Françoise Vergès

Decolonizing the Museum

A Programme of Absolute Disorder

Laurence Favre

The definition of the concept of private property in Western law was fundamental in legitimizing such theft. Having become the property of the nation, and thus of the European or North American people, a court of law must systematically rule to relinquish a stolen object's quality of inalienable property before it can be returned. This conjuring trick, which turns a stolen, looted, duplicitously acquired or purchased object into the legal property of an institution or an individual, demonstrates the perversity of colonial law. The patriarchal and colonial genealogy of property rights imposed on the non-European world means that to claim back an object that belonged to them, groups, communities, or peoples have negotiate its return within the parameters of the very law that dispossessed them of their property. 

The museum pulled off a tremendous rhetorical reversal, masking conflictual and criminal aspects of its history and presenting itself as a depositary of the universal, a guardian of all humanity's heritage, a place to cherish, to be protected and preserved from any contestation, a sanctified space far from the disorder of the world. Its neutrality is taken for granted. Inside, tones are hushed, dialogue disinterested, devoid of excess and intemperance. Strikes by staff, protests, or occupations of its sites are deemed highly distasteful. 

The structural racial, class, and gender inequalities that exist within the museum echo the global structural inequalities born out of slavery, colonization, racial capitalism, and imperialism. The destruction of palaces and the confiscation of their riches, looting and systematic theft have, along with the narrative of a Eurocentric art history, helped give the Western museum unprecedented aura nd resources. 

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