Françoise Vergès

Françoise Vergès, a long-time decolonial antiracist feminist, is currently Chair of Global South(s), Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris. 

Vergès, who grew up on Reunion Island in a family of intellectuals and anticolonial activists, settled in France in the mid-70s where she worked as a journalist in a feminist weekly (Des femmes en mouvements) and as an editor for the “femmes en lutte de tous les pays” collection at the publishing house des femmes, Paris.

Vergès went to the USA in 1983 where she obtained a BA summa cum laude in Political Science and Women’s Studies and a Ph.D. in Political Theory at the University of California at Berkeley in 1995. Her Ph.D. Monsters and Revolutionaries. Colonial Family Romance and Métissage was published by Duke University Press. She was president of the French National Committee for the Memory and History of Slavery (2008−2012), project advisor for Documenta 11, “The Slave in Le Louvre” pogramme organiser for the 2012 Paris Triennial. She has been working with filmmakers and artists and is the author of two films Maryse Condé une voix singulière and Aimé Césaire face aux révoltes du siècle.

She has written extensively on the living memories of colonial slavery and colonialism, psychoanalysis, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, the Indian Ocean world as a cultural space, decolonial feminism and museums.

In her last book Le ventre des femmes. Capitalisme, racialization, feminism (Paris, March 2017, forthcoming in English) Vergès analyses state racial politics on women’s womb.