Seminar
Seminar 1: Ashes to Artifact: Cultural Death, Repair, and Restitution of the Benin Bronzes
Sep 26, 2022
6:00–7:30pm ET
Online
Is it possible—or desirable—to “correct” a relation of power between subjugated peoples and their colonizers if the originary imperial violence continues to be perpetuated in the present day? In 1897, during the height of the Scramble for Africa, the British colonial military invaded the Kingdom of Benin (modern day Nigeria) and looted 10,000 sacred ancestral artifacts from the royal palace. These pieces, often referred to as the Benin bronzes, largely remain scattered across North America and Western Europe in museums and galleries despite decades of calls for their restitution. Launching the Correction* Seminar Series, Cresa Pugh, Assistant Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research, explores what it means to attempt to overcome more than a century of imperial violence against this collection of artifacts and their descendants by their captors, Western governments, and the contemporary museum industrial complex. What does corrective repair look and feel like in the postcolonial context and can contemporary Indigenous art forms and practices provide one method through which restitution is achieved and the healing process between oppressor and oppressed begins? Pugh’s lecture is punctuated by poetry readings by Nigerian poet Inua Ellams.
Correction* Seminar Series
A series of twelve seminars, presented from September 2022 through May 2024, Correction* is structured as an open curriculum. Led by Vera List Center faculty and staff, each monthly seminar in this two-year series explores the perils and potentials of the political, social, and metaphorical implications of “correction.” Bridging theory and practice, Correction* unfolds through three distinct research clusters every semester set to guide our joint investigation into Institutional Critique, the Body, and Carcerality. It is presented as part of the Barbara Jordan Lectures: The State of Democracy series.
The Vera List Center is committed to ensuring that our programs are accessible to and inclusive of all. Please let us know when registering if you need any accommodations.
The Fall 2022 programs of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics are generously supported by members of the Vera List Center Board, other individual donors, and the following institutional donors:
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
The Boris Lurie Art Foundation and the Schaina and Josephina Lurje Memorial Foundation
The Dayton Foundation
The Ford Foundation
Italian Council
The Kettering Fund
Mellon Foundation
The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation
and Pryor Cashman LLP
We also gratefully acknowledge the support of The New School, our academic home.
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Seminar Overview
Correction* Seminar Series
Sep 26, 2022–May 6, 2024
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Seminar 3: Correcting Mistaken Ideas: Revisiting the People’s Program at Lincoln Hospital with Walter Bosque
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Seminar 4: Becoming One: The University Between Labor Struggles and Communities of Care
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Seminar 6: Indigenous Cultural Revitalization: Rematriation and Preservation
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Seminar 7: Bring into Order: School(ing) as a War of Correction
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Seminar 8: “Hader Halal” (With Regard to Presence)
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Seminar 9: Of Bodies and Sound
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Seminar 10: Reducing Harm (As Prompt, As Practice)
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Seminar 11: Many Returns
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Seminar 12: Strike That
