93 Fragments: Dr. Cresa Pugh and Helon Habila in conversation

This program delves into the layered tensions between cultural heritage as a site of dispossession and as a realm of possibility for reimagining sovereignty. Building on themes explored in WPA's current exhibition, , sociologist Dr. Cresa Pugh and novelist Helon Habila will explore how artifacts—whether fragmented or intact—carry histories of violence, resilience, and reclamation.  The discussion will examine restitution, repatriation, and activation, and consider how practices of stewardship and care might center community and repair, challenging conventional museum frameworks and colonial legacies. 

After the talk, we move to the exhibition space to engage with the artworks  and continue the conversation more informally.  Tea will be served. 

Cresa Pugh is an assistant professor of sociology at The New School in New York. Her research sits at the intersection of historical transnational sociology, postcolonial social theory, and critical museum studies, with a focus on the cultural, political, and economic implications of colonial-era artifact looting and contemporary movements for restitution. Central to her work is an examination of how cultural artifacts looted during colonial conquest continue to sustain imperial racial capitalism and global racial hierarchies. Pugh’s current book project, Guardians of Beautiful Things: The Politics of Postcolonial Cultural Theft, Restitution, Refusal, and Repair, engages with the contested history of the Benin Bronzes and ongoing struggles over their restitution. In addition to her work on restitution, Dr. Pugh is developing a second book project, Fela Kuti and the Postcolonial African Imagination, which examines anti-colonial and decolonial thought in postcolonial Africa through the life and activism of Nigerian Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti.

Helon Habila is a Nigerian author and poet currently teaching at George Mason University in Virginia. His writing and poetry include The Chibok Girls: The Boko Haram Kidnappings and Islamist Militancy in Nigeria (2014), The Granta Book of the African Short Story (2011), Oil on Water (2010), Measuring Time (2007), among others. His writing has won many prizes including the Caine Prize, the Commonwealth Writers Prize for the African region, the Emily Balch Prize, and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction.

Washington Project for the Arts presents , organized by DC-based artist Mojdeh Rezaeipour and hosted by GW’s Corcoran School of the Arts & Design in Gallery 1 at the Flagg Building from November 14, 2024–February 15, 2025. The project includes a group exhibition and a series of programs that bring together the creative practices and methodologies of sixteen artists, writers, and thinkers from all over the world who are in direct conversation with materials of cultural heritage. Engaging themes of restitution, reclamation, transmutation, and talismanic connection, 93 Fragments proposes a radical reimagining of stewardship that aims to transform a museum-like showcase of preserved objects and artworks into a space of revolutionary and liberatory potential.

Host or Publisher Washington Project for the Arts