Lecture
Why Is the Museum a Topic in the Current Context?
- Date
- Thursday 17 April 2025
- Time
- Location
- Kamerlingh Onnes Building
Steenschuur 25
2311 ES Leiden - Room
- A1.44
In A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum, Françoise Vergès argues that the decolonisation of the Western museum is impossible if we take the process of decolonisation seriously. It does not mean that the struggles for social, racial, and gender justice and for the return of stolen, looted art from Africa, Asia, Oceania, the Caribbean and the Americas are not important, urgent and necessary. But Vergès asks if we would not imagine something else for the 21st century that can answer current challenges – climate disaster, neoliberalism, imperialism, financialisation, increasing poverty, new forms of looting and destruction of art – that would not be on the hegemonic model of the Western museum.
This event is organised by the Decolonising Collective Leiden.
About the speakers:
Françoise Vergès (La Reunion/France), who read Political Theory at Berkeley University (Ph.D. 1995), is a writer, antiracist feminist, and independent curator. Recent publications include Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment and Racial Capitalism, Goldsmiths Press, 2024; A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonizing the Museum, Pluto Press, 2024; A Feminist Theory of Violence, Pluto Press, 2023; and A Decolonial Feminism, Pluto Press, 2021.
Discussion will be provided by Manar Ellethy, Lecturer in Cultural History at Utrecht University. Her work focuses on race and cultural studies with a specific focus on Black radicalism and cultural resistance in the US during the 1960s. Her work also focuses on Black transnational solidarities with decolonial and anti-imperial struggles in North Africa and the broader MENA region.
The event will be moderated by Dr. Densua Mumford, committee member of the Decolonising Collective and Assistant Professor at Leiden University College.
Registration & Access
Please note that the building is only accessible to those with Leiden University (LU) cards or those who have been registered as guests by Leiden University members. LU members only need to register for the event. If you want to bring a non-LU guest, you must use a separate registration form for the building in addition to registering for the event.