An unknown cabinetStanding alone in an empty white room, is a tall black open-cased cabinet. Five rows of shelves contain black cylinders, partitioned off into separate cubicles. Each object is separated from another. The cabinet isolates each cylinder, prisoners to their column. Twenty-nine dark objects, divided between twenty-seven squares. The objects are indistinguishable silhouettes against the brightness of the white walls of a gallery, museum, private collection.
Dark, unknown things. They stand upright, gridlocked within this looming shelving unit. They make no movement, no sound. The room is silent.
There are no descriptive plaques beside the cabinet. For the experienced museum-goer, we expect a certain amount of explanation about what we are seeing. So innocuous that you forget that someone must have written them, small descriptions about each display usually underscore contexts for us, the laypeople, what we see. This exhibit is unlike other ones that show off colonial spoils. It’s frustrating. You can’t tell what anything is. Where is the helpful typeset note from some expert in the field of whichever indigenous tribe this is from? How are visitors meant to know what period of history, place, people converged to leave these objects for us to view?
If this was a regular display of colonial plunder, or rather, willingly donated objects of study, I would be unaware of what was missing. When a display informs me, politely, that I’m looking at an ancient Persian drinking-vessel, I nod my head and move onto the next. We accept what the collection presents us, ignoring the violent, hegemonic ways in which the archive excludes. The labour and curation behind colonial displays is occluded by the cohesion with which a collection presents itself. Ideas of history, the linear progress of humanity, the ethnographic urge to understand: these function to circumscribe other, alternative lives into consumable, abstract wholes.
Instead, this cabinet invites the multiplicity of interpretation, possibilities. Dark cylindrical objects could be many different things in their excesses and liminalities. Are they used bullets, the very ones turned on black and brown bodies? As ammunition, they long to be put to work. Bullets disrupt the clinical quiet of the gallery; they seem out of place. In its seeming incongruence with the room, the objects of destruction indicate the very paradox at the heart of the anthropological museum. Violence, brutality, plunder, are the life-blood of the display. By military and paramilitary means, in the pursuit of scientific and pseudo-scientific discoveries, each colonial exhibit is obtained. Attempts to place objects from colonised people into a history of Man always ends up with the Western Man at the forefront of progression. Evolution – the colonial display indicates – naturally results in European civilisation. The bodies of those subjected to imperialism, colonialism, slavery, are invisibilised in the face of the anthropological collection.
Yet, there is also something alluringly phallic about the cylinders, contained in their cubic partitions. Are they proud displays of sexuality, masculinity, bodies? Or are they severed displays of outright domination? A cabinet that revels in its rapacious conquest of marginalised people disrupts the manufactured peacefulness of an anthropological display. If the cylinders are amputated phalluses, they would suggest a similar violence to the bullet. Could they be manifestations of castration anxieties? If the fear of being feminised correlates with the disempowerment of coloniality, what does this indicate about the colonised woman? She provokes fears of emasculation, weakness, in her lacking. To both the colonising and the colonised man, she is anxiety-inducing. A spectral figure that haunts the outskirts of the archive. The subaltern, racialised woman is hidden from spectatorship, but she’s never far off. The naked body of the racialised woman is exhibit, object of the sexualising eye, but never her labour, life, self. Her work stays hidden in the shade.
When I step backwards, the cabinet throws a long matrix of shadows, more opaque, more visible, against the bright spotlights. The subaltern woman is excluded, confined solely to the shadows of such exhibits. The clean, white floor and walls are claustrophobic, overwhelming. But they also provide a blank canvas, a generative space, for those of us in the shadows to exist. In this painful, traumatic room, from this dark cabinet, excesses spill out across the floor, leaking further outwards, in uncontrollable, shadowy ways.
Donald Locke, Trophies of Empire, 1972-4. Ceramic, wood, metal, glass and other materials. Shown at the Life Between Islands exhibition at Tate Britain. Photograph mine, taken 30 January 2022.
My creative-critical writing depicts imagined spectatorship of Donald Locke’s Trophies of Empire in response to questions about museums and the archive, and their relationship to colonialism. The sculpture parodies the ways in which Western anthropological museums display stolen goods from the Global South, interrogating the archival impulse to discipline and make sense of indigenous cultures.
First, I undertake an embodied spectatorship of the sculpture, emphasising the inability to comprehend the cylindrical objects. In opposition to institutional attempts to categorise and contain the objects in an exhibit, explored in James Clifford’s ‘On Collecting Art and Culture’, (1) I foreground the feeling of unknowability produced by the sculpture.
Thus, I confront the limits of the museum by imagining differing histories of the cylindrical objects, inspired by Saidiya Hartman’s writings on Black women in the archive. (2) By presenting multiple histories behind the objects of Locke’s sculpture, I emphasise the failings of the archive to adequately represent marginalised people.
Finally, I reflect upon exclusions of racialised women from the archive, where subaltern women’s bodies are displayed in museums, but never their voice. I invoke sexual displays of Black women like Sarah Baartman. (3) I represent these silences of racialised women in the archive through the image of the shadow cast by the sculpture, provoked by my photograph in the appendix. This image of racialised women existing in the shadows of the archive responds to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s evocation: ‘if, in the context of colonial production, the subaltern has no history and cannot speak, the subaltern as female is even more deeply in shadow’. (4) I suggest that within collections of imperialistic objectifications, a space can appear for those most subjected to its hegemony to confront the violence of the archive.
James Clifford, ‘On Collecting Art and Culture’, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) 215-251.
Hartman’s creative-critical archival work is particularly effective in Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe, 12.2 (2008): 1-14, and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019).
For performative engagement with the history of Sarah Baartman, see Suzan-Lori Parks, Venus, (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1997).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, eds. P. Williams and L. Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992) 66-111, p.83.