‘Ontologies In Conversation’: Restitution As A Cosmopolitan Practice

What this project seeks to do is to ‘Pivot the center’ and theorize from multiple angles so as to make new approaches, themes, and questions visible in the current debate for the restitution of objects looted from Africa during colonization. This work reads demands for the restitution of subjects looted during colonization as an articulation of an indigenous decolonial world-making agenda by centering indigenous worldmaking practices, research methodologies, and narratives of colonial violence as well as decolonization agendas, this work will also fundamentally address the epistemic violence inherent in museum practice and in Eurocentric mainstream narratives. In so doing, this research will look at how the memory of colonialism and the looting of/provenance of subjects is remembered in communities of origin, thus serving as a space where the community can represent and speak for itself and thus be allowed for an alternative narrative that does not immediately dismiss everything non-European as primitive. The current project responds to the lack of indigenous-centered scholarship that examines restitution as a decolonial agenda in indigenous world-making and as a cosmopolitan act. As a person from a community that has been actively engaged for decades in restitution claims for cultural subjects from Germany that were looted during colonization, I will trace the object biography, the present-day significance, and the agency of the subject. Yann Le Gall and Sebastien Sprute note that Ngonnso “...in particular, illustrates the broad spectrum of possible thematic confrontations, including the object as a subject of current political power relations.” This thesis will therefore be concerned with examining: To what extent are the current restitution claims for Ngonnso' a manifestation of cosmopolitanism grounded in indigenous worldmaking? And to what extent can a new theory of cosmopolitanism be anchored on Nso ontologies?

• Postcolonial Studies
• Black empowerment
• Decolonial futurities and thought
• Anti-colonial unlearning
• Critical museum studies