Looting the archive: German genocide and incarcerated skulls

Zoé  Samudzi

doi:10.25159/2957-3645/10490

Authors

Zoé Samudzi University of California

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25159/2957-3645/10490

Keywords:

Namibia, genocide, postcolonial studies, repatriation, indigeneity

Abstract

Since African nation-states began to gain their independence in the mid-twentieth century, they have fought for the repatriation of cultural artifacts and human remains as an integral part of continental processes of decolonization. Using the concept of the “afterlife of genocide” as a method for understanding transformed but still ongoing processes of genocidal dispossession, this paper engages the relationship between the organizing colonial logics of the 1904-1908 German genocide of Ovaherero and Nama people in South West Africa and the continued presence of Ovaherero and Nama skulls in Euroamerican museum institutions.

Author Biography

Zoé Samudzi, University of California

Zoé Samudzi is a postdoctoral research fellow with the ACTIONS Program at the University of California, San Francisco and a research associate with the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender, and Class at the University of Johannesburg. Her research engages German colonialism, the 1904-08 Ovaherero and Nama genocide, biomedicalization, visuality, and the institutional capture of human remains. She is coauthor of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation and a writer whose work has appeared in Art in America, The New Republic, The New Inquiry, SFMoMA’s Open Space, and other outlets; she is also a contributing writer for Jewish Currents.