Bøker av Francoise Verges

A vital feminist manifesto from one of our most inspiring political voices

"A complete overhaul of the Western museum tradition"-Publishers Weekly"An impressive critique of the universal museum as complicit in the damages inflicted by colonial power"-Isaac Julien, artist and filmmaker"Should fascinate anyone interested in social justice, post-colonialism and the arts"-Euronews"Powerful and so relevant"-DiacritikThe Western museum is a battleground-a terrain of ideological, political and economic contestation. Almost everyone today wants to rethink the museum, but how many have the audacity to question the idea of the universal museum itself?In A Programme of Absolute Disorder, Françoise Vergès puts the museum in its place. Exploring the Louvre's history, she uncovers the context in which the universal museum emerged: as a product of colonialism, and of Europe's self-appointed claim to be the guardian of global heritage.Vergès outlines a radical horizon: to truly decolonize the museum is to implement a "programme of absolute disorder", inventing other ways of apprehending the human and non-human world that nourish collective creativity and bring justice and dignity to the dispossessed.Françoise Vergès is a political scientist, activist, historian, film writer, and public educator. She is the author of A Decolonial Feminism and A Feminist History of Violence. She is also a senior research fellow at the Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, University College London.

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.

Francoise Verges examines the scandal of white doctors forcefully terminating the pregnancies of thousands of poor women of color on the French island of Reunion during the 1960s, showing how they resulted from the legacies of the racialized violence of slavery and colonialism.

Analyses the complex relationship between the coloniser and colonised on the Indian Ocean island of Reunion. Through novels, iconography, and texts from various disciplines including law, medicine, and psychology, this title constructs a political and cultural history of the island's relations with France.