AIRN Seminar #9
Bolobo’s Ivory Carvers (1880s-1980s): Making and Mobilities in Congo

Sarah Van Beurden (Ohio State University / School for Advanced Research)

December 13, 2023 | Online | 6 PM (GMT)

ZOOM | https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/96816750302?pwd=YVlCYW90aTN6UnZmdUltY29OZ1RaUT09

Organisation | African Ivory Research Network & Centre for History of the University of Lisbon

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Abstract: This talk will trace the emergence, spread, and eventual decline of modern ivory carving in the town of Bolobo on the Congo River. It investigates the conditions under which this new craft economy emerged, the exponential growth it experienced, and its eventual decline as a consequence of international regulations on ivory trade. Key to this history of both objects and people is an understanding of ‘making’ is a creative, as well as an economic, cultural, and social practice in which regimes of value meshed with colonial social codification, (post)colonial economies, and labor. I will demonstrate how processes of making shaped the encounter between communities and colonial structures, helped determine the lifespan of the colonial cultural economy, and were acts of self-realization that reveal a shared imagination.

CV: Dr. Van Beurden is an associate professor of History and African American and African Studies. She is also currently a member of the Ohio editorial collective for the journal African Arts. Dr. Van Beurden earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Leuven in Belgium (1999) and her Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania (2009.) She is interested in the ways culture is constructed, represented, and used in political contexts and has published on the history of museums and African collections, art restitution, decolonization, provenance studies, histories of craft making, heritage politics, and contemporary Congolese art, as well as the history of anthropology and art history. Her first book, Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture (New African Histories Series, Ohio University Press, 2015) investigates the role of museum politics in the legitimation of the Belgian colonial regime and the postcolonial Mobutu regime in Congo/Zaire. It tells a history of decolonization as a struggle over cultural categories, the possession of cultural heritage, and the right to define and represent cultural identities.

Van Beurden is a frequent media contributor on topics such as African art restitution and Belgian colonialism and its legacies. In recent years she has also taken a more active public role.  She chaired the Restitution Belgium initiative, which developed a set of guidelines for the management and restitution of colonial collection in Belgium, and served as an expert for the Special Parliamentary Commission on Belgium’s Colonial Past.

Her work has appeared in journals such as The Journal of African History, History and Anthropology, Critical Interventions, and Radical History Journal, among others  She is currently finishing Congo Crafted: Histories of Making (1880s-1990s), a book that examines the dynamics of a colonial cultural economy through the history of three craft genres and their afterlives.

Van Beurden has held fellowships at the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas in Austin, the Käte Hamburger Kolleg and Centre for Global Cooperation Research at University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany), and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. During the 2023-24 academic year she will be a Weatherhead Fellow at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM.