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Fisher, Callum: Godeffroy, Beetles and Birds: Museum Collections in the Plantationocene, in Andratschke, Claudia, Hoes, Charlotte Marlene and Krieger, Annekathrin (Eds.): Colonial Dimensions of the Global Wildlife Trade, Heidelberg: arthistoricum.net-ART-Books, 2024 (Veröffentlichungen des Netzwerks Provenienzforschung in Niedersachsen, Volume 6), p. 186–211. https://doi.org/10.11588/arthistoricum.1415.c20439

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https://doi.org/10.11588/arthistoricum.1415
ISBN 978-3-98501-262-6 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-98501-263-3 (Softcover)

Published

07/03/2024

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Authors

Callum Fisher

Godeffroy, Beetles and Birds: Museum Collections in the Plantationocene

A renewed attention to the plantation as a site of planetary change has highlighted the persistence of its logics beyond the sphere of agricultural production. Work on the plantation condition foregrounds the links between interspecies dynamics, racialised hierarchies of labour, and the proliferation or extinction of certain kinds of life forms. Looking to the Godeffroy Museum, a 19th-century institution founded by a Hamburg-based merchant and plantation owner, the contribution engages with the colonial legacies of this museum’s collections, attending to traces of Godeffroy’s plantation logics. Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle (MNHN) in Paris and the Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt (MARKK) in Hamburg, an attention to traces of the plantation in the present offers the possibility to bridge the divides between disciplines and institutions, whilst attending to the museum’s entanglement in violent planetary changes.