Between Mbembe and Vergès: demolishing the museum as a decolonial necessity

Abstract

This essay proposes a radical critique of the museum as a symbolic institution of modern coloniality, highlighting its historical role as a showcase of plunder, racialization, and the erasure of memories and ways of life. Far from being a neutral space or an impartial preserver of the past, the universal museum is analyzed as a central apparatus in legitimizing colonial domination, intertwined with the dynamics of racial capitalism and the narcissistic pact of whiteness. Drawing on the theoretical contributions of Françoise Vergès and Achille Mbembe — in dialogue with authors such as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Cida Bento, and Nêgo Bispo — the text examines the mechanisms of symbolic and material expropriation that sustain museological power. It also analyzes how the appropriation and exhibition of collective expressions from subalternized peoples operate the silencing of their histories and cosmologies. The article further explores the propositions of the anti-museum and the post-museum as ethical-political horizons for breaking with this logic, proposing absolute disorder as a condition for reimagining memory, justice, and the very structure of the sensible. In this context, restitution does not simply mean returning objects, but rebuilding worlds and breaking with the colonial foundations that uphold hegemonic ways of seeing, narrating, and organizing life.