrong” of colonial appropriations, including the systemic peculations of human remains; Alarcón Rapu prevents Hoa Hakananai’s’ holders from assuming a benevolent subject position by identifying the collection as incarceration and alienation; Hunt’s restitutive claims pivot on a simultaneous demand for an acknowledgment that disrupts and fractures the colonial discourse. Each of these speech acts radicalizes restitution by centering it on obligations that exceed “mere” physical relocation and change of status. Instead, they articulate a radical ethical stance of redress and acknowledgment.

Probing more deeply the question of acknowledgment and a demand for truth-telling as a “hinge” connecting restitution and recognition, I turn now to the writings by Patchen Markell to argue that postcolonial restitution can have reparative effects only when it includes recognition as acknowledgment and an avowal of historical truth. “Acknowledgment” in Markell’s work pertains to both (i) recognition of something (here: heritage provenance and colonial power structures that have enabled the procurement, and the epistemic and institutional insertion of the items in the museum), and (ii) renegotiation of own subject position in relation to that history. Markell critiques the core assumptions in the theory of recognition, namely the normative proposition that political and ethical relations in a society can be based on mutually accurate and appreciative acknowledgments of identity, or what he calls this ideal of a “world without alienation” (2003: 3). This idealized notion is for Markell a misconception that is rooted in a desire for invulnerability. What the ideal omits, or disavows, is that to partake in social and political life means, ineluctably, taking on the risk of, or making oneself vulnerable to, misidentification or misrecognition. Modern society is permeated by the denial of what he call, following Arendt, “human finitude” and “openness and unpredictability of the future,” (2003: 5). “Human finitude” does not mean mortality in this context, but, rather, the irreducible conditions of contingency and uncertainty of social and political life, which set limits to our actions and responses. The denial of contingency and finitude pivot on a fantasy of a masterful, independent and self-sufficient subject that Markell calls a “desire for sovereign agency” (2003:5). Approaching this issue from a psychoanalytic feminist perspective, Teresa Brennan outlined it as a foundational fantasy of modernity based on renouncing and disowning “our helpless and unbearable passivity, our lack of agency” (2004:13; see also Brennan, 2000). Subjective independence, meaning a social existence “without experiencing life among others as a source of vulnerability” and unpredictability (Markell, 2003: 12), is possible and desirable.

Markell’s critique of the desire for an “unencumbered self” and of the “aspiration to sovereignty” is an insightful contribution to the discussion of restitution and recognition as “hinge concepts” (and to understanding the endurance of global colonial legacies more broadly) because it helps approach coloniality not as a withdrawal of recognition from the per se, but as a “patterning and arranging the world that allow some people and groups to enjoy a semblance of sovereign agency at others’ expense” (2003: 5). Applied to the questions of heritage restitution and redress for cultural dispossession, this bold proposition means that relations of domination imply not “the failure to recognize [others’] identity, but [the] failure to acknowledge one’s own basic situation and circumstances” (2003: 7). What acknowledgment requires is thus not only an avowal of marginalized histories of colonization, but that “no one be reduced to any characterization of his or her identity for the sake of someone else’s achievement of a sense of sovereignty or invulnerability” (2003: 7). When postcolonial heritage returns are accompanied by a failure of acknowledgment, that is, when they coincide with disavowal and non-recognition of the former colonizing subject’s vulnerability and “finitude” (in Markell’s sense), they fail to actualize their radical political and ethical potential. In addition to relocating and transferring back cultural heritage to the origin communities in order to rectify and redress dispossession, restitution also demands that the colonizer undergoes a divestiture of their privilege. Rather than controlled and deliberate act of return that rooted in the subject’s humanitarian goodwill and benevolence, restitution (in this radical ethical perspective) is thus less a ’doing’ than “being undone.” For Markell “acknowledgment” demands that “we refuse something, restrain an impulse, forego an advantage, evade a recognition” (2003: 7). Here restitution means not recognition of the other, but a self-recognition, that involves undergoing a loss; it is a form of a privative experience of dismantling (“unfixing”) a system of privilege.

Restitution as an avowal of historical truth and as an opportunity to develop a greater “capacity for truth” regarding the historical (and continuing) global relations shaped by coloniality goes hand in hand with acknowledgment that takes oneself as an object of its action (the grammar of acknowledgment is that of “middle voice”). This coheres with Mbembe’s point that restitutions are vulnerable to being politically warped into opportunities for “Europe to endow itself with good conscience” (2018) and to absolve oneself of much needed critique of the continuities and aftermaths of colonization (in another perspective, this also imbricates with Kate Schick’s conception of vulnerable recognition (see e.g. 2022), whereby restitutions can be viewed as opportunities for those engaged in the practices of return to develop a capacity for vulnerability and relationality). Mbembe (2021): “[w]hen we say that we restitute these objects, does that mean that the function of self-criticism has finished?” He warns that restitutions can be distorted on the model of “expulsions” or “deportations”—getting rid of and ejecting beyond its borders something one no longer needs or values. Hence Mbembe’s articulation of restitutive ethics as an aporia means that the condition of possibility of returns is that one gives back only that, which one has learnt to value, so that the former colonizing subject can incurs (and mourns) a loss. This strikes a concordant note with what I have called a “middle voice acknowledgment” and restitution as an act that dismantles structures of privilege and benefit. On this account, restitution is less a gift to the other (an endowment or bestowal upon the other), and more an act of “abdication.” (Markell, 2003: 36).

Conclusions: toward restitutive ethics of “Giving Back” as “giving up”

In this article, I have probed the relationship between restitution and recognition through a series of interpretative and conceptual steps. Borrowing from (and recontextualizing) the work of Tarik Kochi, I have approached it as a “hinge” that can be inspected from different angles, revealing different elements and “appearances” of their connection, including restitution as a form of redress and repair for past misrecognition and restitutive ethics radicalizing the demands of postcolonial heritage returns by connecting them to truth-telling and acknowledgments. I have postulated that, rather than focus solely on the actions of return, it is important to pay more heed to and amplify perspectives articulated by “restitutive actors” and to expand the meaning of that term beyond the formal representatives of the state, including representatives and elders of Indigenous communities, activists and artists. Weaving into my discussion speech acts by three such actors (Lidia Thorpie, Tarita Alarcón Rapu, Victoria Hunt), I have suggested that it is important and fruitful for scholarly debates to recognize the centrality of these voices for restitution critique, and to consider restitution as a response to utterances and their illocutionary (optative) force. I have called their interventions “reclamatory speech acts,” suggesting that the perspectives of non-state restitutive actors illuminate different elements of the “hinge” of restitution and recognition: (i) as a redress for past misrecognition, which accompanied cultural dispossession of colonized groups by way of “world voiding”; (ii) considering restitutive demands and claims as an expression of self-recognition and a practice of historical agency; and (iii) linking restitution to acknowledgment and truth-telling, which can potentially lead to undoing and dismantling continuing legacies of colonization in the form of structures of privilege and epistemic ignorance. In this context, I have also attended to a range of thinkers postcolonial and critical Indigenous studies who have discussed returns, object movements and cultural dispossession, and who pose a “provocation” to the current holders of colonial-era heritage items, asking not only for their return but for greater critical self-reflection and psychic honesty. Within the purview of radical restitutive ethics, acts of “giving back” become irrevocably bound with incurring a loss and with “giving up” (something of value, one’s own privilege, enrichment and entitlements, an interest in perceiving the world in certain ways and in “not knowing”). The political, economic and epistemic “giving up” also needs to coincide with the psycho-social level as a process of “abdication” of the masterful subject by abandoning colonial fantasies of control and domination. Such multiple layers of “giving up” seem to me crucial if we aspire to a more radical and more globally transformative postcolonial object movement.

Given the political and ethical complexity of the issues at hand, it is important to not reduce acts of recognition (pertaining to the field of postcolonial restitution) to pleas or demands to be recognized (as the rightful spiritual and legal owners and custodians of the heritage at hand), but to expand the rubric of recognition in the context of restitution conceptually and normatively. Here I have attempted to undertake such “expansions” in different directions: by discussing restitution as a repair for misrecognition and by linking recognition of someone to recognition of something (i.e. acknowledgment). Some of the key issues in this context are that of historical truth regarding the provenance and the socio-political conditions of domination that had made colonial acquisition, institutionalization and re-semanticization possible in the first place. When reframed as a response to reclamatory speech acts—or, as I have suggested, as politically and ethically “provoked” or “called forth” by the restitutive actors’ interventions—restitution is thus reframed in a close relation to recognition. For societies currently in possession of others’ cultural heritage, restitution does not mean “doing the right thing” but becoming vulnerable to loss, undergoing a dispossession and capitulation of colonial fantasy of mastery and invulnerability.