Books by Françoise Vergès

Un féminisme décolonial

by Françoise Vergès

Dans le débat public, être décolonial est une infamie. Dans les universités, dans les partis de gauche et d’extrême gauche, les syndicats, les associations féministes, partout on traque une « pensée décoloniale » infiltrée et funeste pour le vivre-ensemble.Dans ce livre, Françoise Vergès élucide l’objet du scandale. Le féminisme décolonial révèle les impensés de la bonne conscience blanche ; il se situe du point de vue des femmes racisées : celles qui, travailleuses domestiques, nettoient le monde ; il dénonce un capitalisme foncièrement racial et patriarcal.Ces pages incisives proposent un autre récit du féminisme et posent toutes les questions qui fâchent : quelles alliances avec les femmes blanches ? Quelle solidarité avec les hommes racisés ? Quelles sont les première vie menacées par le capitalisme racial ? Pourquoi les néofascismes s’attaquent-ils aux femmes racisées ?Ce livre est une invitation à renouer avec la puissance utopique du féminisme, c’est-à-dire avec un imaginaire à même de porter une transformation radicale de la société.

Feminism for the World

by Silvia Federici, Françoise Vergès, Sayak Valencia, Verónica Gago, Zahra Ali, Lola Olufemi, Rama Salla Dieng, Djamila Ribeiro

In the years since #MeToo, misogyny, sexism and gender-based violence have flooded the news and our social media timelines. Anti-privilege politics and intersectionality have entered the mainstream--systematically trolled on one end of the spectrum; embraced, to questionable ends, on the other. But what has this increased visibility entailed, other than the marketisation of the feminist struggle?

Feminism for the World argues that we have been witnessing an erasure of feminism as a long-term tradition, with its many conflicting histories and geographies of struggle elided and forgotten.

In this ground-breaking collection, eight leading international figures of contemporary feminism highlight feminist struggles and traditions from the Global South, presenting feminism as a project that is impossible without international solidarity from the West. In doing so, they revive an authentic internationalism and propose paths for present and future generations.

Authors include Lola Olufemi, Françoise Vergès, Silvia Federici, Verónica Gago, Zahra Ali, Rama Salla Dieng, Sayak Valencia and Djamila Ribeiro. Translated by Fionn Petch and Sophie Lewis.

Making the World Clean Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism

by Françoise Vergès

An antiracist theory of cleaning.

In Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, and Racial Capitalism, Françoise Vergès examines the racial and gendered politics of wasting lands, bodies, and resources and the organized deprivation of clean water, shelter, and access to health services—in other words, the structural denial, along racial lines, of vital needs. Through 38 short sections, she looks at the social relations that have made cleaning into drudgery and into a racialized, gendered, poorly paid job that is nevertheless necessary for any society to function. She concludes with the proposition of a feminist, decolonial, antiracist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-capitalist politics of cleaning. Or, simply put, of “decolonial cleaning.”

To Vergès, the structural denial of the elemental needs of women of color (sanitary pads, access to water, and privacy for basic washing), and why these needs are considered insignificant and trivial, shows how racism and class war are gendered. By examining the banal, the trivial, and the elemental, the author addresses cleaning as a necessity rather than the maintenance of a consumerist lifestyle, a condition of basic care of the body and the mind that is considered with indifference by racial capitalism, white environmentalism, and even, too often, by humanitarian organizations. She argues that by building “life-affirming institutions,” as Ruth Wilson Gilmore advocates, struggles against the whitening of cleaning create sites of freedom. “Decolonial cleaning” imagines cleaning as taking care of land, humans, plants, animals, and rivers, not seeking to discipline them or transform them into commodities or objects of conservation but cleaning as a practice dedicated to sustaining the living world.