Global Asia Lecture Series: Restitution: on/in/to Southeast Asia

As part of ASU's commitment to global engagement, sustainability and future-oriented knowledge and research, the Asia Center at the Arizona State University is organizing a series of virtual lectures for the 2023-2024 academic year on the theme of "Global Asia in a Multipolar World." This virtual lecture series highlights research from prominent scholars in an array of disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and beyond, broadly centered on Inter-Asian networks and flows of ideas, peoples and texts across national and linguistic borders.

This is the third lecture in our series, and it will be provided by Dr. Ashley Thompson, Hiram W Woodwoard Chair of Southeast Asian Art , SOAS, University of London. Titled "Restitution: on/in/to Southeast Asia," this talk will explore the circulation of Southeast Asian artefacts, restitution, decoloniality and the new/old culture or national narratives. Please read the full abstract below.

Abstract

To what extent does restitution live up to its name? Can an object be returned to its original place? What does such a return (un)do? What’s a place, for that matter, or an object? Is a place the same before and after the destitution/restitution? And what about ownership: could you imagine a form of restitution that wrests an artefact away from a culture or an ideology of ownership? To what extent does restitution participate in or confirm the reduction of a complex cultural form to a tangible, material, objective state, or to a marketized commodity? Where does restitution sit in the uneasy divide between decolonization as a concrete political action and a decoloniality that takes on more abstract, arguably less tangible structures? In any case, these ‘returns’ are anything but simple and seem to function on several different levels, in different, culturally incommensurable frames and even with different apparent temporalities. In this session I hope to sketch some links between three projects I am currently involved in: one on the circulation of Southeast Asian artefacts in the context of ongoing interventions around restitution, one on decoloniality in Southeast Asian art (history) and the third on the new/old cultural or national narratives that returning artefacts (re)tell.