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Françoise Vergès’s post-museum: the culmination of a programme for decolonising history in Western museums

Rethinking the history of countries formerly colonised by European powers is a broader issue than might seem at first glance, since it involves not only the need to decentralise our perspective, but also to question how this past is represented, particularly in museums. Determining how to decolonise the relationship that museums have towards history is no easy task, even in places marked by colonisation, such as La Réunion. Françoise Vergès, the political scientist, art historian, and decolonial feminist activist from La Réunion—who was born in Paris in 1952, serves as the President of the “Décoloniser les arts” association, and whose work focuses mainly on slavery, colonisation, and feminism–sets the tone for decolonising the Western museum model. In March 2023, she published a critical essay entitled Programme de désordre absolu: Décoloniser le musée (Programme for Absolute Disorder: Decolonising the Museum). 

Figure 1 – Cover of Françoise Vergès’ essay @ La Fabrique éditions

Vergès took this title from a passage in Les Damnés de la Terre, one of the major works by the Martinique intellectual Frantz Fanon. In the words of Fanon: “Decolonisation, which aims to change the order of the world, is, as we can see, a programme of absolute disorder. But it cannot be the result of a magic operation, a natural upheaval or an amicable agreement.”1 Vergès applies this idea of decolonisation to Western museums with universal pretensions.

According to Vergès, the racial and gender hierarchy in most major European museums is very pronounced, which she sees as part of racial capitalism, the fruit of the slave trade and colonisation. Black men supervise the public while black women clean the space, both ensuring that the museum can welcome visitors.2 However, these visitors are not from the same background as the racialised staff. The museum, like the rest of society, thus perpetuates forms of discrimination based on race, gender, and class.3 For Vergès, the museum can only be decolonised if the rest of society is also decolonised, because what counts for society in the museum is not just what is hanging on the walls or exhibited behind glass, but also the people who work there, who clean it, and who manage it.

Towards the post-museum era

Vergès has little faith in the complete decolonisation of the Western museum, and even deems it impossible. Faced with this impossibility, she defends the need to imagine a post-museum, which she sees as “a space of exhibition and transmission that takes into account critical analyses in architecture, history, and the visual arts”.4 It would disregard hierarchies of gender, race, class, and religion, and avoid the pattern of the universal Western museum, which continues to exert a real attraction on the rest of the world. For all that, the post-museum would not reject everything about universal Western museum, drawing on its knowledge of conservation standards.5

The idea of a post-museum grew out of a long process of reflection on the part of Vergès in connection with her visits to numerous museums around the world beginning in the 1980s, starting with those in the United States exhibiting contemporary art, as well as Latin American and black culture. The fact that the author grew up in a region marked by slavery and colonisation, whose past and present are very different from those of mainland France, also contributed. There is another factor. In the early 2000s, following the victory of a left-wing candidate for the presidency of La Réunion, a project was launched to build a museum to tell the story of the island’s settlement and cultures, based on a museographic model similar to that of the French regionalist museum (this project was championed in the 1960s by the Communist Party of La Réunion (PCR)), the Maison des civilisations et de l’unité réunionnaise (MCUR). Like Carpanin Marimoutou, a teacher, researcher, poet, and literary critic from La Réunion, Vergès expressed reservations about the reports presenting this project. They did not want to reduce the history of La Réunion to its roots in France, but to highlight its own dynamics. The idea was to instead place the island and its history in a more representative Indian Ocean space, while devoting the space to exhibitions and debates, without necessarily displaying objects. The idea of a museum without objects was quickly seen as absurd, and rejected. In 2010, the right won the regional elections and the MCUR’s project came to an end. It was “this defeat” that, according to Vergès, “rekindled [her] reflection on the impossibility of decolonising the museum in the world of racial capitalism”,6 and gave rise to the idea for a new kind of museum for the twenty-first century: the post-museum. To adapt to the context of coloniality7 of La Réunion, an island in the Indian Ocean still dependent on France, it would be rooted in the present, with its architecture and approach making it a place of welcome, a place of life conducive to gatherings, celebrations, wakes, reminiscences, and memories. The post-museum would therefore not be a place of contemplative silence, but rather a living space of exchange.

According to Vergès, this experience should be based on “critical theories of representation, critiques of Orientalism and negrophobia in the arts, anti-colonial theses, postcolonial studies, visual and cultural cultures, black feminism and all literature critical of Western heritage and museums.”8 It must also take into account all the theories and practices of resistance on the island of La Réunion, using a vocabulary adapted to the island’s past and key issues. The author shows how challenging this is in this post-colonial French overseas territory, where structural racism stemming from slavery and colonialism remains prevalent.

A programme of absolute disorder

The post-museum is a museum without objects. For Vergès, the absence of objects is first and foremost an act of resistance—not presenting objects equates to resisting. It is also a way of giving voice to resistance movements such as that of the maroons, slaves who fled plantations in search of freedom. The post-museum thus gives visibility to these anonymous people, whose struggles were aimed at absolute disorder, but who remain invisible to the colonial and later post-colonial order.

The museum’s presentation of the subaltern shows that the men and women who populated La Réunion and made it what it is today came from territories with rich and complex social and cultural organisations. This demographic diversity gave rise to La Réunion’s culture and imaginary world, for which Vergès provides a few examples: the Creole language, the ideal of marronage, the rites linked to ancestors, the maloya (a musical style native to La Réunion in keeping with its Creole culture), cuisine, knowledge of plants, a relationship with the land and the sea rooted in a relationship with freedom.9

Figures 2-4 – Three places of worship on La Réunion, © Quentin Robert

Vergès’s reflections on the absence of objects grew out of her critical analysis of the Western relationship to material objects. Objects often indicate a civilisation’s level of sophistication—the narrative is built around the object—whereas in the context of La Réunion, no material objects that belonged to slaves, the poor, indentured labourers, or migrants has survived to the present day. All that remains are traces of slave plantations, such as the masters’ houses. Instead of presenting the lives of these thousands of people through the prism of the dominant actor—which is to say materially through the objects and documents associated with slavery, such as legal codes or slavery iconography—the post-museum proposes telling their story in a different way.

The absence of objects does not imply a lack, or a state of underdevelopment. It is an alternative narrative, a different kind of museography. It is a resistance to the colonial and racist ideology developed by a Europe that, since modernity, has seen itself as the model of civilisation, with its imperial expansion across the world. This ideology of civilisational superiority has produced a fetishisation of the object that we find in Western museums. Creating a museum without objects is an appropriate response to this ideology, but it also requires an effort of imagination.

The absence of objects is also a way of not imposing the preservation of a heavy material heritage on new generations. The post-museum, as conceived by Vergès, aims to give space to an intangible aspect that is nevertheless a powerful vector of sociability and creativity: language. French and Creole are not the only languages spoken on the island, with Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malay, Urdu, Madagascarese, Swahili, Shimaoré, Cantonese, Arabic, and Vietnamese also being spoken. In reserving a place for this linguistic diversity, the post-museum restores the history of La Réunion.

Finally, the post-museum fights the dominant discourse by desacralizing objects that bear witness to past and/or present domination. The Code Noir is a case in point. Instead of trying to acquire an original edition, which, apart from its exorbitant price, would be a kind of fetish on display, Vergès proposes desacralizing this text by approaching it as a legal code that is part of the history of French law. However, she does not rule out acquiring pocket-sized copies so that they can be read and commented on in groups. This is in line with the post-museum’s role as a forum for discussion and debate.

Basing herself on a long-term critique and a global perspective of the museum in its universalist, Western form,10 Vergès has developed a new form of museum known as the post-museum. This new museum decolonises the Western museum through a programme of absolute disorder, namely by serving as a space for life, one that is part of a deeply democratic culture, and that welcomes the history of subalterns linked to slavery and colonisation. This programme of total disorder may not be for tomorrow, but it offers a powerful perspective on an institution that is far from neutral.


Thibault Sauzaret, M.A., was born in 1998 in Le Puy-en-Velay. He studied history at the Université Clermont Auvergne (UCA), graduating with a Master’s degree and a thesis on writing practices, the construction of regional identities, and the making of ancestors in France. His new project focuses on the contemporary history of Africa. His recent publications include: “De Frison-Roche à Boudon-Lashermes, les Garamantes en Velay, une histoire fantasmée,” Les Cahiers de la Haute-Loire (2024); and “La ‘guerre’ des inventaires en Haute-Loire selon Albert Boudon-Lashermes,” Bulletin historique de la Société académique du Puy-en-Velay et de la Haute-Loire (2022).


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  1. Françoise Vergès, Programme de désordre absolu. Décoloniser le musée, Paris, La fabrique éditions, 2023, 15. []
  2. On the intersection of gender and race, see the book by Vergès, Un féminisme decolonial, Paris, La fabrique éditions, 2019. []
  3. As early as 1966, the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel showed that museums are important spaces of social distinction (Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, Lamour de lart. Les musées dart européens et leur public, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 1966). On 21 February 1972, Pierre Bourdieu told Jocelyn de Noblet on Radio France that “museums are important for those who go to them, in that they allow them to distinguish themselves from those who don’t.” (Pierre Bourdieu, “Musées d’aujourd’hui et de demain,” Radio France, 21 February 1972). []
  4. Vergès, Programme, 12. []
  5. Ibid, 37. []
  6. Vergès, Programme, 178. []
  7. On the concept of coloniality, see recently Michel Cahen, Colonialité. Plaidoyer pour la précision dun concept, Paris, Éditions Karthala, 2024. []
  8. Vergès, Programme, 181. []
  9. Ibid., 192. []
  10. According to a UNESCO report on the state of museums worldwide in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic of April 2021, 61% of museums are located in Western Europe and North America. []

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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Thibault Sauzaret (April 8, 2025). Françoise Vergès’s post-museum: the culmination of a programme for decolonising history in Western museums. Geschichtstheorie am Werk. Retrieved January 22, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13pf8


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