Make No Mystique!

We live at the con fl uence of planetary concerns about disappearing eco-systems and the development of practices for the ethical upkeep, display and at times restitution of the visual-material worlds violently sequestered through colonial conquest. The inquiry of this special issue is situated on the cusp of these only-apparently-competing trends and offers a capacious analytic for the fragile human and nonhuman actors caught in between them that strive to navigate this age. This analytic consists of collect ables : it stands for an eclectic catalogue of humans and non-humans that have experienced processes of dispersion, destruction, morphing, and rejuvenation engendered by the histories of several empires, migration as well as decolonisation. The choice of collect ables is certainly no celebration of an ableist ethos: rather, it acknowledges the multiple required to effectively capture the affective bind between individuals and communities and visual-material worlds. Through collect ables , this special issue aims to queer established notions around collections, collectors and collectables – and dispel the mystique around them – to foreground other epistemes and avenues of inquiry. This intervention is shaped by the contributors ’ diverse positionalities, disciplinary backgrounds, practice (the issue includes both scholars and visual artists), entanglements across the global south and global north, and a theoretical prism that falls outside logics of symbolic and physical conquest that have largely dominated the study of collecting in the geocultural areas under analysis. Concerning these, the collect ables analysed here fi nd their origins in wide-ranging processes such as the Dutch colonisation of South-East Asia, the Transatlantic slave trade, the labour and trade migration from South Asia to Australia, and the Partition of India, to name just a few.