FORUM Decolonising Europe: National and Transnational Projects ♦ Introduction: Decolonisation Matters Patrícia Ferraz de Matos and Livio Sansone
In 2020, Europe was the setting for several events that sparked off a broad debate on the need for the decolonisation of thought, practices, spaces, monuments and museums. Historically, several European countries have had a direct or indirect relationship with colonialism and its practices, as well as with the authoritarian ways of managing and exercising power (Cahen and Matos 2018; Cooper and Stoler 1997; Matos 2019). The need to reflect on imperial ruins (Stoler 2013) and to decolonise thought today is therefore understandable. This was not always considered urgent, however. Additionally, there was not always an opportunity for it. In the postcolonial period, debates were limited mainly to academia and, more recently, to the world of museums, where the hot issue of repatriation of artefacts and human remains that were pillaged, stolen, or abusively gathered in the Third World was initiated by the 1970 UNESCO Convention against Illicit Export under the Act to implement the Convention (the Cultural Property Implementation Act) and boosted by the successive UNESCO resolutions on repatriation (Sansone 2017; 2019). Over the last ten years, these debates have also emerged more systematically in non-academic groups or associative movements. Sometimes they have been promoted by Afro-descendant groups or communities, which seek to fight for their rights and for their representation in societies where they are not the majority – or where there is not always space for their voices. However, racism cannot only be related to the colonial past or the past more in general as a large part of the descendants of the victims of colonialism are still victims of racism today (Matos 2013). The concurrence of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, with all its power and political relevance (an inheritor of the Civil Rights Movement) along with the global Anti-Trump feeling and, last but not least, the central place of the US in global Anthropological Journal of European Cultures doi: 10.3167/ajec.2021.300205
AJEC 30.2 Winter 2021.indb 79
Volume 30, No. 2 (2021): 79-85 © The Author(s) ISSN 1755-2923 (Print) 1755-2931 (Online)
11/23/2021 10:58:31 AM