Worlding Popular Culture

Rethinking gender from the ethnographic museum. Introduction to the special issue

“…In so doing, Isaka demonstrates the radically different ways in which gender is naturalized over time and place. It asks us as scholars and museum workers to become ever more comfortable, patient, and agile in engaging the 'untranslatabilities', to which Emily Apter and Esther Peeren refer in their work on the worlding capacities of the literary and the cultural (Apter, 2013;Peeren, 2022).…”

“…Borrowing from Esther Peeren's articulation of popular culture and worlding dynamics, it is evident that the research that informs the present contributors’ work is concerned with the process of making present the ‘untranslatabilities’ of gendered dynamics. Most of the art pieces in the ethnographic museum were not originally ‘destined for global circulation from their inception’ (Peeren, 2022: 119). Yet the fact that these pieces were often forcefully put into such global circulation and then forced into arrested habitation in the depots of ethnographic museums by colonial processes, does not mean that they are ‘static’.…”

“…Yet the fact that these pieces were often forcefully put into such global circulation and then forced into arrested habitation in the depots of ethnographic museums by colonial processes, does not mean that they are ‘static’. Our research and readings of them must be open to ‘chart[ing] specific, more or less predictable or capacious trajectories’ (Peeren, 2022: 119), and we must pay attention to them in what Souleymane Bachir Diagne (2019) reminds us is most important: What does an object mean to us now? In one of his multiple reflections on African masks as philosophy, he writes of European scholars’ frustration at not being able to trace a particular history of the makers of the masks collected during the long history of unabashed looting of African art:If, then, we can no longer ask what was meant, we remain free to pose the question of what sculpting like that may mean: for us today.…”