Decolonizing Western Museum: (Im)possible? - Françoise Vergès
Channel: Asian Studies
Date: 2023-06-28

On June 9th, the Humanities Across Borders program of IIAS hosted Professor Françoise Vergès in the IIAS Conference Room in Leiden, where she held a lecture on her new book Programme de désordre absolu. Décoloniser le musée (La Fabrique, March 2023), arguing that the decolonization of the Western museum is impossible.

If decolonization, as Frantz Fanon wrote, is a program of absolute disorder because it sets up to change the order of the world, then the museum, an invention of European modernity intimately tied with colonialism and imperialism, cannot be decolonized unless it is entirely dismantled. Escaping this hegemony means imagining a “post-museum.”

Humanities Across Borders (HAB) is an initiative of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) to invigorate the Humanities with innovative pedagogies grounded in local experience in different locations around the world. Its aim is to offer models of international collaboration that place higher education institutions in the global North and South on an equal and collaborative footing. See more at https://www.humanitiesacrossborders.org.