People, places and plunder: Diasporas and the restitution of looted heritage

Call for abstracts

Panel on “home” and the restitution of colonial-era plunder 

In June 2026, Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture organizes the conference “Unsettling heritage and memory futures: Decolonial trajectories between crisis and possibility”. We would like to make use of this opportunity to bring together scholars to reflect on the idea of “home” in relation to restitution. We are therefore proposing a panel:  

Where is home? People, places and the restitution of colonial era-plunder

Recently, the critique against the continued retention of colonial-era plunder in Western institutions has virtually exploded, pushing museums to initiate or speed up processes of return. Typically, restitution is understood as a process where cultural objects are given back to the community from whom they were once wrongfully removed, and a way to rectify historical injustices and address their manyfold endurances into the present. The “problem” posed by (ill-begotten) objects out of their original cultural context is “solved” by returning them “home”. However, these initiatives, and the heated debate about whether and how artefacts should be returned, raise a number of thorny questions about ownership and “home”. What place artifacts belong to after many years in “exile” is sometimes disputed. Moreover, it is not always self-evident who best represents the community that the objects were taken from in a context of multiple levels of governance and conflicting power structures. The fact that not only objects leave their places of origin, but also people, adds to this complexity. Diversity is increasingly recognized as an intrinsic part of the societies where many colonial-era objects are retained, and over time migrants from former colonies and their descendants have made themselves at home there. However, recurrent political debates and campaigns in migrant-receiving countries picture immigrants and diasporas as “out of place” and in need of returning “home” unless they properly assimilate to the majority culture. The panel puts the focus on how the historical trajectories of mobility of both objects and people, and their multiple belongings, shape the debate and provide novel perspectives on restitution and representation.

The panel invites papers that engage with issues of “home” and place in relation to restitution. Examples of questions to address include (but are not limited to): 

• What are the different ways in which objects can “come home” or be seen as being “at home”?
• How are multiple claims over the proper “home” of objects negotiated or resisted?
• What meanings are objects loaded with as they are connected to (diverse) places and communities?  How does this affect representation and display?
• How does the idea of “home” and belonging figure in museum initiatives to collaborate with communities?  
• In what ways do contested objects and their restitution relate to people’s sense of belonging and of being “at home” in a globalized world? To what extent and how do they become part of diaspora communities’ political homeland engagement?