“It’s Your Curse,” and Other Lessons in Repairing Historical Harm

Wolf Humanities Center • University of Pennsylvania

2024–2025 FORUM ON KEYWORDS

“It’s Your Curse,” and Other Lessons in Repairing Historical Harm

Deirdre de la Cruz
Associate Professor of History and Asian Languages and Cultures, University of Michigan

The University of Michigan possesses extensive archival, photographic, archaeological and natural history collections from the Philippines, many of which were built during the American colonial period from objects, images, and ancestors taken without the consent of local source communities. In this talk, historical anthropologist Deirdre de la Cruz introduces a multi-year, collaborative effort by Michigan faculty, curators, collection managers, students, and community partners to develop and enact reparative approaches to these collections. Professor de la Cruz reflects on how the historical and contemporary specificities of the Philippines and its diaspora both contribute to and complicate on-going conversations around museums and historical justice, including its associated lexicon of keywords like repatriation, affiliation, reciprocity, and even, refusal.

Cosponsored by Penn’s Department of Anthropology, Department of History, Department of South Asia Studies, Center for East Asian Studies, South East Asia Working Group, and the Penn Museum.

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Deirdre de la Cruz is a historian and anthropologist whose work examines global formations and global relations from the historical and cultural vantage point of the Philippines. Her first and second books (Mother Figured: Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal and God’s Magicians: Philippine Centers of the Global Occult ) trace the discursive, material and performative processes through which the Philippine emerges as a major spiritual and religious center over the long twentieth century. For the last several years, de la Cruz has also served as co-PI of ReConnect/ReCollect: Reparative Connections to Philippine Collections at the University of Michigan, a collaborative work of public scholarship that seeks to repair historical harm by creating models for more ethical and equitable Philippine colonial collections by introducing Filipino and Indigenous agency to their stewardship. De la Cruz is Associate Professor of History and Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan, and currently serves as Director of the Doctoral Program in Anthropology and History.

More information: https://wolfhumanities.upenn.edu/delacruz

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This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

Photo by Jeffrey Smith, courtesy of the University of Michigan Special Collections Research Center.

The Wolf Humanities Center values inclusivity and we aim to create a welcoming environment for people of all backgrounds. Please feel free to note any accessibility needs or concerns in your registration, or connect with us by email or phone (215.573.8280).