Property as Settler Imaginary in Shangri La Museum

• In Event: Artistic Praxis, Insurgent Futures, and SWANA Diasporic Archives

Abstract

This presentation develops my early ethnographic research visit to Shangri La Museum in Honolulu, the only museum exclusively dedicated to Islamic art in the occupied lands by the United States. Privately funded through Doris Duke Foundation, Shangri La was initially built in 1935-37 as a vacation house for Doris Duke. Over the next six decades, Duke purchased a myriad of ceramics, wood, glass, and textiles from 1600 to 1940 CE to decorate her residence. Her collection of nearly 4,500 artworks, cultural materials, and architectural designs includes plundered and looted items from religious sites and shrines. In this paper, I situate the archive of Shangri La in the broader settler colonial context of Honolulu. Drawing on Eunsong Kim’s work on racial capitalism, property and art collections in the US museums, I seek to further consider how histories of colonial extraction in SWANA and expropriation of land and labor in Hawai‘i are a condition of possibility for Shangri la museum and Duke’s archives. I think with Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s critical theorization of the white possessive, Robert Nichols’ theft as property, and Cheryl Harris’ whiteness as property to bring into conversation the theft of museums’ objects looted and stolen from SWANA with that of land theft as vital to the imperial imaginary of the islands as a site of white leisure and militarism. I posit that exposing the colonial dispossession behind the museum’s collection of items from SWANA is only possible through understanding the ongoing dispossession of Kānaka Maoli people from their lands. This work also attends to the imperial history of this relatively small museum in relation to histories of Japanese internment, labour extraction, and East Asian migration to the islands as important forces that continue shaping the settler imperialism’s claims on the landscape of Hawai‘i as a site where capitalist expansions of militarism and tourism coalesce.

Author

• Nazli Akhtari, University of Waterloo