Towards the beginning of the movie Black Panther, Michael B. Jordan’s character “Erik Killmonger” steals a war hammer from the fictional Museum of Great Britain.  He justifies this to the museum director by asking her if she thought her ancestors paid a fair price or just took it “like they took everything else.” This scene […]

This clip relates to our class discussions in many ways; we recently discussed Fred Wilson and his mixing of artifacts in his exhibits that do not relate to each other. Although, it was supposed to be incidental because the artifact was stolen and so wrongly identified, the clip incorporates the misinterpretation of African artifacts. This […]

History has always been seen as valuable. This can be seen through the construction of monuments and memorials some standing for hundreds of years. Museums play a large part in this by preserving old artifacts and keeping them on display. For a long time, these types of exhibits were seen as largely uncontroversial and factual […]

In the tour of the Nubian exhibit, the main point of the exhibit was to show how much of what we thought was Egyptian because of how history seems to be “rewritten” when artifacts are stolen and taken in to the history of the new culture/group. No one had even heard of Nubia, so it […]

The clip from the Black Panther helped strengthen the idea that not only have museums retrieved artifacts illegally, they also hesitate at times when it comes to knowing the actual origin and other valid facts about the same artifacts. Moreover, some museums exhibit such artifacts with incorrect details, which further degrades its culture and history. […]

Stories of history are often told by the “winner.” The winner in this sort of context can be the winner of a war, the empire that thrived the longest, the voice of the majority. The winner can also be imperialistic countries who colonized other lands. The winner gets to tell the story because they have […]

In the museum scene from Black Panther, Killmonger expresses the desire to have the Wakandan artifact returned to him. When the museum guide said that these items were not for sale, he retaliated with the rhetorical question about how her ancestors originally obtained the artifact. This scene raises the debate on whether museums should return […]

In class we were talking about different museum exhibits and the meanings behind them. We talked about ones with racist themes (a whip area for slaves) and one representing museum guards. We talked about how that exhibit included 4 headless when dressed in nothing noticeable which was a symbol for how almost everyone ignores museum […]

These African artifacts being in a British museum is one part of the legacy of colonialism.  Modern Africans do not have many of their cultural and historical artifacts in their museums, because they were taken from their countries during the colonial period.  This can create a lack of understanding of their culture and history, because […]