The Museum Symbol Analysis

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.”