Early in 2025, Patty Gerstenblith published 'Cultural Objects and Reparative Justice. A Legal and Historical Analysis'. She proposes an innovative paradigm for determining reparations, including restitution of cultural objects appropriated during the nineteenth century. This is a review of her book by Annaïs Mattez with both positive and critical points.
The debates on the ownership of contested cultural objects bring forth questions regarding the representation of history. But might these debates also lead to the fabrication of history?
Over the centuries, a multitude of items – including a cannon of the King of Kandy, power-objects from DR Congo, Benin bronzes, Javanese temple statues, Maori heads and strategic documents – has ended up in museums and private collections in Belgium and the Netherlands by improper means.
Can one historical injustice be compared to another? Historians don't like it, for understandable reasons. But in matters of looting art you can't escape it. What rarely happens, comparing books by authors from four countries on one subject, does Pieter van Os.
