Since the titled "Scramble for Africa" in the late 1800s and early 1900s, African art has been looted and dispersed into major museums and personal collections in the United States and Europe. This thesis will examine the origins of looting and restitution resistance from the first exhibition of looted African art (at the Royal Colonial Institute in London in June, 1897), to today.

To do so, this thesis will first isolate ideologies consistently utilized by museums, auction houses, publications and personalities that have falsely brandished African art as inferior. Which ideologies contribute to restitution resistance? For example, the idea of African art as "primitive" is an unfortunate and consistent theme throughout critical texts, and sometimes even a theme of major exhibitions (including the Museum of Modern Art's notorious 1984 exhibition "Primitivism in 20th Century Art"). Needless to say, this theme is steeped in colonialism and leads to other ideologies such as the "Universal Museum", which will also be explored.

Secondly, this thesis will examine instances of successful restitution efforts, which are often the efforts of governments, institutions, and individuals. This thesis is novel in that it examines multiple root causes of restitution resistance alongside efforts to restitute, in order to more closely focus on the systems that are in place to either fight for or against restitution. Although this thesis explores the restitution of African art looted during the colonial era, it is timely due to the lasting implications of said looting. It is also timely in the wake of successful restitutions efforts that have occurred as recently as November 2017.