Decolonising the Museum Curated by Beatriz Preciado

On the one hand, the seminar explores the mutations of capitalism according to what Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker call ‘the multiethnic class’, the invisible ‘Atlantic proletariat’, the processes of racial, gender and sexual oppression that were central not only to the ‘primitive accumulation’ behind the Industrial Revolution, but to the invisible accumulation that today favours the expansion of global capitalism. On the other hand, we propose a critical re-reading of the authors and discourses responsible for the fiction of ‘European modernity’ and the ‘museum of modernity’, confronting the aesthetics and politics of emancipation with the overturning of artistic, cultural and global protest knowledges and practices: ethnopsychiatric, pan-Africanist, pan-Arab, third-world, Atlantic and tropical practices, feminisms on the border, bastard theories, cybergologies, Malinche translations, internationalisms, etc.

Following the logic of the tempestuous shake-up and dehabituation that led Gilles Deleuze to invite us to imagine philosophy with ‘a clean-shaven Marx and a bearded Hegel’, this encounter is an invitation to think of a tropical Marx and an effeminate, African Hegel. It takes into account the critical re-readings and exercises of political resistance and utopian elaboration that are ‘Marx-ist/ian’, post-Hegelian or of the Commons, and which originated in the processes of decolonisation and gender and sexual emancipation since the first modern revolution (the Haitian Revolution of 1791, not the French Revolution), by way of the processes of decolonisation of the 1960s (the independence of Morocco and Tunisia in 1954, and the independence of Algeria in 1962), the processes of independence of the African countries (1957–1960), the Casablanca Conference (1961), the Black Movement, until the present process of the Commons and the Bolivian indigenous process.

Thus a different profile of the museum is drawn, one that no longer functions as an instrument for legitimising the colonial processes, but as a critical and reflective apparatus proposing other ways of managing the archives, other forms of representation, other world-fictions.