Competing Claims of a Rightful Home: Narrating Returns in Art Restitution Claims

Art institutions today grapple increasingly with issues of diversity, inclusion and representation. Debates over objects' provenance, restitution and repatriation have entered the mainstream. The public has a greater awareness of cultural rights than ever, as well as of the importance cultural heritage's preservation. These debates are bitter, and the threat of litigation looms large. Parties that challenge museums’ ownership of looted objects may assert that an object's rightful home is its country of origin or faith community for whom the object is a sacred or even a sentient being. In opposition, some institutional voices assert that the rightful home of an art object can only be the site of conservation and public display. All make assumptions about the nature and function of the object, and its rightful handling and mode of display. They depend on rhetorical strategies and narrative plots. They are caught up in global imbalances of power. Scholars of reparations like John Torpey question the idea of “making whole what has been smashed.” For art history, this troubles the very possibility of a “return” for a disputed object. How can such issues be resolved in the case of objects that arrive in Western museums as a result of catastrophic war, genocide, and civil conflict? This paper takes recent cases of objects from the Middle East to examine the broader phenomenon of disputed objects for whom no clear “return” is possible, and around whom competing claims of home coalesce.