A Programme of Absolute Disorder

Decolonizing the Museum

Françoise Vergès author Melissa Thackway translator

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Pluto Press

Published:20th Jul '24

£20.00

This title is due to be published on 20th July, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

A Programme of Absolute Disorder cover

The Western museum is a battleground—a terrain of ideological, political and economic contestation. Calls for its decolonisation have washed like great breakers over the institution; almost everyone today wants to "rethink the museum". But how many have the audacity to question the very presuppositions of the universal museum itself?

In A Programme of Absolute Disorder, Françoise Vergès puts the museum in its place. With a specific focus on the history of the Louvre, she centres the context in which the universal museum emerged: as a product of the Enlightenment and colonialism, of a Europe which presents itself as the guardian of the heritage of all mankind.

Discussing the impasses in the representation of slavery, and examining unsuccessful attempts to subvert the museum institution, Vergès outlines a radical horizon: to truly decolonise 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 populations who have been dispossessed of it.

'Vergès offers, in the wake of Frantz Fanon, a powerful reflection … The Western museum is a tool of domination which must be deconstructed in a post-racist and post-capitalist world. Powerful and so relevant'

-- Diacritik

'The post-museum era has come. Museums without objects, museums of the present, living museums, museums of oral speech, museums of the great disorders of the world... There is no shortage of ideas for those who still know how to dream'

-- Hors-Serie

'A thought-provoking demonstration that should fascinate anyone interested in social justice, post-colonialism and the arts'

-- Euronews

'A complete overhaul of the Western museum tradition'

-- Publishers Weekly

'An impressive critique of the universal museum as complicit in the ongoing damages inflicted by colonial power structures. Françoise Vergès gives us the tools to harness our imagination in order to build new art institutions for a different future.'

-- Isaac Julien, filmmaker and installation artist

'Enacting the decolonial task to imagine and practice a post museum, Vergès also enacts the gargantuan task of a post historical, post epistemic archive. This obliges the absolute disorder of the structures of thought and feeling that sustain the impossibility of history and knowledge unoccupied by the modern archive. Showing it should be done, Vergès offers creative joyful relentlessness towards decolonial worlds.'

-- Marisol de la Cadena, Professor of Anthropology, Science & Technology Studies,University of California, Davis

'A brilliant book on how to order the disorder of colonized spaces while finding new pathways to discuss what it means to question rage and embrace new narratives on the once invisible structures of museums. Françoise Vergès skillfully writes a manifesto of sorts that shifts the paradigm and re-imagines a world as if there was no West with a curious wit, fearless irony, and a clear sense of underpinning hope.'

-- Deborah Willis, artist, New York Univer

ISBN: 9780745349619

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

224 pages