Colonial museums reduced African adults to infants and objects of penetrable nakedness

Evidence

Native primitivism in the figure of naked bodies and their statuesque representations hints simultaneously at the sexual objectification threaded throughout the Museum, and more generally in Europe’s relation to colonial and postcolonial bodies. The representation of fully naked figures in the Tervuren Museum is always of women, repeatedly in fact of African women, and occasionally of children. This emphatically equates once again African adults with infantility, and dialogically reduces Africa to the childish and feminine, but also to nakedness before the penetration of the European colonizer. Thus, and revealingly, the most disturbing of these statues is that appropriately named “Slavery.” Here a tall Arab male slaver – mean, sly looking, sharp and frowning – holds beneath him a kneeling naked pubescent African girl whose arm he twists, whip in the other hand. Both figures stand atop a dead young African boy, the sandal of the slaver crushing the breath from boy’s body beneath his weight. Another statue elsewhere in the Museum represents a Vuakusa-Batetela man, blanket wrapped about waist, defending from a fully clothed Arab slaver “his” naked woman lying prostrate between the two men. In a not so unconsciously ironic twist, “Slavery” is set in relief against a wall marked “Kinderatelier” (“Children’s Studio”), a characterization multiply symbolic perhaps of the entire Museum. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 899

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes Saidian orientalism and feminist critiques of colonial visual culture; connects to the ‘immodesty’ moral-panic theme in published article (2).
• SEED: Essay angle: how museum display choices encode racial hierarchy — nude African women, clothed European viewers, and the infantilization built into colonial statuary.