Reframing restitution with Roberto Esposito and Achille Mbembe: restitutive justice struggles and the colonial ‘dispositif of a thing’

Abstract Struggles for postcolonial restitution of heritage objects held in museums and other knowledge institutions in the west have challenged the legal and regulatory frameworks securing the collections’ integrity and unseizability and they have oppugned the epistemological power dynamics that manifest through the re-semanticization of the acquisitioned and confiscated objects as ‘mere things’. Drawing attention to the contrast between the international legal discourse of cultural property and what I call ‘refractory speech acts’ deployed by activists, artists and spokespersons from Indigenous communities within restitutive justice movements, I turn to political theories of Roberto Esposito and of Achille Mbembe to outline the critique of the epistemological power of western museums through the conceptual rubric of the ‘dispositif of a thing’ and to explore the possibilities for counter-action and alternative (non-Eurocentric and non-anthropocentric) understandings emerging through restitutive struggles today. Ultimately, I argue that the language, art and political action instantiated by these struggles are decolonizing practices that challenge the binary separation between persons and things, which offer a richer, and more politically radical, understanding of restitution beyond property relations and transfer of ownership.