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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2007
I am in full agreement with Alan Audi's basic premise, so forcefully made in this article, that the legalistic discourse and the associated “argument-bites,” as he calls them, are an inadequate and highly problematic lens through which to explore the issues of restitution of what we call “cultural property,” another, equally problematic term. I would equally concur that any discussion on the subject that ignores the colonial past (and I would add, the neocolonial present), and the power inequities associated with it, is not only hypocritical but it also conceals an undeclared interest, effectively taking sides in the ongoing cultural and overtly political global battlegrounds. The issue of the Elgin or Parthenon Marbles is correctly identified by the author as the omnipresent shadow in all debates of restitution, the shadow that haunts museum professionals and politicians alike. It is this shadow that led the current director of the British Museum to start the initiative on the “Universal Museum,” an initiative that falls apart only by looking at the list of signatories: 18 major museums, all located in Europe and North America. In his article in the Guardian in defence of this thesis (that museums such as the British Museum or the New York's Metropolitan, tell a universal story, hence their need to retain objects from all over the world), he even invoked Edward Said; but the title of this article gave the game away: “The Whole World in our Hands.” Who has the right to represent the universal? Why is it that the exhibition of the global story of humanity, even if such an exercise were possible in supposedly neutral and depoliticized terms, must be staged in London, New York, or Paris, and not in Cairo, Sao Paolo, or Delhi? As Homi Bhabha reminded us, the desire to “grasp the whole,” to represent and stage the universal, has always been at the core of the colonial imagination; we need only think of the nineteenth-century Grand Fairs and Universal Expositions, and the role of antiquities in them.