by Françoise Vergès, translated by Melissa Thackway
Pluto Press
7/20/2024, hardcover
SKU: 9780745349619
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?
In A Programme of Absolute Disorder, Françoise Vergès puts the museum in its place. Exploring the Louvre's history, she uncovers the context in which the universal museum emerged: as a product of colonialism, and of Europe's self-appointed claim to be the guardian of global heritage.
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.
Reviews:
"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 University
"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
About the Contributors:
Françoise Vergès is a political scientist, activist, historian, film producer and public educator. She is the author of A Decolonial Feminism and A Feminist Theory of Violence. She is also a senior research fellow at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, UCL.
Melissa Thackway is an independent researcher and translator. She lectures in African Cinema at Sciences-Po and INALCO in Paris. Her recent translations include A Feminist Theory of Violence by Françoise Vergès, Contemporary African Cinema by Olivier Barlet, Tropical Dream Palaces: Cinema-Going in Colonial West Africa by Odile Goerg and African Diasporic Cinema: Aesthetics of Reconstruction by Daniela Ricci.