Should museums return cultural heritage taken from colonised peoples? This question is usually fought on legal and technical grounds: Do the original owner societies still exist in a form able to reclaim cultural objects? Can present-day conventions be applied retroactively to takings from the colonial era? Are fragile objects better cared for by Western institutions? But these surface disputes may conceal something deeper. 

This talk uses an unlikely window – the vicious online backlash against Relooted, a 2026 video game about reclaiming stolen African artefacts – to get at what people really feel when they are asked to give colonial loot back. Analysing more than 6,000 posts from the game’s discussion forum, the study finds that many white commenters experience restitution not as a legal or practical matter but as a threat to their very identity, and respond with a recurring set of defensive moves: minimising the original theft, recasting colonisers as rescuers and scientists, insisting the treasures belong to “all humanity,” or claiming that restitution is really just anti-white racism. Beneath the legal and technical debate, in other words, lies a struggle over identity and history – one that may help explain why, decades after the demands began, so little has actually been returned.

Dr Ollie Hellmann is an Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Waikato, where he has been based since 2019. Prior to joining Waikato, he held academic appointments at the University of Sussex (2013–2019) and Durham University (2010–2013). His research focuses on collective memory, environmental communication, and the intersection between the two. He primarily employs narrative frameworks and visual analysis methodologies, while also exploring the role of humour as a communicative resource. Dr Hellmann's research has been supported by a number of competitive funding bodies, including the UK's Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the British Academy, and the Academy of Korean Studies. In 2016, he was appointed a POSCO Fellow at the East-West Centre in Honolulu.

ZOOM details:
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