The Brutish Museums
My book The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution was published with Pluto Press in November 2020, and has been described as ‘the book that changed the conversation about museums’.
The Brutish Museums was named one of the New York Times List Best Art Books of 2020 and won the 2022 prize for the Best Book in Public History of the National Council on Public History, and was joint winner of the 2021 Elliott P Skinner Book Prize of the Association for Africanist Anthropology.
The book was also shortlisted for the 2021 Bread and Roses Award for Radical Publishing
The novelist Ben Okri wrote of The Brutish Museums that ‘it is with books like this that cultures are saved’.
“for those who still bear the weight of these colonial legacies today, Hicks’ urgent, lucid, and brilliantly enraged book feels like a long-awaited treatise on justice”
“destined to become an essential text”
Bryan Appleyard, The Sunday Times
“should be on every museum professional’s shelf”
“if you care about museums and the world, read this book”
“The Brutish Museums is a landmark cultural moment”
“A startling act of conscience. An important book which could overturn what people have felt about British history, empire, civilisation, Africa, and African art. It is with books like this that cultures are saved, by beginning truthfully to face the suppressed and brutal past. You will never see many European museums in the same way again. Books like this give one hope that a new future is possible.’
“a beautifully written, carefully argued book”
Charlotte Lydia Riley, The Guardian
“you shall know the truth”
“it’s difficult to argue that he is wrong”
“leaves no stone unturned”
The Brutish Museums helps readers gain a clearer picture of European museums with “colonial blood” on their hands
”fastidiously chronicling and contextualizing the plundering of the Benin Bronzes as well as their subsequent dispersal”
“a forceful case for restitution”
“a bombshell book”
“masterful”
The Los Angeles Review of Books
“unsparing”
“tendentious”
“An unflinching look at the enduring myths around looted objects in European museums. Elegantly written, thought-provoking and passionately argued, The Brutish Museums is a call to action.”
Praise for earlier books and curatorial projects