ABSTRACT
As museums across the ‘Global North’ focus on questions of restitution, these pursuits do not in themselves address the persistence of those colonial dynamics that facilitated acquisition of museum objects in the first instance. It is therefore necessary to expand questions of restitution to include considerations of ‘repair’. However, in order to apprehend what is in need of repair we have to account for how and where the colonial wound manifests in the present, and across the world. Museums need to widen their conception of what constitutes knowledge in relation to the objects in their collections, especially as concerns who are deemed the custodians of such knowledge about those objects and their life-worlds are and surrender the illusion of authority.
