In The Contested Crown (Chicago, 2022), I meditate on the case of a spectacular feather headdress believed to have belonged to Montezuma, the last emperor of the Aztecs. I follow conflicting desires for this crown across continents, while exploring the possibilities for repatriation.
“The work of Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, The Contested Crown, gives us a detailed social and historical cartography of the quetzalapanecáyotl. The book mobilizes its material history, to offer us an itinerary that goes from the fifteenth and sixteenth century history of its imperial appropriation and display in the Wunderkammer of the Castle of Ambras till its exhibition today in the vitrines of the ‘Weltmuseum’ in Vienna. While the museum is concerned with asserting the ‘authentic history’ of the quetzalapanecáyotl and its minute preservation, the book of Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll helps us to turn the quetzalapanecáyotl into an unsuspected mirror, one that reveals the history of the formation of the white gaze, of the regimes of ownership and representation that constitute and sustain the colonial difference. Carroll’s reflections on the vitrine, helps us understand how in the modern/colonial system of representation, the vitrine instruments the formation of the ‘white gaze’.”
Rolando Vazquez, from the Preface to the German translation of this book