Over the last decade, Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe has developed the concept of necropolitics as a biting critique of the Eurocentricism of Foucault’s biopolitical discourse. Building on Mbembe, the art historian Dan Hicks has advanced the concept of necrography as a productive paradigm by which the looted objects in museum collections might be analyzed as legacies of colonial despoliation. He suggests that a necrography of looted objects provides the desperately needed context that has been stripped away from them in the service of Western European and American colonial efforts. Using Hicks’s work as a blueprint, this paper provides a preliminary necrography for the “Captive Being Flayed,” or the so-called Wellesley Eunuch Wellesley Davis Museum; 1883.1. In so doing, I attempt to answer the funda-mental questions: What is our responsibility to the objects in our care? And, more importantly: How the curation of these objects extends the orientalist impulses out of which they were procured, allowing them to metastasize into new lieux de memoire as satellites of decaying empires?
Eric X. Jarrard (Wed,) studied this question.