Reparation, preservation, and transition: On the 2008 Italy-Libya treaty of friendship, partnership, and cooperation

This article joins the scholars who have been variously probing the limits of reparation and repair, and joins the authors of this issue in scrutinizing the fervour with which defenses of the universal or encyclopedic museum are simultaneously being mounted as a corollary to the initiatives to ‘decolonize’ these very same institutions. From the early 2000s to the early 2020s, repair and reparation were increasingly summoned to stabilize and preserve a political and economic order in crisis. Following this observation, the article narrows in on the preservationist dimension of reparation, situating it within several key transitional moments from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first century. Taking as its point of departure the first treaty of colonial reparations to be signed between a postcolonial nation-state and a former European colonial power, the essay probes the temporal and political movements propelled by preservation and its relation to significant moments of transition. Beginning with the 2008 treaty, the layered temporality of the document is unfurled by following the Venus of Cyrene, one of the main objects restituted to Libya through the treaty, from the moment of its unearthing in the new colony in 1913 to its return to Libya in 2008. Simultaneously, the article examines an alternative vision of reparation and a different logic of preservation that was inaugurated by the founding of the Libyan Studies Center in 1978, which was significantly diminished and instrumentalized with the signing of the treaty in 2008.