The Western museum is a battleground – a terrain of ideological, political and economic contestation. Almost everyone today wants to rethink the museum, but how many have the audacity to question the idea of the universal museum itself?
Vergès outlines a radical horizon: to truly decolonize the museum is to implement a ‘programme of absolute disorder’, inventing other ways of apprehending the human and non-human world that nourish collective creativity and bring justice and dignity to the dispossessed.
Her book begins its inquiry by highlighting how the question of restitution is only the tip of the iceberg. Françoise Vergès sees it as a necessary beginning, a threshold that must be crossed. But to her, the real combat, the real act of decolonisation, lies in uncovering the truth of the Western museum, brandishing a mirror to its face, forcing it to acknowledge its crimes, tearing its semblance of civility – its masquerade of universality – apart.
Vergès quickly sets the question of restitution aside to raise a bigger imperative: implementing a programme of absolute disorder into the decolonisation of the museum to avoid turning the word into an “empty aesthetic” or “a metaphor”.
