Decolonise

Approaches to decoloniality must necessarily address the legacies of European imperialism and the long histories of dispossession and exploitation of people, land and resources that continue to reverberate today. There is now growing recognition that practices established to catalogue, preserve, and analyse objects in isolation from traditional owners, sites of origin and diasporic communities continue to inflict loss, trauma, and exclusion on those people most closely connected with them. Drawing on Tuck and Yang's ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor’ (2012), this contribution argues for the need to shift the emphasis away from what these cultural objects are authoritatively held to ‘symbolise’ to how they perpetuate colonialist ideologies and practices. In doing so, it examines the critical, material work necessary in cultural geography to go beyond simply acknowledging colonial violence to engage more deeply and actively with processes of restorative justice.