Stolen Objects

This article positions Angelina Jolie’s performance as Lara Croft in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001) next to Sophiline Cheam-Shapiro’s unsanctioned Cambodian classical dance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023 to interrogate the museum’s display of looted artifacts. Cheam-Shapiro’s barefoot dancing in front of the stolen Cambodian god statues, which triggered the museum’s security, deploys performance as a critique of the archaeological fantasies of Lara Croft. Through a comparative framework, the author dissects the two women’s performances via three dimensions: their respective racial and gender politics, their relation to stolen objects, and the disparate modes of their media distributions. In conversation with women of color feminist perspectives, the article interrogates the collusion between Western museums and art dealers like Douglas Latchford, who smuggled many of Cambodia’s cultural objects during the period of the Khmer Rouge genocide. By such analyses, the article employs the politics of Third World solidarity against the colonial looting ethos of white Western museums