« Queer settler colonialism: Cameron Greensmith, Queer Professionals and Settler Colonialism, University of Toronto Press, 2024
Fantasies of settler resilience (emerge when one intuits settler fragility instead): Anthea Garman, ‘Tropes Have Fangs: Elsa Dutton, 1883, “Going Native”, Adaptive Whiteness and Trope Resilience’, Journal of Literary Studies, 40, 2024 »

Collecting settler colonialism: Christian Jarling, ‘Settler Colonialism and Collecting for Museums: The Namibia Collection in Bremen’s Übersee-Museum (1880s to 1970s)’, in Jürgen Zimmerer, Kim Sebastian Todzi, Friederike Odenwald (eds), Displacing and Displaying the Objects of Others: The Materiality of Identity and Depots of Global History, De Gruyter, 2024, pp. 65-104

08Nov24

Excerpt: The ethnographic Namibia collection in Bremen’s Übersee-Museum encompassed more than 1,500 objects at the end of 2020. Most of these objects, unlike the museum’s other collections from former German colonies, were not exclusively collected during the period of formal German rule. Rather, the objects and their documentation came together over the course of many decades, largely between the 1880s and 1960s, and thus attest to a longstanding relationship between Namibia and the Bremen museum. An evolving historical context informed how objects were first collected and the museum’s desire to have them. These two phenomena were mutually reinforcing and tell a shared story. This essay depicts the formation of the Bremen collection as a process with caesuras and continuities. Over eight decades, individual objects and groups of items found their way to Bremen under specific circumstances and with the help of various actors. The museum did not receive these items directly from their African producers or previous owners (with one notable exception). Instead, museum workers engaged with German actors on site, who enabled the transfer of Namibian objects to Bremen. Within the system of settler colonialism4 in Namibia, civilian actors supported the museum and continuously expanded its holdings. In Cameroon and German East Africa, by contrast, colonial soldiers and government officials more often performed this work.


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