“The Savage Hits Back” Revisited

Art And Alterity in the Colonial Encounter

Editor: Anna Brus
Publisher: Reimer
approx. 304 pages, English
140 illustrations, 120 in color, softcover
ISBN 978-3-496-01622-9
Price: approx. €39

Coming soon

The volume accompanying the exhibition Spectral-White: The Appearance of Colonial-Era Europeans explores the forgotten intervention by Cologne museum director and ethnologist Julius Lips (1895-1950) who, from exile in 1937, reversed the view of the “others” with his book The Savage Hits Back. Lips’s book gathered artefacts from colonial contact zones, showing Europeans as exotic and barbarous strangers thus questioning colonial power relations. The authors of “The Savage Hits Back” Revisited shed new light on the work and biographies of Julius and Eva Lips (1906-1988) and consider ethnology, art history and museum practices before and after the Second World War. Tracing the origins of the objects Lips collected, the volume follows the inverted gaze up to contemporary art and discusses the history and possibilities of a symmetrical ethnology.

With articles by Heike Behrend, Cora Bender, Anna Brus, Anselm Franke, Michael Harbsmeier, Ingrid Kreide-Damani, Gerald McMaster, Christopher Pinney, Nora Probst, Erhard Schüttpelz, Nanette Snoep, Ann Stephen, Zoë S. Strother, Nii O. Quarcoopome and Martin Zillinger.