ISBN:
9781501337925
,
1501337920
Language:
English
Pages:
xxvii, 305 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates
,
illustrations (some color)
,
24 cm
Series Statement:
Contextualizing art markets
Parallel Title:
Erscheint auch als Kingdon, Zachary Ethnographic collecting and African agency in early colonial West Africa
DDC:
709.660744275
Keywords:
World Museum Liverpool History
;
Ethnological museums and collections History
;
Museums Acquisitions
;
History
;
Benefactors
;
Great Britain Colonies
;
Commerce
Abstract:
Preface / Kathryn Brown -- Introduction -- Prologue: Western Africa, Africans and Liverpool's Municipal Museum -- Arnold Ridyard and his assemblage -- Diasporic dialogues: the Sierra Leonean donors I -- Trans-imperial identities: the Sierra Leonean donors II -- Coastal 'kings': the Gold Coast donors I -- Coastal cosmopolitans: the Gold Coast donors II -- Museum meanings: regimes of classification, representation and display -- Epilogue.
Abstract:
"The early collections from Africa in Liverpool's World Museum reflect the city's longstanding shipping and commercial links with Africa's Atlantic coast. A principal component of these collections is an assemblage of several thousand artefacts from western Africa that were transported to institutions in northwest England between 1894 and 1916 by the Liverpool steam ship engineer Arnold Ridyard. While Ridyard's collecting efforts can be seen to have been shaped by the steamers' dynamic capacity to connect widely separated people and places, his Methodist credentials were fundamental in determining the profile of his African networks, because they meant that he was not part of official colonial authority in West Africa. Kingdon's study uncovers the identities of many of Ridyard's numerous West African collaborators and discusses their interests and predicaments under the colonial dispensation. Against this background account, their agendas are examined with reference to surviving narratives that accompanied their donations and within the context of broader processes of trans-imperial exchange, through which they forged new identities and statuses for themselves and attempted to counter expressions of British cultural imperialism in the region. The study concludes with a discussion of the competing meanings assigned to the Ridyard assemblage by the Liverpool Museum and examines the ways in which its re-contextualization in museum contexts helped to efface signs of the energies and narratives behind its creation."--Publisher's website
Note:
Includes bibliographical references and index
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