When Césaire addresses the rhetorical strategies of intellectuals like Roger Caillois, he uses museums to represent how Europeans justify colonialism by replacing reality with ideas. Caillois insists that European people can form legitimate conclusions about other cultures through ethnography, while nonwhite people are inherently unable to form scientific knowledge about any culture, including their own. Of course, Caillois’s absurd argument ironically appeals to pure racist prejudice, rather than any verifiable fact, in its attempt to show that rational science should be exclusively white. Because he places so much value in white people’s knowledge, Césaire notes, Caillois concludes that colonialism is worth the cost because it has led to the formation of anthropology as a discipline and the creation of museums about colonized people’s culture in European capitals like Paris. Césaire sees this as emblematic of the way European intellectuals look past the material effects of the conquests and genocides conducted by their governments in order to suggest that knowledge—which they prize above all else—justifies the horrible human cost. Museums exemplify this because they allow colonial oppressors to claim ownership over and pride in the same cultures they are busy oppressing at the same time. Museums are only possible when one culture systematically steals the creations of another, and they make the power differences that define intercultural “contact” in the real world totally invisible by presenting living, breathing, and often struggling cultures through the lens of material objects they have left behind. This is all enabled by Caillois’s assumption that white people’s knowledge is more important than nonwhite people’s lives. Césaire says that rather than killing people to build a museum for them, “Europe would have done better to tolerate the non-European civilizations at its side, leaving them alive, dynamic and prosperous, whole and not mutilated.”
The Museum Quotes in Discourse on Colonialism
I ask the following question: has colonization really placed civilizations in contact? Or, if you prefer, of all the ways of establishing contact, was it the best?
I answer no.
And I say that between colonization and civilization there is an infinite distance; that out of all the colonial expeditions that have been undertaken, out of all the colonial statutes that have been drawn up, out of all the memoranda that have been dispatched by all the ministries, there could not come a single human value.
And the museums of which M. Caillois is so proud, not for one minute does it cross his mind that, all things considered, it would have been better not to have needed them; that Europe would have done better to tolerate the non-European civilizations at its side, leaving them alive, dynamic and prosperous, whole and not mutilated; that it would have been better to let them develop and fulfill themselves than to present for our admiration, duly labelled, their dead and scattered parts; that anyway, the museum by itself is nothing; that it means nothing, that it can say nothing, when smug self-satisfaction rots the eyes, when a secret contempt for others withers the heart, when racism, admitted or not, dries up sympathy; that it means nothing if its only purpose is to feed the delights of vanity; that after all, the honest contemporary of Saint Louis, who fought Islam but respected it, had a better chance of knowing it than do our contemporaries (even if they have a smattering of ethnographic literature), who despise it.
No, in the scales of knowledge all the museums in the world will never weigh so much as one spark of human sympathy.
The Museum Symbol Timeline in Discourse on Colonialism
