Ancestral Absence, Embodied Presence: Encountering the Benin Bronzes with My Daughter in the Heart of Empire

Context Statement:

This reflection emerges from my February 2025 visit to the British Museum in London, UK, where I encountered the Benin Bronzes alongside my five-year-old daughter, Sage Ali, during our first international trip together. As a Black feminist scholar, mother, and educator committed to liberatory praxis, this visit was more than an academic or touristic stop—it was an embodied pilgrimage into difficult knowledge. Set against the backdrop of a colonial institution that claims cultural stewardship while refusing reparative justice, this exhibit became a site of emotional, ethical, and pedagogical tension. Drawing on the critical frameworks of Roger Simon, as well as Lehrer and Milton, this reflection interrogates the failures of curatorial responsibility, the silencing of diasporic and Nigerian voices, and the refusal of institutions like the British Museum to transform their aesthetic possession into ethical reckoning. What unfolds here is both an intellectual critique and a personal narrative of inheritance, grief, witnessing, and radical love—a call to reimagine what it means to truly "care for" the past.

Title of the Exhibit and Museum:Benin Bronzes – British Museum, London, UK

Link to the Exhibit 

• British Museum page on the Benin BronzesLinks to an external site.

Instagram Photo of My Daughter and ILinks to an external site.

Why I Chose This Exhibit:I visited the British Museum in February 2025 with my five-year-old daughter, Sage Ali, during our first international trip together. We departed from our great-grandmother's parents house in which we live, straight to a space and place nuanced and layered with difficult knowledge, London,UK.  As a Black woman scholar, mother, and educator rooted in radical traditions of truth-telling and liberation, I was intentionally seeking an encounter with difficult knowledge and the Benin Bronzes offered that. Seeing these stolen artifacts housed in the heart of empire was both surreal and infuriating. I had an internal reaction of heaviness and revelation as I realized the lengths it took me to be in the same space of such great art and culture that is held in captivity. 

I chose this exhibit because it forces a direct confrontation with colonial theft, white supremacy, and the way cultural institutions sanitize or reframe violence. The bronzes themselves are breathtaking delicate, regal, filled with spirit matter that demands a whole body, mind and soul attentiveness and yet their beauty is inseparable from the brutality of how they arrived here. As I stood beside my daughter, I kept thinking about inheritance what we pass down, what is stolen, and what must be returned. The exhibit moved me to reflect on how museums claim to be sites of knowledge, but often perpetuate silence, erasure, and control. It reminded me that even in sacred spaces of learning, the narratives being told (or untold) matter deeply.

This wasn’t just an academic visit but a work of embodied knowledge and cyclical knowings of "getting free" and it was ancestral, emotional, and political.

In preparation for class, I plan to draw from Simon’s framing of curatorial judgment and the pedagogical force of exhibitions, particularly how affect and thought interact through a visitor’s embodied engagement with difficult knowledge. Roger Simon pushes us to consider that an exhibit’s power lies not only in the information it presents, but in its capacity to create an “intimacy with the world” that compels ethical reflection (Simon, 2014, p. 175). The Benin Bronzes exhibit at the British Museum lacks this intimacy—it offers historical text and visual marvel, but does not dwell within the consequences of colonial plunder. Instead, it curates distance. This lens helped me better understand why my experience with the Benin Bronzes felt so emotionally flat communally despite the deeply violent history they represent. The British Museum’s curatorial approach reflects what Simon calls a failure of pedagogical responsibility, it leans toward institutional self-preservation rather than transformation. The exhibit gestures toward historical fact, but its clinical tone and detached presentation do little to provoke the kind of reflective discomfort that Simon argues is necessary for a true encounter with difficult knowledge.

The exhibition mise-en-scène, to use Simon’s language, remains sterile and is designed more for cultural prestige than pedagogical discomfort. What’s absent is a structure that might convert the “affective force” of these looted objects into critical reflection or ethical responsibility (Simon, 2014, p. 184). I argue that the museum fails in its pedagogical responsibility: it presents the trauma of colonial extraction as a neutral aesthetic display, rather than as an unresolved political and ethical conflict still impacting communities today. 

I also draw on Lehrer and Milton’s idea of being "witnesses to witnessing"—the notion that curation should open space for visitors to reflect not just on historical violence but also on the ways that violence is remembered, repressed, or sanitized. As I stood in the exhibit with my daughter, I felt the weight of being both a witness and a descendant of the communities harmed by colonial plunder. And yet, the exhibit itself did not invite this kind oflayered witnessing. There was no space for dialogue, no inclusion of Nigerian or diasporic voices demanding restitution, no invitation to reckon with the affective and ethical stakes of looking.

Building on Lehrer and Milton’s introduction to Curating Difficult Knowledge, I also reflect on their framing of curation as care—not just in preservation, but in justice. They write, “to ‘care for’ the past is to make something of it, to place and order it in a meaningful way in the present” (Lehrer & Milton, 2011, p. 4). The British Museum may “care for” these bronzes materially, but not ethically or relationally. Again there is no activation of empathy, dialogue, or accountability. No attempt to make the British public reckon with how these objects arrived or why they remain.

Visiting with my daughter, I was struck by the gap between what was displayed and what was silenced. In a space that should invite transformation, the curatorial choices instead maintain colonial comfort. As Simon writes, exhibitions must provoke “a force to thought”—not immobilizing shame, but ethical reckoning that might change how we live, learn, and relate to the past and present (Simon, 2014, p. 180).

Discussion Questions

1. Can museums ethically curate cultural artifacts obtained through colonial violence without reproducing the structures of dispossession they aim to critique?(What curatorial choices would demonstrate ethical care rather than aesthetic possession?)

2. Lehrer and Milton write that difficult knowledge should “unsettle established meanings of past events” (2011, p. 5). In what ways do you think museums succeed or fail to do this?  And who gets to decide when that unsettling is “enough”?

3. Simon emphasizes the importance of an exhibition’s mise-en-scène in transforming affect into thought (2014, p. 177). What are some practical curatorial strategies that can support this transformation, particularly for visitors who may be emotionally distant from the histories on display?