Practicing Decoloniality

Abstract

| african arts AUTUMN 2022 VOL. 55, NO. 3 of decolonial work currently being undertaken in UK museums (Museums Association 2021). Meanwhile the government has warned museums that “as publicly funded bodies, you should not be taking actions motivated by activism or politics” (Dowden 2021) and projects exploring colonial legacies have received high-profile criticism from MPs and the rightwing media (Doward 2020). The sector also continues to wait for much-delayed guidelines on repatriation and restitution (often seen as a cornerstone of decolonial work) from Arts Council England. Yet “decolonizing” is now a term that appears regularly in funding bids, on museum websites, in redisplay projects and exhibitions amid concerns that the term has been co-opted, is becoming meaningless and is, anyway, impossible from within the institution (Kassim 2017). Some of these concerns echo those of de Greef, Goncalves, and Jansen about the university (2021: 1). In light of this, it is important that this exhibition is taking place at the V&A not only because of its high profile and international reputation, but also because of its long and troubled relationship with Africa. Founded in the mid-nineteenth century with a focus on art and design, today it holds the UK’s national collection of fashion and textiles and has extensive Asian holdings (which also include fashion), but Africa has not been part of its remit. As recently as 2009 the V&A’s collecting policy stated, “Objects are collected from all major artistic traditions ... The Museum does not collect historic material from ... Africa south of the Sahara” (V&A 2012). Although the policy only excluded historic material, in practice contemporary material was not collected either. North African objects were included and the museum has a large collection of embroideries from the urban coastal regions, but it did not, until recently and due to the work of Angela Jansen, collect North African fashion (Stylianou 2013, Jansen 2022). Furthermore, for much of the twentieth century the V&A not only excluded African fashion but also deaccessioned dress and textiles collected in the nineteenth and early twentieth century (including Madagascan weaving, Nigerian rigas, military uniforms, and royal Ethiopian robes) on the grounds that it was, and could only be, of anthropological interest (Stylianou 2013). When one thinks about the invisibility of Africa in fashion histories and museum practice, the V&A has surely been the example par excellence. This absence needs to be addressed. However, making African fashion more visible is not without its problems, not least that in bringing postindependence Africa firmly into the fashion canon (as an exhibition at the V&A must surely do), it only feeds into the colonial/modernity binary that “ultimately reinforces categories of racial, cultural, and temporal discrimination” (de Greef, Goncalves, and Jansen 2021: 4). In the introduction to the forthcoming Creating African Fashion Histories: Politics, Museums, and Sartorial Practices (coedited by JoAnn MacGregor, Heather Akou, and myself), McGregor describes how curators have exposed and are “seeking to repair racialized exclusions and the persistence of Eurocentric regimes of knowledge and representation” (McGregor 2022: 2) through fashion. The edited volume comes out of a 2016 conference hosted by Brighton Museum to coincide with Fashion Cities Africa, a temporary exhibition that showcased contemporary fashion from Casablanca, Nairobi, Johannesburg, and Lagos through personal “style stories.” Running simultaneously was a collection project that acquired African fashion from the 1960s onwards for Brighton Museum’s collection. The collection project was guided by a panel made up of academics and local people with lived experience of African fashion who met regularly to create a wish list of objects for the museum. The museum then attempted to acquire the objects, drawing heavily on the personal and professional networks of the panel (Ojo, Mears, and Stylianou 2022). For me, a member of the collection panel and organizer of the conference, the work felt critical, for a number of reasons.