Egypt’s dispersed heritage: Multi-directional storytelling through comic art

Abstract

This paper responds to a need to address the colonial history of collections of Egyptian archaeology and to find new ways in which Egyptian audiences can assume greater agency in such a process. The ‘Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage’ project presents a model of engagement whereby foreign museum collections become the inspiration for Egyptians to express their own feelings about the removal of their heritage abroad using idioms and traditional storytelling of cultural relevance to them. A series of online comics confronting contentious heritage issues, including the display of mummified human remains, eugenics, looting and destruction, is discussed. It is argued that this approach is not only more relatable for Egyptian communities, but moreover provides space for the development of grass-roots critique of heritage practices, both in the UK and in Egypt. Museums have a responsibility to take on board these critiques, curating not just objects but relationships forged amongst them in historical and contemporary society.

BLIND SPOTS IN MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY: Ancient Egypt in the Ethnographic Museum

“…Initiatives to juxtapose ancient Egyptian material and contemporary art in Egyptian museums have themselves been subjected to considerable local skepticism (Elnozahy 2021). For many, sculpture and painting retain connotations of elite high culture and overlook opportunities for other forms of locally relevant cultural production and commentary that might find space in museum dialogues, employing locally relevant idioms and cultural references (Abd el-Gawad and Stevenson 2021).…”

“…Yet as Abd el‐Gawad (2020; Ahmed 2019) has implored, a focus on repatriation as a means of decolonizing practice for Egyptian material is not one that necessarily provides social justice or direct benefit to Egyptian communities given that the vast majority are disenfranchised from such claims, which are framed within Eurocentric and nationalistic discourses (Omar and Hussein 2021). Moreover, issues of auto‐colonialism are particularly acute within the Egyptian museum sector and international Egyptology (Abd el‐Gawad and Stevenson 2021). A simplistic co‐option of repatriation does little to address those issues, focused as rhetoric is on objects, rather than people.…”

“…Nasser and Heba struggle to have their voices heard. The comic garnered extensive commentary on Egyptian social media, notably evidencing a wide range of contrasting views (Abd el‐Gawad and Stevenson 2021), which in turn informed the Horniman Museum's documentation of these materials, with a view to future interventions in the gallery. A second collaboration between Tawasol community school, Cairo, and the Horniman's education team resulted in new acquisitions, including a kite with the image of Egyptian footballer Mohamed Salah, for the museum's handling collection, permitting social benefit for Egyptian communities as well as the introduction of modern Egypt into ongoing decolonization of the educational program.…”

“…Its colonial baggage, the cultural diversity it encompasses, and the processes of othering that it constitutes have not been confronted in the same way as other parts of the collection. It is a pattern repeated across museums worldwide, where ancient Egypt has become an iconic "museum culture" divorced from the modern country and its people (Abd el-Gawad and Stevenson 2021).…”

Drawing the Line: What’s Wat’s Dyke? Practice and Process

“…Comics about history, archaeology, and cultural and community heritage may take many forms: they may be short, four-panel strips or longer narrative works. Such works may also adopt different narrative positionalities -personal (Richardson and Pickering 2021), fictive (Rajic and Howarth 2021) or revisionist (Lopez and Sheyashe 2021) -and utilise different qualities of aesthetics (Brophy and Sackett 2019), genre (Vowel et al 2019) and style (el-Gawad and Stevenson 2021).…”