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A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum
Paperback
Conservation & PreservationGeneral ArtGeneral Political Science
Publisher Price: $18.95
ISBN13: 9780745352619
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
Published: Oct 20 2026
Pages: 224
Language: English
A complete overhaul of the Western museum tradition--Publishers Weekly
An impressive critique of the universal museum as complicit in the damages inflicted by colonial power--Isaac Julien, artist and filmmaker
Should fascinate anyone interested in social justice, post-colonialism and the arts--Euronews
Powerful and so relevant--Diacritik
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 very 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.
Françoise Vergès is a political scientist, activist, historian, film writer, and public educator. She is the author of A Decolonial Feminism and A Feminist History of Violence. She is also a senior research fellow at the Sarah Parker Remond Center for the Study of Racism and Racialization, University College London.
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